QGIS.ORG to act as proxy organisation for crowd funding bidding
Institutional crowd funding is more and more popular. Government organisations and companies or individuals are joining financial resources to fund new or improved features within or around QGIS.
However, governmental organizations, are bound to certain rules, once the overall funding surpasses a certain thresholds. Things are getting worse, if organisations from different countries or continents are joining the effort - with different legal rules and threshold values.
This motion asks the QGIS.ORG board to act as a proxy organisation and deal with the formal bidding process on behalf of the crowd funding members. To deal with this in a transparent way - the following rules should apply:
- The QGIS.ORG board should approve each request through voting to exclude improper requests
- bidding is announced at the QGIS developers mailing list to allow every QGIS related company to join the bidding process
- One QGIS.ORG board member shall act as a liaison contact to the crowd funding group
- The crowd funding group shall prepare all necessary documents (e.g. requirements or specification document, deadlines) and disclose involved organizations (e.g. gov organizations and companies)
Anything else to add to the rules?
PS: the reason to start this is a bidding process around the QGIS web client successor - project QWC II
Vincent Picavet Tue 8 Dec 2015 9:52AM
May we have a discussion on the mailing list on that topic beforehand ? I do not think it only concerns the PSC, and I really doubt we have a representative amount of people logged in here...
Andreas Neumann Tue 8 Dec 2015 10:18AM
Vincent, I copied the qgis-psc and the qgis-developer mailinglist. I think this should be enough. Didn't want to bother all the thousands of users out there with it.
BTW: for QWC II we may have found a different solution. One of the partners volunteered to do the bidding process - but I suspect the situaion will come up again.
Andreas Neumann Tue 8 Dec 2015 10:19AM
@Anita: the requirements document and the offer are the reference - as with any other contract. The offer may explicitly exclude stuff from the requirements document, if things are technically not feasible.
Vincent Picavet Tue 8 Dec 2015 10:27AM
@andreasneumann I think this is a really important topic with impact for the project. Users should be involved in this discussion.
Furthermore, I thought Loomio was for decision-making / vote, not discussion, which should IMHO be kept on the mailing list.
Andreas Neumann Tue 8 Dec 2015 10:42AM
@vincentpicavet I am fine with discussing it on the mailinglists. It depends a bit how controversial the topic is. Loomio is fine if there are only minor tweaks to do to a matter/topic to define.
The nice thing with loomio is, that it is easier to follow the discussion than on the mailing lists - where it is ripped apart into small chunks.
Anita Graser Tue 8 Dec 2015 12:32PM
@andreasneumann Thanks, I guess my question is: who signs the contract? The crowd funding group and the developer? Or QGIS.org and the developer?
Andreas Neumann Tue 8 Dec 2015 12:46PM
@anitagraser QGIS.org would sign - otherwise we wouldn't need QGIS.org. The main reason would be to simplify the process so that companies don't have to sign contracts with a dozen of organisations.
The other main issue is that the bidding process is quite unclear if we are talking about larger funding goals (think about 100-300k) and each funder would only contribute 20-30k. With the overall goal, we would probably have to do tender bids according to EU and GATT/WTO regulations, whereas with the smaller shares of 20-30k not.
I asked around in Switzerland how other organisations handle it - and there was no clear answer. There is not a lot of experience around institutional crowd funding in OpenSource software development.
A quite similar case was with the LibreOffice OOXML improvement crowd funding - where the OpenSource Business Alliance stepped in as a proxy organisation - total amount of 160k € see http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/European-IT-authorities-want-better-OOXML-in-Libre-OpenOffice-1395595.html and https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Crowdfunding
Hence my request for doing something similar like OSB - where QGIS.ORG could act like a proxy organisation like OSB did for LibreOffice.
Andreas Neumann Tue 8 Dec 2015 12:55PM
Here is another example comparable to our situation:
TDF (the document foundation) doing a tender for implementing the base framework for an Android version of LibreOffice: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2014/09/04/tender-for-base-framework-for-an-android-version-of-libreoffice-with-basic-editing-capabilities-201409-01/
The TDF is for LibreOffice what QGIS.ORG is to QGIS.
Marco Hugentobler Fri 11 Dec 2015 8:06AM
The problem with QGIS.org acting as a proxy is that it is easy to get in trouble if (as Anita mentions) there is a problem between funders and developers. It can even have financial risks for QGIS.org and the board members. In case of institutional croud funding, there is usually a small number of funding organisations. I think it is better if one of the funding organisations steps up and takes the lead (including signing the contract) rather than going over QGIS.org.
Anita Graser · Tue 8 Dec 2015 9:39AM
One issue I see is: What happens when the money for a certain feature is then used up but the funders are not happy with what the (board picked?) developers have delivered?