Hi,
Maho NAKATA wrote on 2010-06-20 00.46:
If it is right, everything can be done by voluntter basis. Since what
Sun Microsystem has been done for OOo.
It's very difficult to human resources. Finding sponsor for CD-ROM
might be much more easy.
I guess we all have similar issues. When it comes to money, things do
not get easy. In general, I am for covering expenses people had, like
travel expenses and lodging, but I am *against* paying community
volunteers for their time. This is not the basis for our community, we
are volunteers, not paid ones.
I see many of us invest lots of time, and I know it by myself. I spend
several hours per day (!) with OpenOffice.org volunteering, I even have
to invest my own private student money to make it going, and so do many
other volunteers I know. All these people do important jobs, and if they
would not, several important areas of the project simply would not work
anymore: No user support, no press releases, no software release, no
OOoCon organization and so on.
Terada-san is a quite newcomer. I find him on twitter. He has been
suggesting improvements on ja.oo.o, and I asked him to work on ja.oo.o.
And what's the difference between ja.oo.o top page and for example
Documentation Bounty?
I see that it's not easy to put projects like the documentation bounty
or the internship programme into our existing structures. We definitely
have many people who are regular contributors to the project, doing lots
of work, much more than students do in three months in the internship
programme, I guess, but never received a single cent. And we shouldn't
start paying people for their work, otherwise we will get into real
problems soon. Who to pay? How much? Who not?
My general rule would be to *never* pay for community volunteer work.
Things like the internship programme and documentation bounty are
extraordinary contests, they catch attention, so funding for them is
okay. However, if we start paying people for their time and work, be
prepared that we have lots of contributors immediately stopping to work,
saying they want money. And what then?
Starting to pay individual work is a real danger we should be careful of.
Please do not think "top page" can be maintained by free of charge.
In general, it's difficlut to find volunteers. DE, IT, FR cases are
exception. If it's easy I never ask for funding.
While generally the projects you've mentioned might be more lucky than
others in finding volunteers, please don't think we have more resources
than others. Our website is done by two, three people. Our press release
is written by one (me). There are always the same people attending the
release status meetings, and always the same people doing QA and
localization. It's only a handful of them, not more.
If just a few of these people would stop working immediately, we would
be -- sorry for the harsh word -- fucked. And then, would we go on and
pay them? We can't afford this.
Anyway, still I argue for that. I looked http://mozilla.jp/ and very
very well organized. I was impressed and suprized to see their pages.
How they get it? Mozilla.jp is a NPO (non profit organization) and
they are funded by Mozilla foundation. I don't think everything should
be funded by OO.o CC, and JA asks for all, every possiblity.
Mozilla is quite hard to compare with us. I know many of the Mozilla
folks, and they are in a much more luxury situation than we are. If we
hired a few leads and gave everyone of them a big travel budget and a
few employees, imagine how fast we would be with redesigning, marketing
and lots of other things. However, Mozilla makes far more money than our
nonprofit organizations do, so we are not in a situation where we can
pay for individual work.
We should use our resources the best way possible.
Sorry for being the bad guy in here, but spending money on worktime for
volunteers in my opinion puts us at a very big risk. A risk we should
not take.
That said, I'm still a bit undetermined. Sorry for being so annoying
here, but can you elaborate a bit on what exactly has been done? The
amount of 1.000 € sounds quite high to me, so I would love to hear
what exactly has been done and how much time it took approximately.
For that, I asked terada-san.
I'd be interested to know that. Just for a comparison: For a sum of
1.000 € an average student in Germany has to work between 2-3 months
with a total of probably 60 hours. For many of us, this is a *lot* of money.
Again, sorry for being maybe the bad guy in here. OOo has a budget, and
we should spend it wisely on things. However, when we pay people for
their individual contributions, we cannot simpy pick up one and ignore
the others, that would be unfair. This will lead to problems and I've
already received complaints offlist by people asking why they have been
working for years already, and others get fundings.
I'm open up other opinions and look forward to discussion. I really do
not want to lower the merits the JP gained, but again, paying individual
contributors is a bad choice. It neither is the idea behind our
community, nor do we have enough money to pay everyone who deserves it.
Let's see what others say.
Florian
--
Florian Effenberger <flo...@openoffice.org>
OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Lead
Tel: +49 8341 99660880
Fax: +49 8341 99660889
Mobile: +49 151 14424108
Skype: floeff | Twitter/Identi.ca: @floeff
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