- Inkscape Board of Directors

IDEA: Inkscape Partner Program
by Ted Gould 19 Sep '22

19 Sep '22

As many of you know one of my goals has been to try and figure out our sponsorship program and reboot it. It used to be our primary income as a project, and I feel that long term it is what is needed to get long term growth of cash flow to allow things like hiring individuals to work on Inkscape. I keep tweaking and changing this, but I've gone with putting a list of issues at the end that I see as unresolved, please help! Sorry, I do realize it is a long read, but I think worth it in the end. I think that our old program had the problem that it talked primary about how much money people wanted to give to Inkscape. So we ended up with a bunch of people who basically wanted to buy ads. But we didn't end up with people who love Inkscape and want to see it grow as our sponsors. This hurt us both financially, but also part of the sponsorship program is to get people working with you, and we didn't attract those people. So how I'm thinking that we should change our program is to move from "how much money" for the levels of program to "how you work with Inkscape." And I with that, not having all the "payment" be financial, but instead including publicly talking about the project and usage. Also, to provide time for employees to contribute to the project for the higher levels. My goal here is to provide a level that makes sense for everyone who's working with Inkscape in an organization to have a foothold to get that organization connected to the project. Along with that restructuring I'm suggesting we rename from a "sponsor program" to a "partner program." To be clear, there are a lot more details to work out in the individual items. But I think it is at a point where it is starting to come together as a plan and I'd really like to hear folks thoughts on how it can be better. Freelance Designer/Developer For an individual or small firm up to three employees Publicly lists either Inkscape development or design as the list of services that they provide customers (i.e. on their webpage) $120/yr Listing in the directory of Inkscape sponsors as someone providing Inkscape services. Encouraged to include the "Inkscape Partner" badge on their website Small Firm For a small design/development firm that provides Inkscape services Employs up to 10 employees in the company or division that provides Inkscape services Publicly lists Inkscape services on the information on the company or division $1000/yr Listing in the directory of Inkscape partners as someone providing Inkscape services. Encouraged to include the "Inkscape Partner" badge on their website. Inkscape Services Provider For a large design/development firm/division that provides Inkscape services Up to 50 employees Provides a public statement of allowing some employees to contribute meaningfully to the Inkscape project Publicly lists Inkscape services on product offerings $10K/yr Listing in the directory of Inkscape partners as someone providing Inkscape services. Encouraged to include the "Inkscape Partner" badge on their website. Inkscape Product Customize Inkscape for use in their product through an extension or patch that they then provide to their customers Provides a link and information about the Inkscape project and what changes or modifications they've made Ensures that changes and modifications/additions are correctly distributed under the Inkscape licenses Donates a percentage of sales back to the Inkscape project for the product in question (depends on product by generally Inkscape recommends 10% of profits on the Inkscape value added) Listing in the directory of Inkscape Partners using Inkscape in products Encouraged to include the "Inkscape Product Partner" badge on their website If the product includes retail packaging it is also encouraged to include the "Inkscape Product Partner" badge Educator (Individual) For an individual educator who chooses to create content with or about Inkscape for their classroom Publicly publishes information about their class and that it uses Inkscape Gets permission to use the school logo and information on the "Inkscape Educators" page $0/yr Includes the "Inkscape Educator" badge on their website Education Program For a department or program that uses Inkscape Publicly publishes how their program or department uses and contributes to Inkscape Gives permission to use the school logo and information on the "Inkscape Educators" page $100/yr per lab or classroom or program Includes the "Inkscape Educator" badge or their website Makerspace For community oriented makerspaces that use Inkscape At all instructional or learning sessions about using equipment that takes vector graphics students are taught how to get a design from Inkscape onto the tool. All general public computers in the makerspace have Inkscape installed for member use Includes the "Inkscape Makerspace" on the Makerspace webiste Allows for usage of the makerspace logo on the "Inkscape Makerspaces" listing webpage $0/yr Obviously agreeing on the program is only the first step of the whole process. Next steps would include working with Vectors on the partners website and various badges. Also we'd need to work with SFC on the agreement we'd need people to sign to ensure we can use their logos and that they'd agree to the other parts of the program. I'm not assuming we'd police it heavily, but more count on people to do what they said they would. Issues I see that I'd like comment on: We don't have a way for someone who just wants to sponsor. For example, Red Hat has sponsored us in the past. They do use us internally, but I don't believe those efforts have a public face. Not sure one of these categories works for that. Should it? Or should we keep a generic sponsorship thing around? (seems like confusion, but I don't know) The education ones aren't great. I feel like that's a place we can grow credibility in "look at all these folks learning Inkscape." Which if we wanted to write grants in the future would really help. But I'm not sure the individual classroom vs. program thing makes sense. Just all education the same? All $0/yr + logo usage? Makerspace, I like it, but is that the same as an education program? Seems like it is a different type of thing to me, but I'm not sure. Process as I see it once we have a blueprint: PLC Votes on the levels and requirements Prepare materials. Work with: Vectors work on badges Vectors work on partners website SFC work on agreements Work with Vectors to do a promotional roll out Generally speaking I'm volunteering to bring this through all those stages, but I'd love help. If anyone wants to join in talk to me! Ted

4 4

Inkscape PLC Meeting (Sept 2nd)
by Ted Gould 09 Sep '22

09 Sep '22

Hello Folks, We have a PLC meeting this Friday. Agenda is here: https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/Leadership_Committee_Status_Updates#Agenda Time in your timezone is here: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20220902T10&p1=202 You can find a calendar entry here: https://inkscape.org/*leadership-committee/calendar/ Everyone is invited, hope to see you there! Ted

1 1

Hiring Comittee Report
by doctormo＠gmail.com 07 Sep '22

07 Sep '22

Dear Inkscape PLC, Attached is the report directly from the hiring comittee, it contains a full detailed account of what happened, the steps everyone took and some recomendations for us in the PLC to consider. Please do read the full report. It's not very long, but I think it contains a great deal of thoughtful information from our volunteer hiring comittee members. --- My own additional recommendations is that the project not persue hiring a paid administrator until a HR person be available at the SFC to oversee the process. I do not believe that there was sufficient staffing at the SFC to process the time sensitive elements of this request we made of them. Thus long delays and ultimately starvation of the process. The PLC may want to publicise this issue further to aid in full project transparency, but please go through the vectors team directly. I don't believe a further meeting is neccessary; The hiring comittee is henceforth disbanded. And if I'm being honest everyone involved in this process is emotionally spent and we all require time and space to recover. Best Regards, Martin Owens

3 3

Monthly PLC Meeting
by Ted Gould 14 Aug '22

14 Aug '22

Howdy folks, We have our monthly PLC meeting this Friday (Aug 5) at the regular time on chat. You can figure that out in your timezone: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?iso=20220805T10&p1=202 The projected agenda: https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/Leadership_Committee_Status_Updates#Agenda Everyone is invited! Also, a special thanks to Maren who sent out the Vector's reminder and made me realize I had forgot to send this email. Ted

1 1

VOTE: SFC Promotional Items
by Ted Gould 14 Aug '22

14 Aug '22

Background: The SFC participates in various Open Source conference and often has a booth. If they have a booth they'd like to have Inkscape promotional items in the booth (stickers, etc.) to help promote Inkscape. This helps the project in getting name recognition and representation at conferences that we're otherwise not attending. Previously we've done approvals on a per-event basis, which has worked, but thinking it makes more sense to approve this as an open item so the SFC can manage their inventory as needed. Proposal: a. Approve up to $300 for the SFC to purchase Inkscape promotional items. b. Approve a different amount of: ________ c. Do not approve any budget for promotional items Timeline: Opening: 2022-08-05 Closing: 2022-08-12 Ted

5 10

VOTE: Formally Close Hiring Process
by Martin Owens 13 Aug '22

13 Aug '22

Dear board, The hiring committee has requested that the PLC formally vote on ending the hiring project. While they don't see the process continuing and we've talked casually in meetings about the process ending; we should conclude it with a vote so the hiring team can make needed announcements without any doubts. a. End the 2022 admin hiring process b. Do something else: Thanks everyone! Best Regards, Martin Owens

6 7

Godot Company
by Martin Owens 10 Aug '22

10 Aug '22

Dear PLC & Devel, This is an interesting bit of news. Godot, which is a member of the Software freedom Conservancy, and one of their largest other projects have had their leadership set up a for profit company called w4 games. This is ostensibly to develop Godot further. "Our mission is to strengthen the open source Godot ecosystem by providing companies with the commercial products and services they need." - https://w4games.com/ This is interesting to us here I believe. One of the conflicts I have personally with the SFC is how constraining and limited the SFC are for many of the things that would allow Inkscape to grow, invite commercial partners, hire developers, pay mentors, fund marketing research and design. Material things that we currently patch together with very kind support for key volunteers, but should be more properly resourced. Has anyone here had thoughts about developing a commercial company to develop Inkscape? I'm going to be reaching out to the new Godot business as well as a few of their contacts to see what their thoughts are and see what I can learn and if we can copy them. Best Regards, Martin Owens

4 5

FSA Final Call for comments
by Ted Gould 26 Jul '22

26 Jul '22

Hello PLC, Karen sent out an updated FSA, which includes the changes we voted on, but also updates that come from the newer version of their template. I've read through them and don't see any significant changes other than just making it easier to read. We don't need to vote on the change because, well, everyone has to sign it anyway. But, it would be nice to not end up in a state where someone won't sign it because they don't like change. So this email is to ask if anyone has any blocking changes on the FSA as sent by Karen, and attached below. My schedule is that, if no one has blocking issues, I'll ask the SFC to send out the FSA for signatures on Monday August 1st, 2022. Thanks, Ted

3 3

Inkscape 1.2.1
by Marc Jeanmougin 14 Jul '22

14 Jul '22

Inkscape 1.2.1 ============== Inkscape 1.2.1 is now released. You can download it at: https://inkscape.org/release/inkscape-1.2.1/ then, if you want to support Inkscape, donate to the project at: https://inkscape.org/support-us/ ---------------- Inkscape 1.2.1 is mainly a stability and bugfix release, fixing a nasty data loss crash with the export dialog, various other crashes, and improving page export and some translations. Thanks to everyone involved in that release! -- The Inkscape team

1 0

VOTE: hardware 2FA for project sensitive access
by Marc Jeanmougin 01 Jul '22

01 Jul '22

Dear leadership committee, Your attention is required to vote on the following matters: Background: Some contributors have, or need to have, access to social media accounts to post on the behalf of the project, or to infrastructure accounts, most importantly gitlab. For computer security, we would like to protect those accesses with a safe 2FA method, and the safest method to avoid impersonation and phishing attacks is a 2FA hardware token with FIDO2 or U2F. Then we would be able to set a policy to enforce 2fa when contributors need access to passwords that would be shared on nextcloud, or to contributors with "owner" access to gitlab projects. The most common such token is the Yubikey (45€/$ a piece+10 tax+5shipping) but there are equivalents with open hardware component and open source software (e.g. solokeys at 35€/$ incl. tax +5€ shipping, or nitrokey ). As for the amount of people, the vectors team has around 10-15 people with some level of access to passwords of the project, 4 people do not have 2FA and have "owner" access to the whole gitlab project, + 2 "maintainer" access to inkscape/inkscape (and more in other sub-projects). We also have the possibility to offer it to all regular contributors for whom it would be useful. It is yet to be seen whether we could have a discount by asking, or if there is a way to pay for the whole order and get a single reimbursement instead of reimbursing individual contributors Ballot: a. Reimburse up to 2000 USD for password and project protection, and also offering it to contributors who have been in the project for more than a year and ask for it (implies support for option b) b. Reimburse up to 1000 USD to protect the project's passwords on nextcloud and gitlab project access (only contributors who have access to nextcloud, and gitlab maintainer or owner access) c. Do not do it d. Other (please specify) Thanks! -- Marc

6 9