[TYPO3-doc] Documentation budgets

[François Suter]

Hi all,

Thanks to budget requests I made in 2010, there's - for the first time - 
money allocated to the documentation from the TYPO3 Association budget.

There are actually two separate budgets:

1) official documentation maintenance: this budget was estimated on the 
basis of 2 hours of work per week. Of course, there's much more work 
than this maintaining the official documentation, but it seems a fair 
amount if you exclude fully reworking outdated manuals or writing new 
ones. So that budget sums up to 104 hours for the year at Association 
rates (50 €/hour).

2) DocBook migration: this is a very large project. There will be parts 
that will require a lot of work, some probably boring, and I figured it 
would help if we could pay people for some jobs. Again there will be 
more work than planned in the budget, but the budget is not meant to pay 
for every working hour. After all we largely base ourselves on volunteer 
work. The goal is to have some money at hand to reward work done (though 
not the exact hours worked) and to help when some job needs to be done 
and money may be that last motivation resort. The total budget is 31 
days (248 hours), again at Association rates.

As the person who requested these budgets, I am now in charge of them, 
even though it's ultimately the Association that pays. Hence I wanted to 
explain to every one what these budgets were and how I was planning to 
use them and share the money, so that everything is laid out 
transparently and nobody feels cheated afterwards.

I am planning to make quarterly assessments. They will be different for 
both budgets:

1) official documentation maintenance: a quarter is 13 weeks, hence 26 
hours. I will make an estimate - based on the activity I perceived - of 
who was active on the official documentation during the quarter and 
split the money between these people as evenly as possible based on the 
perceived amount of work of each. I will then query those people for 
their agreement. When everyone agrees, they can send out their invoices 
(details to be worked out).

2) DocBook migration: in this case, the project was far more detailed 
and divided into 5 milestones. Each quarter I will assess whether a 
given milestone has been reached or not. If a milestone is reached, the 
money allotted to it can be paid out. As outlined above, the money will 
be split as evenly as possible between all people involved, based on the 
perceived amount of work.

I hope this makes it clear enough. If that's not the case, or if you 
have anything to express about this, please say it aloud :-)

Reference: http://wiki.typo3.org/DocTeam/DocBook_migration#Milestones 
and http://wiki.typo3.org/DocTeam/DocBook_migration#Budget

Cheers

-- 

Francois Suter
Cobweb Development Sarl - http://www.cobweb.ch