[Council] incenting e2e development

[Peter Saint-Andre]

[Sent to board and council, cross-posting rights should be in order]

While on a plane to Florida for VoiceCon, I've been reading cached web 
pages and mailing list posts about ways to fund FOSS development.

There seems to be consensus that code bounties are not the best approach 
because it is difficult to properly scope them, developers who don't 
receive bounties may be demotivated, etc.

Project leaders on the foundations list and elsewhere feel that "payment 
in kind" schemes are more successful than bounties. This might include 
things like equipment, but for our purposes a better example would be 
payment to attend a conference. So we might incent developers to work on 
end-to-end encryption by holding a special devcon. Unlike our talk-heavy 
"XMPP Summit", an e2e devcon would focus on coding sprints and interop 
testing. Projects would need to get to a certain point of viability in 
their e2e code before being invited to the devcon (this could even be 
based on self-reports, given the high level of trust in our community). 
One approach would be to hold two such events, or to hold an online 
sprint (e.g., in April or May) followed by an in-person devcon for those 
who complete the sprint.

Thoughts?

Peter

-- 
Peter Saint-Andre
XMPP Standards Foundation
http://www.xmpp.org/xsf/people/stpeter.shtml

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature
Size: 7358 bytes
Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
Url : http://mail.jabber.org/pipermail/council/attachments/20070307/198fd75c/smime.bin