Monday 23 February 2015

Re: request for some pizzas

On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 1:18 PM, Jonathan Riddell <jr@jriddell.org> wrote:
> Yes, but then again these donations aren't meant for spontaneous pizza
> purchases, they are for strategic investments in community teams and
> events.

Whatever does "strategic investments" mean? There's certainly nothing
about it on the donations page. Does working to develop the Kubuntu
desktop which we are about to switch to get counted? This sounds a lot
like using buzzwords to justify the needless beurocracy that's being
introduced.

I use it to apply for money for cloud computing in the same way as I
could when I was a canonical employee.  By it's very nature cloud
computing spending can't be planned in advance, the whole point is
spontanious.  Why would you want to remove the possibility to be
spontanious?  What problem does it solve?

> The fund money was available starting the quarter after the start of
> donations. We don't do real-time accounting, nor were we going to spend
> money that hadn't come in yet. The delay was minimal.
>
> Also note that these funds were only those marked specifically for
> community use, they did not include donations marked specifically for
> flavor or upstream work.

In October 2012 the ubuntu.com website started asking for donations
for flavours ("Better support for flavours like Kubuntu, Xubuntu,
Lubuntu").

No funding was available until June 2013 when it was quietly renamed
to the more general term "Community projects".

If the funding from October 2012 really isn't included in the current
community fund and it simply has been stolen by Canonical this is
worse than I had thought.

Hi Jonathan,

To recap:
- All Kubuntu (and other flavours') requests for community donations funding have been accepted so far, and will continue to be as long as they comply with the funding requirements
- After approving your last request, you were kindly asked to provide detailed receipts and to file claims upfront instead of retroactively
- A request for pizzas was sent to the development mailing list instead of using the regular donations form. Thus that request never appeared on the list reviewed weekly. In any case, it seems it was already approved by the KDE donations fund [1]
- The Ubuntu donations page was set up for users to contribute to the Ubuntu project and trust Canonical to manage those financial contributions
- A few months after the donations page went live, we felt that the community donations part required a more transparent way to manage and report on the money raised on that front. That is how the Community Funding programme was born.

At this point this thread has descended into pretty strong words that are starting to diverge from the original request for funding. As before, if you've got any evidence for your claims, or if you feel you have been treated unfairly, the Community Council might be a better escalation point than using the developer mailing list.

Cheers,
David

[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AosntDLfgW_kdFQzWmZjTkt5X1lWQ3FFdXB3QkpTZ3c#gid=0