Re: Question to all Candidates: Project Funds and donations
On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 10:37:35AM +0700, Paul Wise wrote: > On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 5:45 AM, Wouter Verhelst wrote: > > >> b) What qualifies a contributor to become a "Debian Partner"? What > >> qualifies a "Debian Partner"? > > > > I don't think we have a formal list of "Debian Partners" (but I could be > > wrong). I'm also not convinced we need one. > > > > If we do have such a list that I'm not aware of, it might be a good idea > > to see if it's working well. I don't think I'll be working much in this > > area, however. > > http://www.debian.org/partners/ Right; so the partnership program is a way to acknowledge long-time Debian contributing organisations, such as sponsors, donors, etc. It could be a proper way to thank such organisations; however, it might be good to more actively work on that list. For instance, it still lists Sun Microsystems as a partner (we may have to confirm they still want to be one, and replace the name by Oracle if they do); and some of the links to "more information" to some of the partners' websites that I followed are dead, which could mean that they've stopped helping Debian. I'm not sure that fits my definition of 'working well'; I should probably look into this a bit more, though. -- The biometric identification system at the gates of the CIA headquarters works because there's a guard with a large gun making sure no one is trying to fool the system. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/01/biometrics.html signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Question to all Candidates: Project Funds and donations
On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 5:45 AM, Wouter Verhelst wrote: >> b) What qualifies a contributor to become a "Debian Partner"? What >> qualifies a "Debian Partner"? > > I don't think we have a formal list of "Debian Partners" (but I could be > wrong). I'm also not convinced we need one. > > If we do have such a list that I'm not aware of, it might be a good idea > to see if it's working well. I don't think I'll be working much in this > area, however. http://www.debian.org/partners/ -- bye, pabs http://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/e13a36b31003152037v11f52c2ft1c9dc7765e7da...@mail.gmail.com
Re: Question to all Candidates: Project Funds and donations
On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 11:13:02PM +0100, Martin Zobel-Helas wrote:
> SPI's Treasurer, Michael Schultheiss, (and by the way Debian Developer)
> does a really good job by sending out monthly Treasurer's Reports which
> are in every monthly meeting minutes linked from
> http://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/meeting-minutes
Oh, interesting.
I agree that Michael does a wonderful job with the monthly Treasurer's
Reports, I've been following reports for the past 3 years. Problem is:
I've always seen the reports only posted to the spi-private mailing
list, which is not accessible to non subscribers (and to subscribe you
must be a SPI member). That, together with the fact that I can't find
any reference to that link on *.debian.org, is why I thought it was not
public. I believe a lot of other DDs do not know about that link, in
fact a couple of people which asked me my draft platform stared at my
gross figure of Debian total money and asked me « are you sure this
information is public? ».
But OK, I take that back for what concerns SPI, it was just my
ignorance.
It does not solve the problem of getting in a prominent, visible, and
central place all the accounting of Debian money, though. Fixing that
should start with appointing a new Debian Auditor, as discussed with/by
Kalle in this thread.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
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sempre uno zaino ...| ..: | Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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Re: Question to all Candidates: Project Funds and donations
On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 12:02:59AM +0100, Martin Zobel-Helas wrote: > Hi, > > this question goes to all candidates: > > The Debian Project receives quite a number of monetary donations as well > as contributions in kind via several umbrella organization like SPI, > ffis, debian.ch, etc. > > a) What do you think are valid goals to spend this money on? I'd prefer not to commit to a specific list, since there'll always be something I'll miss, but good examples include things like "holding meetings", or "buying hardware that we need but that we don't get donated". I don't think we should buy all our hardware (we have many people who are happy to donate a piece of equipment, much more so than money), and I don't think having money on the bank will harm the project in any way. > b) How would you think is a valid way to thank (hardware) contributors? That very much depends on the contributors, and on the motives for their contributions. We should probably start off by saying "Thank you for your contribution. Now is there something we can do in return?" E.g., if hardware or bandwidth donators want us to publically state their name somewhere, we can do that. If there are people who've contributed massive amounts of, er, "stuff", for years, we can probably do something more. > b) What qualifies a contributor to become a "Debian Partner"? What >qualifies a "Debian Partner"? I don't think we have a formal list of "Debian Partners" (but I could be wrong). I'm also not convinced we need one. If we do have such a list that I'm not aware of, it might be a good idea to see if it's working well. I don't think I'll be working much in this area, however. -- The biometric identification system at the gates of the CIA headquarters works because there's a guard with a large gun making sure no one is trying to fool the system. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/01/biometrics.html signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Question to all Candidates: Project Funds and donations
Hi, On Sun Mar 14, 2010 at 22:10:30 +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: > - it is not easy enough accessible to DDs (I know, it is enough to > become a SPI member and subscribe to the list, but I still believe it > should be _easier_, e.g. a directory somewhere with archived .txt > files accessible to all DDs) SPI's Treasurer, Michael Schultheiss, (and by the way Debian Developer) does a really good job by sending out monthly Treasurer's Reports which are in every monthly meeting minutes linked from http://www.spi-inc.org/corporate/meeting-minutes Greetings Martin -- Martin Zobel-Helas | Debian System Administrator Debian & GNU/Linux Developer | Debian Listmaster Public key http://zobel.ftbfs.de/5d64f870.asc - KeyID: 5D64 F870 GPG Fingerprint: 5DB3 1301 375A A50F 07E7 302F 493E FB8E 5D64 F870 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100315221302.gk23...@ftbfs.de
Re: Question to all Candidates: Project Funds and donations
Aníbal Monsalve Salazar writes: > At [0] AJ wrote that Martin Michlmayr spoke to Linux Australia about it > holding money/donations for Debian. So, potentially, LA may/will have > Debian money. Thanks, this was news to me - and shows that I should have posted the list already in 2006... -- * Sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology (T.P) * * PGP public key available @ http://www.iki.fi/killer * -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87eijmaxet@inara.killeri.net
Re: Question to all Candidates: Project Funds and donations
On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 05:36:41AM +, Kalle Kivimaa wrote: >The list of organizations I'm aware of having Debian monies is: > >Associação SoftwareLivre.org (Brazil) >Associazione Software Libero (Italy) >Debian UK >Debian Switzerland >Linux-Aktivaattori (Finland) >SPI >Verein zur Förderung Freier Informationen und Software e.V. (Germany) At [0] AJ wrote that Martin Michlmayr spoke to Linux Australia about it holding money/donations for Debian. So, potentially, LA may/will have Debian money. [0] http://lists.linux.org.au/archives/linux-aus/2005-March/011571.html signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Question to all Candidates: Project Funds and donations
Kalle Kivimaa writes: > I don't think it is too much of a burden for a Debian volunteer to send > out quarterly or even monthly emails and then collate the answers. But > it might be a burden to the trustee organizations. But the only way to > find out is to ask, of course :) Forgot to add: tracking the expenses is even easier if the DPL simply CC's the auditor in each of the expense approval mails (especially concerning other organizations than the SPI). Then the auditor can simply keep a running total and publish that periodically. I think the income statements can easily be quarterly or yearly. -- * Sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology (T.P) * * PGP public key available @ http://www.iki.fi/killer * -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87iq8yay5l@inara.killeri.net
Re: Question to all Candidates: Project Funds and donations
Stefano Zacchiroli writes: > As I wrote before, one thing is a desiderata, one thing is what you can > get given the available work forces. Given that you've just stepped > back from the position (which, honestly, I forgot we had), the first > obvious step is now finding a new volunteer for the position. I don't think it is too much of a burden for a Debian volunteer to send out quarterly or even monthly emails and then collate the answers. But it might be a burden to the trustee organizations. But the only way to find out is to ask, of course :) > - it is limited to the money we have in the SPI bank account. I'm sure > most DDs, including yours truly, don't even know exactly how many > different organizations we've in the world that hold Debian money The list of organizations I'm aware of having Debian monies is: Associação SoftwareLivre.org (Brazil) Associazione Software Libero (Italy) Debian UK Debian Switzerland Linux-Aktivaattori (Finland) SPI Verein zur Förderung Freier Informationen und Software e.V. (Germany) -- * Sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology (T.P) * * PGP public key available @ http://www.iki.fi/killer * -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87mxyab0ye@inara.killeri.net
Re: Question to all Candidates: Project Funds and donations
On Sun, Mar 14, 2010 at 01:59:18PM +, Kalle Kivimaa wrote:
> It isn't that difficult, the only thing that needs to happen is for the
> Debian Auditor to do his/her job regularily. Of course, if we want eg.
> quarterly reports, then it might add additional burden on the various
> treasureres of the organizations holding Debian monies in trust, but a
> yearly "monies received / spent / balance" report isn't that hard.
I agree with all this, but yearly is IMO too coarse grained, especially
considering that it is the DPL which ultimately takes money decisions
and that he/she is elected yearly. If we want the report to provide some
form of control/transparency of the DPL choices, it should forcibly be
more frequent.
As I wrote before, one thing is a desiderata, one thing is what you can
get given the available work forces. Given that you've just stepped
back from the position (which, honestly, I forgot we had), the first
obvious step is now finding a new volunteer for the position.
> That said, most of the Debian monies are in SPI, which does a nice
> monthly report already.
Yes, I'm aware of that being myself a SPI member. My main remarks on
that are:
- it is not easy enough accessible to DDs (I know, it is enough to
become a SPI member and subscribe to the list, but I still believe it
should be _easier_, e.g. a directory somewhere with archived .txt
files accessible to all DDs)
- it is limited to the money we have in the SPI bank account. I'm sure
most DDs, including yours truly, don't even know exactly how many
different organizations we've in the world that hold Debian money
- ideally, I believe we should have a public list of our expenses on the
web or, at the very minimum, make them available to our donors. It is
just fair to provide something like that for a project that collects
donations
Assuming there is enough work force and interest in the above, if
elected I will push for it.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
z...@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..| . |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...| ..: | Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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Re: Question to all Candidates: Project Funds and donations
Stefano Zacchiroli writes: > or not. Note that achieving that is not necessarily easy: it probably > involves more work on the shoulders of various treasurers and we should > be ready to help out with that, if it is a blocker. It isn't that difficult, the only thing that needs to happen is for the Debian Auditor to do his/her job regularily. Of course, if we want eg. quarterly reports, then it might add additional burden on the various treasureres of the organizations holding Debian monies in trust, but a yearly "monies received / spent / balance" report isn't that hard. That said, most of the Debian monies are in SPI, which does a nice monthly report already. -- * Sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology (T.P) * * PGP public key available @ http://www.iki.fi/killer * -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87mxybngw9@inara.killeri.net
Re: Question to all Candidates: Project Funds and donations
On Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 12:02:59AM +0100, Martin Zobel-Helas wrote:
> a) What do you think are valid goals to spend this money on?
I believe the driving principle should be to use money as much as
possible to keep the project running at its best, while keeping an
emergency reserve (e.g. to be sure we can afford impromptu hardware
replacement needs).
Then, all the following are worth goals in which money can be put into
use:
- Sponsor DDs meetings.
This include helping out with DebConf travel sponsorships (when
sponsor money are not enough), as DPLs have done in the past.
DebConf should not be the only sponsored meeting though. For instance,
I acknowledge that a long week-end of work side-by-side can replace
several weeks of remote work. If elected DPL, I plan to spot strategic
areas where we might benefit from an intense hacking session, contact
the involved people to check they are interested and available in
meeting, and help out with money and/or specific sponsorship
campaigns. This is pretty much what the Extremadura region has been
offering to Debian, and I've always considered that as one of the best
way to contribute resources to us.
Note: we should not however sponsor _full_ trips just for the sake of
it, otherwise even the money we have now can run out quite quickly. We
should rather apply the "DebConf model" where, AFAIU it, you decide an
overall budget and then within its limits you balance how much
involved people are able to pay by themselves with how much they need
to be able to attend.
- Sponsor specific resources to enable DDs work at best.
For instance, DDs working on packages which take huge amount of time
to build might need specific buildds to speed up their work.
Similarly, DDs working on huge packages (this time in terms of .deb
size) might need access to machines with better network connections
for uploads or better connections tout court. I will encourage DDs
which feel blocked by resource needs to contact me about such needs.
- Booth / marketing stuff.
These are of course good places where to invest money, but I notice
that in the past we have been more lacking organization and manpower
than money. It is looking better these days, though.
FWIW, I don't believe the discussion raised by Steve on how to spend
Debian money last year "did not reach a conclusion". For instance, the
BoF at DebConf9 titled "money, money, money" has provided a lot of
suggestions, they just need to be put into use.
Last but not least, the project needs to be way more transparent on how
much money flows in and out. Ideally, we should have a public disclosure
of all money that comes in and that goes out (the latter at least easily
accessible to all DDs). That, I believe, would be way more fair both to
donors and to DDs, which vote for the DPL and should be able to review
his/her choices on Debian money, no matter they want to be SPI members
or not. Note that achieving that is not necessarily easy: it probably
involves more work on the shoulders of various treasurers and we should
be ready to help out with that, if it is a blocker.
> b) How would you think is a valid way to thank (hardware) contributors?
Having a public balance of what comes in, in terms of money, would be a
good start.
For hardware contributions the best way is probably to advertise the
contributor on the web page of the hosted service, as we do for some
services, even though not uniformly. Ideally, we should have a web page
describing our technical infrastructure and who-has-sponsored-what in
such infrastructure.
> c) What qualifies a contributor to become a "Debian Partner"? What
>qualifies a "Debian Partner"?
In other big non-profit organizations I've been a member of, partnership
programs usually require an yearly subscription fee (possibly in
different classes: silver, gold, platinum, ...). In exchange of that the
partners get listed in a "partners" page and, in some cases, they also
get the right to voice their opinion in the choices of the
organization. We surely don't want the latter: as I've stated elsewhere
in Debian money shan't drive decisions (and we're open anyhow, anybody
can voice her opinion in our matters). We should have the former: a page
listing partners which are supporting us, and in fact we do have it.
How to organize that in term of donation thresholds and visibility is a
choice that we should better delegate to specific teams, such as -www,
-publicity, -press.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
z...@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..| . |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...| ..: | Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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Re: Question to all Candidates: Project Funds and donations
On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 8:02 PM, Martin Zobel-Helas wrote: > The Debian Project receives quite a number of monetary donations as well > as contributions in kind via several umbrella organization like SPI, > ffis, debian.ch, etc. > > a) What do you think are valid goals to spend this money on? I've been thinking about this for a long while now. I think that the areas that deserve spending Debian's money are: keeping Debian running, improving the overall quality of the OS, getting more people to contribute to Debian, and getting more people to use Debian. Currently, there's a portion that is used to fund developers travelling to work-meetings or to DebConf, and another one for shipping and setting up hardware. I think that these are all valid ways to spend money, and that we should encourage them. I also would like to see some money spent on promoting Debian, by providing materials for booths in conferences around the world. This would not be too much money from our accounts, but it could make a lot of difference regarding the image that people have of Debian. Another possibility that would help giving Debian visibility as well as improving the overall quality of the distribution, would be holding bug-fixing and bug-reporting bounties, but with Debian merchandise (t-shirts, mugs, stickers, etc) as prizes (i.e. not monetary prizes)... And if it works we could maybe even get sponsors to donate some bigger prizes. I think that more money could be spent in financing travel for developers to attend conferences, meet with other contributors and give talks related to Debian. For this part, I think we should form a delegated committee, like we do for DebConf to allocate the money, so that it's not left to the arbitrary decision of the DPL. Obviously this should all be done as long as there's enough money left in the Debian accounts for hardware and emergency needs. > b) How would you think is a valid way to thank (hardware) contributors? > b) What qualifies a contributor to become a "Debian Partner"? What > qualifies a "Debian Partner"? This feels like a question from the NM process. The way to thank donors is by showing their logos and listing their contributions in the Debian Partners page. I'm not totally sure of what the question is. I don't know how it was decided which contributors are listed and which are not. But I guess that current providers of hardware and big money contributors should be listed, while past contributors should be listed in a separate "Previous Partners" or the like. -- Besos, Marga -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/e8bbf0361003122139rdbcba13ucb86e5b09f89d...@mail.gmail.com
Re: Question to all Candidates: Project Funds and donations
Le Sat, Mar 13, 2010 at 12:02:59AM +0100, Martin Zobel-Helas a écrit : > > The Debian Project receives quite a number of monetary donations as well > as contributions in kind via several umbrella organization like SPI, > ffis, debian.ch, etc. > > a) What do you think are valid goals to spend this money on? > b) How would you think is a valid way to thank (hardware) contributors? > b) What qualifies a contributor to become a "Debian Partner"? What >qualifies a "Debian Partner"? Hello Martin, The discussion initiated by Steve about how to use our money did not reach a conclusion, and I think that it shows how delicate that subject is. From this thread, I personally conclude that direct donations (hardware, bandwidth, booth space, time, meeting rooms, …) are much more valuable for a project like Debian, whose do-o-cratic traditions do not accommodate with open questions like how to spend our money. Direct donations are in essence more focused, and very importantly are more rooted to reality: we get what our sponsors produce or use; what they give to us influence how we grow. That is a much more intimate relationship than money exchange. So to answer your first question, I think that the Debian money is best spent on what we can not receive by donation. The biggest examples that come to my mind are shipping hardware between private locations and helping people to travel and meet. In particular I will not agree with paying to develop software. Also if we do not manage to spend our money in a meaningful manner, I think that we can modify the donations page of our website to reflect that direct contributions have a much more immediate effect than sending money. Our project does not accept non-voting members nor legal persons (companies, associations, …) as members. In the long term, I think that it would be useful to re-open the discussion on membership, and that would be a good opportunity to give a more formal definition of what a Debian Partner is. I suppose that the concept was created before I joined the project, because I do not remember a discussion on the subject. There is a detailed description on our website (http://www.debian.org/partners/partners) and I am sure you know it, so I suppose that you are also asking what the candidates are thinking of this definition? I agree on its core, that the partnership must be an ongoing story. It does not mean that point contributions are not appreciated, but I think that only with this criterion (contribution that is ongoing), we can aim at maintaining an accurate list of partners. Of course, thanks for past partners or point contributors are much welcome as well. If tomorrow we receive a large donation, we can make a press release together with the sponsor; this press release will have even more echo than being listed on our Partners page. After visiting our website, I saw that the Partner Program is listed in our organization page, with names of active persons. I admit that I have no idea if they are DPL Delegates or not (and I intent do make a general ping and inventory, but that is off-topic here). I think that the role of the DPL is to make sure that teams that take decisions in our name are doing so in a consensual manner, but I do not think that the DPL has to be intrusive on the details. So I will not comment on the details on the Partnership Program. Therefore, the answer to your questions are that what qualifies a Debian Partner is currently decided by the Partners team, and as a simple developer I am not aware of major disagreements about their work. I note however that the page describing Partners is not completely up to date (Financial Partners from page http://www.debian.org/partners/ are not described in the partners/partners page). Perhaps if that team had more visibility (it has no description on http://wiki.debian.org/Teams either) it would attract more contributors? In a separate part of my platform, I will propose to give more detailed delegations and collect them in a single reference point, not only to avoid misunderstanding on who does what, but also to advertise teams that are lead by DPL Delegates and help them to attract manpower. Have a nice week-end, -- Charles Plessy Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-vote-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100313035746.ga11...@kunpuu.plessy.org
