On Wed, 2014-09-17 at 15:43 -0500, meg ford wrote: > On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 2:08 PM, Tristan Van Berkom < > tris...@upstairslabs.com> wrote: > > > > I think perhaps, if we organized bounties which clearly and definitely > > improve software that industry is going to use, and not only for the > > singular purpose of the GNOME Desktop Environment, then perhaps we would > > be able to get some real backers in the industry to come together with > > us and put together a bounty that is worth bidding for. > > I think there are two ways to approach this: (1) the way you suggest above; > and (2) by having smaller bounties which do not require a bidding process > and can be picked up by contributors who would generally donate time, but > could use some extra money in order to afford to contribute their time.
Either way, there is a high administrative overhead, as it was proven in the past when Novell (in communication with GNOME Foundation), and then GNOME Foundation with the help of Google tried bounties. All of them for GNOME. Before going to some details, the short story is: the outcome was what we know now as Google Summer of Code. Some of the administrative things you have to consider: * Determine the issues you want to fix, assess them and put them value. * Set the rules * Getting the maintainers involved to: (1) check if the fix is worth, (2) review the patches, (3) pushing them in master * People to track the patches, update status of bounties (to avoid double work for potential contributors) * All the dance to exclude people from certain places where GNOME Foundation cannot send money to, get bank information, wire money, track everything was good, and makes that everything goes well that IRS won't complain. * ... Also, what is the goal you want to pursue? Who would you expect to apply for? I quote an email of Nat (somehow forwarded to wikimedia foundation): [...] One quick point on numbers: only 11 bounties have been paid, but we've had patch submissions on >50% of the total bounties; release engineering timelines have made it hard for bounty submitters to get some of their patches accepted by module maintainers, and therefore paid, so that contributes to the small number of paid bounties you see. One thing that's surprising is that pretty much all of our bounty submissions came from first-world economies. Despite efforts to promote the bounties heavily in e.g. India. I think there's a need for a bounty administration infrastructure; some piece of software that can run these programs automatically, instead of the mostly hand-generated web pages I wrote. http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.foundation/797 Current board members can dig in the board-list archives from 2003-2006-ish, to get more details. I bet there are also here in this list, and in the board meeting minutes, for example, from 2004-08: Nat gave a summary of the current situation with the Bounties. We've reached the 1st round and so far give out $7460 for 10 bounties. It's currently stalled because of an Evolution code freeze - will launch again soon with a new deadline. The Bounties are proving to be effective in attracting new Evolution developers. Nat asked if it would be useful to have a general mechanism where anybody could put money against a bug item? Owen asked if it was more interesting maintaining a TODO list. Luis worried that making the TODO list the Bountie list was dangerous, because people might end up doing only the things people pay for. Have we already started down this slop already with company involvement? The first try was "Desktop Integration Bounty Hunt", funded by Novell but "lead" by GNOME Foundation: http://web.archive.org/web/20070210190246/http://www.gnome.org/bounties/ http://web.archive.org/web/20070208175703/http://www.gnome.org/bounties/Google.html -- Germán Poo-Caamaño http://calcifer.org/ _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list