Apply for funding
Moritz Onken
I was wondering if why we shouldn't apply for some funding. The work we are doing does greatly support the community and even companies that rely on CPAN.
I know that amazon, for example, does a lot of funding on my university. They fund one course (I know of) with thousands of dollars for their cloud services. And since amazon is also heavily using perl (at least that's what I remember), I thought it might be worthwhile to ask them directly for some funding. They'd get banners and mentions all over the place in return. In parallel we could apply for funding at perl grants and other cloud companies like rackspace.
Now, I would do this, but english is not my first language and the application should be a good one :-)
Cheers,
moritz
Olaf Alders
First off, there's nothing wrong with your English. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. :)
Mark and I were sort of wondering the same thing re: funding. I know that PGXN has done quite well for funding. David Wheeler could perhaps speak to how to go about doing that?
As far as our actual expenses go, right now they're less than $25/month for the Rackspace cloud account. Having said that, the expenses will probably at least double once we integrate your work with the larger CPAN index. There's also the issue of Java being a pig as far as RAM goes. The ES instance basically requires most of the available RAM and this point. All of this doesn't take into account actual traffic. With real traffic, I'm guessing we're looking at some increased expenses.
I don't have any spare hardware right now, but with a hardware donation we could move MetaCPAN over to my rack and use the expense money to cover bandwidth and power. That's certainly not a problem.
As far as cloud hosting goes, we're with Rackspace out of convenience rather than allegiance, so if we could work out a free hosting deal elsewhere, I'd be happy to move things over.
Now, if we could actually get funding to cover some of the dev work, that would be ideal. I would think that a grant covering a month or three of developer time would really speed up development of some of the stuff both you and Yanick are working on. As far as getting a proposal together goes, that's something we could work out via this list, I think. If we can hammer out exactly what we would do with the funding, I think that would be the first step. After that we could target donors. :) I think the funding targets would go hand in hand with having a proper road map for the entire project going forward. It kind of evolved over a couple of meetings at Toronto.pm and got up and running really quickly. Beyond that we have some ideas, but maybe not much of a concrete plan. :)
Best,
Olaf
Moritz Onken
> As far as our actual expenses go, right now they're less than $25/month for the Rackspace cloud account. Having said that, the expenses will probably at least double once we integrate your work with the larger CPAN index. There's also the issue of Java being a pig as far as RAM goes. The ES instance basically requires most of the available RAM and this point. All of this doesn't take into account actual traffic. With real traffic, I'm guessing we're looking at some increased expenses.
I had the ideas to apply for a GSoC project and was talking to rafl the other day. He is happy to support my application. I was also talking to clinton and asked if he could mentor me since he is the elasticsearch guru amongst us. He also agreed. Rafl said that the money (500 USD) that goes to the Perl Foundation will be donated to metacpan, once the application is accepted by google. The next task would be to come up with a proposal that include all the features we wan to implement. I'm going to start with that right away and let you when I have something to show. Also, I'd like to write a blog post about it and collect ideas from the community.
rafl also said that it's not a big deal to get some more funding for the servers. But he asked that we should have some well working, good documented service first.
It would be great if anyone could write up some ideas on the github issue tracker. That would help with the application and we have all ideas in one place.
Cheers,
mo
Olaf Alders
On 2011-03-14, at 5:38 AM, Moritz Onken wrote:
>
>> As far as our actual expenses go, right now they're less than $25/month for the Rackspace cloud account. Having said that, the expenses will probably at least double once we integrate your work with the larger CPAN index. There's also the issue of Java being a pig as far as RAM goes. The ES instance basically requires most of the available RAM and this point. All of this doesn't take into account actual traffic. With real traffic, I'm guessing we're looking at some increased expenses.
>
> I had the ideas to apply for a GSoC project and was talking to rafl the other day. He is happy to support my application. I was also talking to clinton and asked if he could mentor me since he is the elasticsearch guru amongst us. He also agreed. Rafl said that the money (500 USD) that goes to the Perl Foundation will be donated to metacpan, once the application is accepted by google. The next task would be to come up with a proposal that include all the features we wan to implement. I'm going to start with that right away and let you when I have something to show. Also, I'd like to write a blog post about it and collect ideas from the community.
Wow. That all sounds excellent. Let me know what you need from me and I'll put a priority on it. :)
>
> rafl also said that it's not a big deal to get some more funding for the servers. But he asked that we should have some well working, good documented service first.
Agreed. Maybe we can all meet on IRC to discuss this later in the week? We'd need to find a time outside of business hours EST, I think. What works for you?
>
> It would be great if anyone could write up some ideas on the github issue tracker. That would help with the application and we have all ideas in one place.
+1
Best,
Olaf
Moritz Onken
> Agreed. Maybe we can all meet on IRC to discuss this later in the week? We'd need to find a time outside of business hours EST, I think. What works for you?
My schedule is really flexible, one of the benefits of being a student :)
I'm up from http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?day=16&month=3&year=2011&hour=9&min=0&sec=0&p1=37 for 15 hours.
Cheers,
moritz
Olaf Alders
Let's chat at 1:30 pm EST (6:30 PM in Deutschland) to hash out some ideas. All welcome. :) #metacpan on irc.freenode.net
Olaf