As many of you are already aware, we started a new Friends of Eclipse Disbursements programme this year through which we are making funds gathered through “Friends of Eclipse” available to the community. Chris blogged about this in January.
To get access to these funds, you need to open a bug against Community/FoE Disbursements. Your proposal should be concise, but specific: what kind of event/purchase are you suggesting, and how much will it cost. It’s completely reasonable to “ballpark” the cost in your initial proposal and then refine that cost as you start to receive positive feedback (i.e. don’t invest too heavily until there is some confidence that we’re going to make it happen). But, please do provide a reasonable estimate.
The “we” that I’m referring to is the elected “Committer Reps” and me. Together, we’ve been reviewing and discussing the proposals we’ve received so far. There are a couple of promising ones. We certainly do like the idea of funding community-building events like the Texas A&M University Eclipse Symposium. In fact, I am hopeful that we’ll be able to use this event as a template for similar events at other universities.
I also like the New disk array for Hudson and build workspace storage proposal: a lot of community good can come from making builds easier (as more and more projects move their builds to Hudson at Eclipse, the amount of disk space we need is ever-increasing). Plus, we can use the disk space for other stuff. The one problem with this proposal is the cost: ~USD$6,000 after shipping and duty. That’s a significant amount of funds (about 40% of what we have available this year, and 200% of what I figured we’d allocate in the first quarter) that I personally feel uncomfortable committing to without support from the community. Your thoughts as comments on Bug 336864 are welcome.
We’re not ready to close the door on the other proposals, but sorting out how to make them happen is difficult. We just don’t have enough money to fund ongoing development work, and it’s really hard to rationalize providing any single project with huge chunk of the cash.
We’re just figuring this out ourselves. We know that we have to be careful with the precedents that we set as we try to do right by the many projects and diverse communities in and around Eclipse.
