[TYPO3-doc] Requesting budgets or not?

[François Suter]

Hi all,

For 2011 I made two budgets requests for the Documentation Team, which 
were granted. One was for documentation maintenance and one for 
migration to DocBook (which became migration to reST).

For 2012 I didn't renew those budget requests, because they cause 
additional administrative work for me and the fact of having a budget 
caused a variety of reactions from the beneficiaries ranging from 
enthusiasm to rejection.

IIRC correctly from other year, the TYPO3 Association will soon announce 
the deadlines for submitting budget requests for 2013. Thus I wanted to 
have a discussion here about budgets, more specifically how you feel 
about them?

My personal opinion is that budgets for big projects (like the reST 
migration) are really good, as they allow people (like Martin Bless 
currently) to spend more time on the project, thus making progress 
faster. If we had such a big project again in the pipeline I wouldn't 
hesitate to make a budget request for it.

For the maintenance work, I'm hesitant. I felt that it was good to be 
abel to reward people for their work. The money did not cover the whole 
work involved. It was not meant to be, as it would have made the budget 
too important and - being an open source project - most contributions 
are still expected to be on a voluntary basis. However it felt rather 
right to me to be able to offer some small reward to the most active 
contributors, as a token of gratitude for their efforts, hopefully 
encouraging them to continue contributing in the future.

I would very much like to have your opinion(s) on the topic.

Furthermore if one of you has an idea where a budget might be 
appropriate, please make it known.

Cheers

-- 

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