An Idea For Debian Funding From The Community

Why do we need more Money?

In order to be able to afford more Debian work meetings (50 per year seems a conservative estimate) Debian needs more money. One can calculate with about 2000-5000USD/€ per work meeting, which would result in an overall sum of up to 250kUSD/€. Work meetings have proven to accelerate Debian development.

How would this work?

This could work much like the Mandriva Club, which "sells" a lifestyle feeling of coolness and l33tness for supporting Mandriva. As far as i know it was the Mandriva Club that saved Mandrake from bankruptcy and made it profitable again, so there is a lot of potential in this concept.

So the point is to emphasize lifestyle feeling and other activities that we want to encourage (like helping newbies, fixing/reporting bugs, keysigning and last but not least, donating money).

How could it work for Debian?

Things to sort out

Items of the Website

Frequently Asked Questions

Wow, 50 work meetings are a lot! How do you arrive at that number?

There are a lot of groups and teams that would benefit from a work meeting: Debian-Java, Debian-QA, Security Team, Release Team, all the porters of all the architectures, Kernel Team, glibc maintainers, Debian-Edu, cdds, the Debian Policy maintainers, the KDE packagers, the Gnome team, debian-installer... If all teams only met twice per year we would most likely surpass the 50. That said: It will take some time for groups to get used to meet and we won't see so many work meetings during 2006 yet.

Won't This Money Corrupt Debian?

Theoretically that is possible. But it is not likely: Other Projects have not been corrupted by money yet. One example that is very close to Debian is Ubuntu, which uses money to pay developers, fund conferences, give away lots of CDs, etc. Still the community prospers and there seems to be no resentment or envy about money there. Debian subprojects used money in the past to help development: Debian-Installer and Debian-Edu work meetings were funded by SLX-Debian-Labs without corrupting people or the sub-projects. It is obviously important to do this right. But being aware of the danger will already help a lot.

Are these Work Meetings just Smaller Deb``Confs? Will they be a semi-vacation to talk about stuff one does as a hobby?

No, there is a distinct difference between a Debian Conference and these work meetings: The focus of these work meetings is to work in a focused way to solve specific problems and get stuff done. There are no talks or formal dinners or parties etc. They are much more like the python sprints or collective marathon hacking sessions. Usually people attending such a meeting might want a vacation afterwards. :-)

Of course it is ok and even desired if the attendees enjoy working on the specific problem.

Work in progress

The Region of Extremadura in Spain will be making great support for Debian with international gatherings around the year thanks to effort of Darío Rapisardi. More information can be found at: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/12/msg00003.html. Six sessions have been proposed for 2006: See WorkSessionsExtremadura.