[ZF] Volunteering

Matthew Wilkes matthew at matthewwilkes.co.uk
Wed Feb 13 14:52:24 UTC 2013


Hi Jim, all,

> I'm also a little concerned with the pile of money the
> Foundation is sitting on and not putting to better use. Again, this is
> not meant as a criticism of the board, but just pointing out that I'd
> like to see if we should do something a little different.

I won't personally be standing for the board as I'm already a member of 
the Plone Foundation board, and don't feel I could do both well, but I'd 
like to pick up on this point.  Plone was in a similar situation when we 
came into office, we had around 150k USD in the bank and the mentality 
was very much one of maintenance.

We decided that there was previously insufficient return for sponsors 
and donors, and that the money in the bank was useless just sitting 
there, so we're trying to spend significantly this year. We have 
allocated approximately 22k USD for funding sprints, in order to make 
them more attractive to host. The foundation mostly stays out of who 
gets this money, we leave it to our teams (the QA team asked for money 
for a RobotFramework sprint last weekend, the Framework team did one on 
Dexterity content types at the same time).  The only exception is for 
funding sprints that contain lots of new participants, especially in a 
new area – we funded a sprint in Africa in January.

Now, it's too early to tell at the moment, but by the end of February we 
will have had 5 Plone sprints this year. Last year we averaged one per 
month.  We're hoping that people that make their living with Plone will 
agree with us that this is money well spent, and will encourage more 
donations and sponsorship in order to ensure we can spend like this 
every year.

I'm certainly in favour of the Zope Foundation encouraging more 
community action through strategic spending.

Matt


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