Budget brainstorming

[Chris Davenport]

Hi All,

As you know, we need to put together a budget for the Production Working Group for 2010.  The first step in the process is to do a little brainstorming about the sorts of things that we might want to include.  If we can gather some ideas in this thread over the next few days we can discuss them at our next meeting.

To start things off, here are the pitifully few and entirely predictable items that my feeble grey matter could come up with (in no particular order):

* Production WG Summit
* Bug squashes, code sprints, doc sprints, etc.
* Attendance at conferences and meetings with non-Joomla groups.
(In particular, I'd like to be able to attend the Writing Open Source Conference if it's held again next year)

Get those thinking caps on.

Chris.

[Ron Severdia]

I think we should budget for two LT team members to attend as many
conferences throughout the year. It shouldn't be same two people all
the time so probably those who are closest (or have the most relevant
connection topic-wise or demand-wise) to the nearest event.

I also think we should organize a LT summit at some point. Place TBA,
but the earlier the better.

I also propose that we undertake one large-scale conference/Joomla Day
during 2010 (partially a WG item, but obviously would involve others).

I think we should establish quarterly code/doc sprint weekends
throughout the year. We could send a WG member to several select
locations to coordinate with a group of local contributors.

Anyone else?

[Mark Dexter]

Yeah, what he said. Mark

[Louis Landry]

Hi all,

As promised here are my thoughts on the budget, as it pertains to conferences, summits and expos.

Overview

I have attended a vast array of events while representing Joomla over the years. Most of the time, the implicit reason for attending these events was to raise awareness about Joomla and thus increasing market share. This is why we have always attended the LinuxWorld Expos and setup booths at various expos all over the world. We have tended to send high level project representatives, sometimes en masse, to these expos so that they can stand at the booth and talk up the project.

One of the great side effects of this practice has been sort of mini-summits of key project contributors. I remember my first expo was LinuxWorld in Boston with Mitch Pirtle and Andy Miller. It was fantastic to be able to meet those guys for the first time in person and get to talk about ideas and concepts into the future. Later that year I got the opportunity to meet Johan and several others at the LinuxWorld in San Francisco. While I am sure the couple of hundred people we met at those events know more about Joomla today than they did before meeting us, I am absolutely certain that the benefits gleaned from spending time discussing and debating project topics with other key contributors far outweigh any real benefit from manning those expo booths.

Another of the great side effects in attending these events is meeting and building relationships with leadership of other Open Source projects. Cultivating those relationships gives us insight into community processes and organizational structures that do and don't work for other projects. It also opens doors for collaboration in all sorts of areas that wouldn't otherwise be available to us.

In my opinion the last (but not least) major side effect of attending expos is meeting and building relationships with local Joomla communities. It is absolutely fantastic to interact with people who are JUG members or just passionate users of Joomla and hear what they have to say. To talk with them about problems and solutions facing both the project and them individually is incredibly rewarding. This is also one of the great benefits of having project leadership and key contributors attending JoomlaDay events all over the world.
I would put to you that the principle mission of raising awareness and market share should take a back seat when considering how we spend our money in attending events. To me, we should be encouraging and supporting local user groups to attend these expos all over the world instead of necessarily flying in key contributors.

I think we would be better served flying key contributors into conferences for learning and presenting rather than manning a booth. There are a number of key industry conferences to which we have never sent a delegation. For example, the Joomla project has never attended the Zend/PHP Conference, or php|tek conference. Those are both key PHP conferences where industry leaders give talks about cutting edge technology and topics related to the programming language upon which our software is based. We have never attended any of the many conferences or expos focusing on next generation Web applications, AJAX technologies, etc such as The Rich Web Experience, The Ajax Experience or Web 2.0 Expo. Also, there are content management conferences that we may benefit from attending such as Gilbane Boston 2009 - Content Management Conference and many others.

Attending these types of events would give our project leaders more opportunity to meet and mingle with other industry leaders. It would also enrich our project by giving our key contributors the ability to both teach and learn among peers in the industry. The better our leaders are the better our project will be.

In my opinion the most important things we can spend money on are things that will directly impact our ability to produce software, documentation and translations. To that end I would like you all to have a look at the concept the Ubuntu project has for their Ubuntu Developer Summits. I believe we should have similar such events twice a year. This is where they hone the vision and guidelines for each software release. We should be meeting twice a year and also bringing in key contributors where appropriate. It should be open to our third party developer community to attend as well so that we can discuss and debate a wide range of issues.

Second to that, I think we should be looking to send people to relevant industry conferences like I have outlined previously. Instead of having people attend conferences with the purpose of marketing, lets send them with the purpose of gleaning information and building relationships with other organizations.

Budget Suggestions

Joomla! Developer Summits

I estimate the Joomla! developer summits to cost somewhere around 15 thousand dollars. This would include the flight and accommodations for the leadership team and the venue. Third party developers would need to cover their own travel and accommodations.
I would like us to do two of these a year.

$30,000 USD

Industry Conferences

I estimate that on average a person attending a conference will cost around 2 thousand dollars. This would include travel and accommodation as well as entry fee. I would like to see us average around 5 of these per year with 2 people attending each.

Obviously the cost would fluctuate with expensive versus cheap conferences and whether or not the people going are speakers.

Some suggestions for conferences we should attend are:

• Zend/PHP Conference
• php|tek
• Web 2.0 Expo

I expect that there are conferences more focused on documentation as well. One that comes to mind that other project managers have pointed me to is WikiSym.

$20,000 USD

Pizza, Bugs and Fun Events

These events have traditionally been great for productivity and collaboration. I would like to see us commit to 2 of them per year and budget 5 thousand dollars per event.

$10,000 USD

Documentation Camp

While we have only really had one of these, it proved to be very successful and I think if we committed to two of these a year we could make some major inroads towards improving knowledge sharing within our community and improving the completeness of our documentation. I would budget these the same as PBF events at 5 thousand dollars per event.

$10,000 USD

Grand Total: $70,000 USD

- Louis

--
Development Coordinator
Joomla! ... because open source matters.
http://www.joomla.org

[Sam Moffatt]

Here is a quick summary of what we've done in previous years (and this
year). The first number is how much we've spent (actuals) and the
second in brackets is the budgeted amount for the year. Hosting
includes everything and probably doesn't include the new dev box we
have but it might be useful to use it as a general guide.

2009 YTD
Dev Supplies and Materials - 0 (500)
Dev Events - 393.30 (2000)
Dev Summit - 2388.43 (9500)
Dev Sprints - 0 (1000)
Hosting Expense - 10585 (14957)
Marketing - 0 (5800)

2008
Dev Supplies and Materials - 63.56 (0)
Dev Events Travel - 22050.03 (0)
Dev Summit Travel - 4951 (0)
Hosting Expense - 15371 (13200)

2007
Hosting Expense - 23672 (12000)
Marketing - 5112 (240)