[Members] Re: disconnect from board to active developers

[Egbert Eich]

* CC-ing to members at xorg also *

Dave Airlie writes:
 > I'd like to ask the potential board members some questions...
 > 
 > 1) X.org has limited funds gotten from company sponsorships, I'd like
 > to know what plans for those funds the nominees would have?

Well, X.Org's funds are not so limited after all. As a candidate 
I won't comment on the ammount of money we currently have in the 
bank but the order of magnitude should be well known.

Early this year I drafted a budget which was later approved by 
the Board. It has been published to the developers mailing list 
(not to the members list as that one was unavailable at the time) 
so it is public knowledge.

In this budget we set aside funds for a number of activeties.
Among those are:

- Conference organization.
- HotHouses (opportunity for developers to meet)
- Sponsorship to attend conferences to talk about the state
  and progress in development of the X Window System.
- Sponsorship for travel to attend conferences and HotHouses.

This year we have organized two developers conferences - XDC
hosted and sponsored by SUN and organized by Stuart Kreitman
and X at FOSDEM Conference + HotHouse organized by Luc Verhaegen. 
The latter event was funded by X.Org. Luc managed to organize 
it for around EUR 500 - which included drinks, pastires and a 
social event. It didn't include travel and accomodation - not 
even for the organizer.
We funded travel for 3 people to attend conferences. 

With all this we stayed well below what had been budgeted 
and there aren't many opportunities left to spend the money 
before the end of the year.
There is no use creating a budget when we don't set up a 
structure to spend this money.

It'd be valuable for our project if we managed to bring 
more people who contribute together. Small and highly
focussed events that allow a small group of people who
are interested in a certain area together can be extremely
valuable.
Or sponsor people to attend events where they can increase 
their knowledge and skills. 
We need to:
- Encourage people in different geographies to organize events
  like Luc did on FOSDEM.
  Identify which event we would like to support with how much.
- Identify events for which we budget for a travel sponsoring	
  program. Work with the event organizers to collect and process
  funding requests.
- Create a sponsorship program for individual travel funding.

 > 
 > 2) Due to fact that we have a limited budget, how does your current
 > employer feel about your X.org contributions and will funding for
 > X.org related travel come from your employer or the X.org funds?

Yes, definitely. In my case my employer is very interested in me 
contributing to X.Org and participating in the community development
efforts of the project. Therefore I'm able to get funding for travel
to go to X.Org related events as long as this does not exceed the 
budget.

However even if this wasn't the case - as a Board Member - I would
refrain from asking for funding of my personal travel as long as there 
is no sponsorship program available thru which funding requests are 
handled.

Board duty is about service - not priviledges. As a Board Member
I expect to receive exactly the same treatment as any other contributor
to the project.

I did solicited funding for others because without a sponsoring
program people had difficulties to bring their requests forward
to the Board.

 > 
 > 3) X.org attends a number of "industry" events, like Linuxworld I
 > believe, do you feel this is necessary for what is primarily a
 > development oriented foundation? or that funds would be better placed
 > elsewhere at organising developer meets...

It's a good thing to attend trade shows with an open source focus
as long as there is no charge for booth space for free projects.
It allows to demonstrate new achievements of the project, get 
feedback from users and provide 'hands on' support as a service
for our users. The benefits of this to our users are limited as
we only reach a small fraction of our user base.

Free software pavillions are usually attended by many free projects.
So being there can help to stay in touch with other projects.

In terms of community building trade shows have not really 
proven to be successful in the past.
This may be different if one plans and prepares a community event
and gathering on the trade show. With good preparation and advertising
it may be possible to use the trade show presence as a meeting place
for contributors and we may even succeed to recruit new people and
draw them into the project.
However this model has never been explored.
What had been tremendously successful was our developers conference 
right before LinuxTag here in Germany last year which I helped to 
organize.
We were able to utilize some of the infrastructure and resources
that were already in place  for the show. This helped us to keep 
the expenses low.

Trade shows are local events. If there is a local community
it should be left to that community to decide which trade shows 
to attend and how to organize the attendance. This will help to 
strengthen the local communities.
There is no need to send people around the globe to do this and
certainly it doesn't need the involvement of Board Members to 
organize this.
Instead what the Board can do to support such local effords is
to make sure that material to create posters, programs and 
information material is made available.

In terms of marketing I'm doubtful if a presence at a trade show
is really as relevant as some Board Members think.
We should determine what the marketing goals of X.Org are and 
identify our target audience before we decide which event we
are going to attend.
Our trade show appearances have not been very targeted. In the
past we met people mostly 'by happy accident'.

 > 
 > 4) These seems to be a major disconnect between the X.org and
 > freedesktop.org organisations (particularly around security
 > releases...), at times it seems like the board forgets that we have
 > freedesktop.org hosting a lot of our services and goes and does things
 > itself which usually would be much quicker done with fd.o support,
 > most of the fd.o admins are X.org members, none of the X.org admins
 > are active developers from what I know...  do you believe that the
 > X.org board should be involved in these decisions or should the
 > administration of those machines be handled by a separate admin team?
 > (i.e. >1 person)...

Yes, if X.Org runs the ftp server where people expect to find 
releases (and especially security releases) this must be run in
a way that new releases are available without delay. 

X.Org itself hosts 3 machines now: one of them has been in service 
for roughly a year now, two more have finally been racked just 
recently (as I have heard) after having been shipped to the hosting 
location months ago. (Although they may not have been installed yet).

These and other delays happened because the Board likes to retain
tight control over everything that is X.Org Foundation - far beyond
what the Board Members can handle themselves - instead of identifying
jobs that could be delegated and ask for help.

The development project is presently hosted on freedesktop.org.
Thankfully freedesktop.org has a powerful and well administrated
infrastructure with local people experienced in system administration
who are able to do on site maintenance in low response time should
this be required.
In short it provides all the services a development project needs 
and has made this available to the development on the X Window
System ever since we prepared the 6.7 release.
With this proven infrastruture it would be hard to convince the 
development community to move their resources to a system owned 
by X.Org.
Still X.Org would be able to provide numerous services to the
development project such as backup and mirroring. Also other 
services - like the defunct tinderbox server could be hosted 
there.
This however would require to distribute the work load on more
shoulders and delegate responsibilities to others.


Cheers,
	Egbert.