I would seriously prefer if the CoC would be used to validate methods and outputs, and /not/ to discipline people.

Otherwise we are at risk to get bogged down in personal accusations of misconduct (again: who wants to be the watchdog collecting evidence of gross misconduct against fellow community members? I won't and if anyone else would, this is a clear reason for me to run away screaming!).

But reviewing this strategic plan, or looking over certain SSF activities as to whether or not they comply with the CoC makes sense to me.

But at the personal level, I'm sorry, I have to refuse.

Chamindra--

that is actually not true at all -- I think you have a completely wrong impression of Sahana, and in particular Eden.

Non-paying organisations have a huge influence on the code-base, and many of the Eden application templates have actually been developed solely for non-paying orgs, e.g. EVASS, UVG, Yolanda, Syria, CERT, ...even NYCPrepared is only partially funded. Most of the core features too were developed as volunteer efforts to support non-paying users, and have only then been re-used by commercial projects.

They do have influence thanks to the relentless efforts of the Eden volunteer community who support them (e.g. me over 900 volunteer hours this year, more than 200 of them for the EVASS project). In fact, the vast majority of our efforts goes unpaid.

The bad thing is though that - just like with your statement - this is constantly ignored by the SSF, as if it wouldn't exist. Similar arguments of your - e.g. that there is a lock-in of knowledge about Eden technology, or even that this was created intentionally by AidIQ in order to stay in control of their business interests - is just equally a lie. No other Sahana project has ever had as much detailed documentation of features, framework, process as Eden, and huge parts of this were contributed by AidIQ.

And then mind that at the same time the proposal here was to engage in fee-for-service projects, not to support non-paying user communities!

I think that by overcoming the disconnect between the Sahana volunteer community and the SSF board of directors there will be enough potential to relieve AidIQ of constantly doing SSF's job - for free!

And that starts by directors actually getting informed about how things really are instead of making such ignorant statements down from their high horses.

Dominic

Really,

that is an annoying statement.

They do have influence - Fran and I have been constantly fighting for that, making sure that unfunded requirements do not get overruled by paying customers, or features distorted in a way that they are only usable in the context of commercial efforts.

We have constantly been fighting for more documentation, for clearer coding styles and conventions, to make the codebase available and reusable for everyone. Constantly persuading paying customers to make the code that is developed for them re-usable for others, mostly donating the extra time required to generalize things beyond the paid context.

The whole templating system we have developed serves exactly that purpose - the coexistence of commercial and public contexts without one dominating the other. We have invested massively to keep things configurable, to not lock in features with paid contexts.

We have also continuously tried to facilitate the knowledge transfer between big and experienced NGO's and smaller organisations and communities to make their information architectures compatible, to facilitate mutual understanding, collaboration and interoperability.

And the most recent proposal of Fran to develop a public open Sahana data repository demonstrates again our intentions. In no way would we allow those who can not afford commercial support to be cut off.

We do give them a voice in Sahana, and we do give them all support we can - even to the extent that we suspend all regular business in AidIQ for two entire weeks in order to allow Fran and me (and others) to support emergency deployments to help the victims of a hurrican in the Philippines. Over 120 working hours in the first week alone - to deploy a prototype, gather requirements, develop new features, scrape together the required data from the web and make things useful for a user community who never had to pay for anything at all.

And afterwards, we have asked SSF whether there was funding available, at least for some parts of the effo

Somewhat naturally, they depend on what community volunteers are ready to do for them. They can ask nicely, and people will help.

For funded support for those organisations, there are two options:
1) you can help them to raise funds so they can afford a vendor, or
2) you can give them funds (grants) based on their proposals

Providing funded community resources under SSF control seems not the right way to grow the ecosystem.

And effectively, if you want to fund community resource to support those organisations, you need just as much to raise those funds as those organisations have to.

So, effectively you're just raising the funds on their behalf, and then appear as the vendor that is to be paid by them.

But what for? You could equally well just provide those services for free, if you find people who are willing to donate their time to those organisations.

And that again is exactly what the Sahana community does just naturally.

I guess what you really want to change is to be able to order people to help those organisations instead of having them helping voluntarily. And I'm really -1 to that.

In my eyes, the whole community is "dedicated resources" to help organisations that cannot afford vendor support.

I mean - that's basically what we do all the time. Voluntarily, of course, and with the option to not respond to certain requests if we lack capabilities, or are running out of bandwidth.

Paying some people in the community to do that isn't exactly fair against those who do it voluntarily - and can effectively lame all voluntary activity. It's then "those paid guys" that are to take care of those organisations looking for help, not us.

I really prefer the voluntary way - it gives being a volunteer in Sahana some sense and importance.

So, either you pay everyone's efforts (including volunteer developers, not just business analysts), or nobody.

A good way, in my eyes, is to provide public materials (i.e. not for particular organisations).

This includes trunk/release code, documentation, screen casts and videos, books and booklets, presentations and SahanaCamps.

Those public materials can indeed be sponsored by SSF - although they may not necessarily be under exclusive control of the SSF (e.g. trunk code is not - and whether SSF-sponsored code makes it into trunk is a PMC decision).

What SSF could also sponsor are infrastructure and product integration, e.g. branch management, code reviews and QA, release management etc.

But especially the latter are on behalf of the Sahana community (i.e. supporting the community), not for user organisations.