Re: New PostgreSQL Sponsorship Criteria - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 6:49 PM, Jonathan S. Katz
<jonathan.katz@excoventures.com> wrote:
> The PostgreSQL Sponsorship Committee has proposed new criteria for
> determining which organizations are considered sponsors for the PostgreSQL
> project.  The proposed criteria would take effect on Nov 15, 2013, and are
> listed here:
>
> https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/NewDraftSponsorCriteria
>
> The major change to the criteria, outside of having a detailed list of
> criteria, is that we are reducing the different sponsorship types to two
> categories: Sponsor and Major Sponsor.  These designations will make it
> easier to determine the appropriate level an organization has contributed to
> the PostgreSQL community and will be more inline with how we recognize
> contributors to the PostgreSQL project.
>
> Note that financial sponsors for PostgreSQL conferences are not considered
> for evaluation of PostgreSQL sponsorship.
>
> We would like to hear the community's feedback before we start using the
> guidelines to determine sponsorship.

This looks very well thought out in general, I think, so a "good work"
from me :) And I definitely approve of having a clear policy.

First, one very quick note - it should probably explicitly list
"PostgreSQL Europe" rather than "Postgresql.eu". That's our official
name - just as you use the full name for the Canadian organization,
and not "postgres.ca.". I could fix that myself, but I think it's
probably better if you guys who are actually in charge of the policy,
are also in charge of the edits...


A few other notes:

In the examples at the bottom you refer to "full time contributors".
AFAIK, almost *no* PostgreSQL company has two employees that work full
time on contributing to PostgreSQL. They all do something else *as
well* (which might well be postgresql related). I'm not sure even
EnterpriseDB can claim to have that. I'm pretty sure you didn't
actually mean it has to be someone working full time on direct
contributions though - and in fact, I think it's a strength of our
development team in general that large parts of them don't *just* hack
on the code, but they actually work with the resulting product as
well. So while I'm pretty sure I agree with what you actually mean, I
think the wording needs some improvement.

I also note that for "Sponsors" it's a "code contributor" but for
"Major Sponsor" it's a "contributor". Are those intentionally
different?

Same for servers - for "sponsor" it has to be a webserver, for "major
sponsor" it can be any server - intentional?

I also spot "a company which has hosted four servers for PostgreSQL
for the last five years. ". I hope that doesn't happen much, since it
is a policy of the sysadmin team to *avoid* a situation like that, for
redundancy reasons. We currently have one hoster who runs 4 boxes for
us and it's I think <5 years at this point, but we are sometimes
concerned about having too many eggs in that particular basket. I
think it's a bad idea in general to reward something that is not what
we're really looking for, so I think that limit should be dropped to
maybe two.

I realize these are both in the Examples part - consider that a vote
for that the rest of it is good :)

Finally, I think the wording is a bit unfortunate about conferences.
The bullet list says "Providing repeated, substantial financial or
labor contributions to PostgreSQL community conferences. " is a
considered contribution, but then in a note later down it says "Note
that conference sponsorships for which publicity and other benefits
were provided by the conference are not considered when evaluating
sponsor contributions.". I'm not sure what's actually left at that
bullet point? I'd rather suggest that companies providing *manpower*
for the community conferences are considered as contributions, rather
than sponsorship. (This is very different from organizing a regional
conference - I'm talking about the organizations/people that provide
significant manpower for our larger events)


--
 Magnus Hagander
 Me: http://www.hagander.net/
 Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/