Re: On what we want to support: travel?

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> The fact that it's members of the FG who have issued opinions on how to
> spend money is unsurprising. People were selected for the FG in the first
> place because they were interested in fundraising. All that we've proven
> here is that we actually made a pretty good selection: we seem to have
> everyone who cares.

Excellent point.

> Sure, but I was hoping to avoid getting into vague arguments of
> hypotheticals, which have a tendency never to conclude on this list. I
> think that concrete funding requests are a lot easier to resolve than
> general rules.

Sure, I was just stating my priorities.

> See, I was trying to avoid this because I don't think that we can make
> hard-and-fast rules about priorities by category.

Who is making rules? These are guidelines at best, and certainly flexible
on a case-by-case basis.

> For example, a full membership in TPC is $20,000 and we'd be unlikely to
> be listened to even as full members. Would you rate that over paying for
> 15 different trips by PostgreSQL keynote speakers to South America, Asia
> and the Middle East, each speaking to between 200 and 3000 people?
> I wouldn't.

I would. TPC needs to happen - if no corporate entity is going to step up
to the plate, we need to make it happen ourselves. Consider it an investment:
TPC may end up allowing more large companies to join us (publically) and they
could then be hit up for a large donation.

> How would you prioritize in development tools, like test machines and
> benchmarks? #5, or somewhere in the middle?

Well, I'd put the buildfarm pretty darned high: if it needed money, that would
certainly be #1, barring anything else. Specific test machines? Pretty low,
as I don't see a strong need for them. "Benchmarks" is pretty generic,
but we could certainly use some good ones - it's something highly asked
about, for better or for worse, so if some money would produce a good one we
could point people to, I'd put that pretty high.

The problem is that for all of these categories, you, I, and everyone else
can come up with high priority examples and low priority examples for each one.

> 1) Promotional literature etc.

I think almost everyone agrees on this. Has the LiveCD brouhaha ever settled down?
Do we have a CD/DVD ready to go?

> Well, that was actually *exactly* what I've been thinking of. We had
> probably 15 really good Summer of Code proposals and Google only paid for
> 7 of them. What if the PostgreSQL fund picked up the other eight next
> year?

That would be a Good Thing. +1.

> It's not rare. Please read over prior posts on this thread. We are
> *frequently* asked to speak at conferences which, due to excange rates or
> being new conferences, are unable to pay full airfare and hotel for
> PostgreSQL people.

These opportunities should be widely disseminated to try and find available
people. I certainly agree to advocacy group needs to be doing a better
job of representing Postgres at conferences. A page listing upcoming
conferences and speakers needed would be nice.

> But if funds *were* needed, wouldn't it [infrastructure] be the top priority?

Well, of course, but as I've said, the infrastructure has problems that
throwing money at will not help.

- --
Greg Sabino Mullane greg(at)turnstep(dot)com
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