Andrew,
> 1. Do we think it is a good idea, in general, to fund
> individuals' travel, assuming such individuals are fairly prominent
> members of the community?
Yes. Currently, the only people capable of speaking for PostgreSQL who
also have jobs that pay them to do public speaking frequently are me,
Bruce, and Gavin (plus others in Japan). There are more than 100 open
source conferences a year; we can't possibly cover them all with the three
of us.
Travel sponsorships allow other members of our community to promote and
educate about PostgreSQL in many, many more places. I know that if we'd
had travel money available in 2003, I would have gone to conferences in
Brazil and Indonesia to promote PostgreSQL -- that was a big part of the
reason why Robert Treat and Greg Mullaine started to put together a
non-profit in the first place.
> 2. If the answer to (1) is "yes", what weight do such cases
> carry compared to other possible expenditures, such as paying coders
> for features; paying for hardware or network service; paying for
> community presence at exhibitions (e.g. getting a "commercial" booth
> at a trade fair); paying for marketing such as advertisements,
> conference "swag", release CDs, and the like; paying for tools for
> individual (or groups of) developers, such as real copies of the SQL
> standard; or even paying for entry to the "industry" groups or
> standards like TPC, ANSI, &c.? The list is not exhaustive; make up
> your own case.
Personally, I think it's co-equal with the things above categorically,
*except* for paying for a commercial booth at a conference, which I feel
should be our lowest priority if we have cash just lying around. It's the
most expensive item, with the lowest benefit to the community.
So, I think our spending priorities should be:
1) PostgreSQL online infrastructure
2) Everything else including travel
3) Commercial booths.
Determining the priorities within (2) should be based on the individual
opportunity. i.e. how much does it cost, and what does the community get
out of it? And how much money do we have?
--
--Josh
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL @ Sun
San Francisco