Loomio
Tue 8 Dec 2015 7:49AM

QGIS.ORG to act as proxy organisation for crowd funding bidding

AN Andreas Neumann Public Seen by 296

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

AN

Andreas Neumann Thu 17 Dec 2015 4:24PM

Hi all,

I am following up on this thread.

It would be sad, if QGIS.ORG ( http://QGIS.ORG ) isn't available to handle such crowd-funded based bidding processes.

I
investigated further, and apparently none of the involved organizations
is willing to do such a bidding process on behalf of all the other
partners, involving different laws in different countries.

Our
current proposal is to rip the project apart in smaller chunks so we
don't have to go through such a complicated public bidding process,
where it is totally unclear which law applies. Unfortunately, this would
mean, that there is no transparent public bidding process. In such a
scenario it is to the discretion of the project partners to pick their
favourite company to work with. It also means that QGIS.ORG ( http://QGIS.ORG ) has no say
in the project steering and that whole coordination is much more
complicated.

Is it the last word, that QGIS.ORG ( http://QGIS.ORG ) is
not available as an organization to organize a bidding process for a
crowd-funding project? I would guess that the same problem will come up
again and again, because it won't be the last crowd-funding project.

Thanks,

Andreas

TS

Tim Sutton Sun 24 Jan 2016 7:01PM

Hi

Sorry I some how missed the loomio notifications for this. We did already discuss it in our PSC meeting 2 months ago. Personally I think it is worth investing some effort in investigating how we can deal with this kind of request. I think we can somewhat mitigate the risks if we are creative. I guess the most optimal solution would be one where a targeted donation is made to QGIS and then we subcontract developers to do the implementation work. A second option would be just to have a clear contract stating that we will be the disbursement agent in the agreement between the consortium and the developers but any contractual disputes should be handled directly between the two parties. Andreas in order to make the last word I think we should have a clearer understanding of exactly how the contract would look and what our exposure would be in the event of something going wrong.

PC

Paolo Cavallini Mon 25 Jan 2016 8:36AM

Agreed with Tim.
I also would like to keep on with an open discussion on qgis-dev (or qgis-psc).