How about this for a sequence of formulaic steps:
1) I think everyone would agree that OpenLayers would benefit from figuring out how to spend money on itself. Putting that to a vote would get unanimous support (I think). 2) The word "benefit" above is vague. We've seen several notions of what benefit means. Metrics are independent of benefits, so we don't need to get hung up on metrics (at least not yet, and maybe never). To be totally pedantic, benefits are increases in utility as measured by some peoples' utility function. I would like to see a list of the benefits that we hope would come from spending money. With such a list in place, the PSC should vote on the various parts of it --- at least high-level categories if not specific target benefits. Ideally, this would result in a ranking of the most important things that money could buy the project. Articulating target benefits in plain language can be difficult -- it takes time and discussion. 3) Then, after(!) that, we can figure out which specific purchases would help achieve the ranked benefits. Since this involves lots of leg work, like calling tshirt printers :-), the PSC should delegate it to individuals or small groups who are particularly jazzed about one or another benefit. This will tell the PSC the costs of various approaches to the goals. When the PSC has money to spend, it will need to vote on proposed budgets. 4) With this information in hand, we are almost ready to seek money from sponsors. We need just one more thing: a bank. We could use OSGEO's banking service, which has a fee associated with it. Or we could use any of a variety of other banking services. Again, this should be delegated to people who will report back to the group on the costs/benefits of each banking option. Then, the we can vote on that selecting that. 5) After that ground work in place, then we're ready to approach sponsors. When the project has money, the PSC may decide to allocate money specifically toward seeking sponsorships. The conversation "with MetaCarta" to which Erik and Chris alluded was not quite so formal as that might have sounded. Josiah (head of engineering) and I listened to the summary of the discussion to date, and found that it was primarily about #4 in the list above. We suggested that steps 1-3 are more important than #4 and that without the results of steps 1-3, step 5 will be challenging. As a PSC member and a netizen, I would love for the project to do all five steps. Here are a couple candidate benefits that I think some people may like. 1) make OpenLayers easy to adopt and use -- regardless of whether you are a JavaScript ninja or just starting out 2) make OpenLayers globally known as the easiest way to build rich mapping applications 3) gather a larger group of people using OpenLayers professionally and also contributing to the project Others? John _______________________________________________ Dev mailing list [email protected] http://openlayers.org/mailman/listinfo/dev
