- Inkscape Board of Directors

Developer education
by Johan Engelen 13 Jan '14

13 Jan '14

Hi all, Lately, I've become obsessed with code quality. I've been reading Bjourne Stroustrup's "bible" on C++11, watched all videos of the "Going Native" conferences, started using clang, ..., and it has made me much more aware of the language's facilities for preventing bugs. I regularly browse over Inkscape's code and try to fix things I think can be improved (janitorial); our source is a pretty big mess I really do think Inkscape can use some love to improve logic and to decrease some amount of spaghetti. I just saw the book "Effective C++", which I believe is a great resource to inspire thought and learn how to write better code, and is meant for experienced programmers. How do you guys feel about donating this book to our top committers? (if you feel this is too egoistic of me, *I* will pay for my own copy myself, no worries, and pass my copy on to the dev that was just below the cut-off point). In general: how do you guys feel about donating something to our top committers for their "education"? We would need some metric of what "top committers" means, we could use ohloh.net's numbers. *For example*, we have 10 people that committed more than 50 times in the past 12 months. So that'd be 10 books = 10 x 31 euro = 310 euro cost --- shipping and whatnot --> 400 euro cost. What do you think? Cheers, Johan (After we release 0.91, I will become very active in pushing for C++11 (i.e., upgrading our compiler dependencies to more modern versions so we can start using part of C++11 features), and general maintenance / refactoring / cleaning up. It's pretty rewarding I find, and very low-key in terms of long-time brain-investment.)

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Proposal for fundraising and funded development process (Was Re: RedHat Question)
by Bryce Harrington 12 Jan '14

12 Jan '14

[Forwarding thread to the board mailing list. Dropping CC of board members since they're already on the list alias.] We've talked about fundraisers and funded development in the past. For me the sticking point is always, "Who's going to handle running the fundraiser, and then judging whether the work was adequately done?" So, I did a bit of brainstorming using Krzysztof's task rule as a starting point, tacking on the thoughts I mentioned earlier, and fleshing out how the fundraising and administration end of things could be done. My goal here is to get us to a point where the board doesn't have to be intimately involved in specific jobs and fundraisers, but can just sign off on an official policy for how they should be handled in general, and then let the work happen organically. Please read this over and throw darts. I have several questions that I'd want to see answers for before putting this up for a vote, so do please chime in with your opinions and thoughts. Bryce ------------------------------------------------------------------------ We maintain a listing of proposed projects. Projects can be proposed by anyone in the Inkscape AUTHORS file. Anything can be proposed, including feature development, bug triaging, documentation, administration, etc. It must have a defined deliverable and acceptance criteria identified, and a time limit for how long the work should take. Initially these are all made available for volunteers to do freely. When GSoC rolls around we use them as suggested projects for students to undertake. Any project that remains on the list unfinished for 6 months becomes eligible for funding the work. (This is so that any proposed projects that are fun or easy get done by volunteers, and money can be focused on harder unsexy work, and to make abuse harder.) We'll call these eligible projects 'jobs'. Meanwhile, we run official fundraisers, that have the goal of getting donations for these jobs. Each of these has a named person serving as that fundraiser's coordinator who handles all administrative manners for the duration of the campaign. It is up to this coordinator's discretion how to distribute the raised money at the completion of the fundraiser, however: a) all funds must be directed only to jobs in the list, and b) no single job can receive more than 25% of the raised funds. For ongoing fundraisers, the coordinator responsible for setting it up can specify the distribution programmatically (e.g. "distribute evenly to the four oldest jobs in the list", or "10% each to each to the ten jobs with the highest funding", or "allocated evenly across all documentation jobs". The coordinator will remain responsible for administrative duties for the length of the fundraiser; if they choose to step down, the fundraiser is terminated (but another coordinator can start up an equivalent to replace it, under their own funding distribution preferences). The money from these fundraisers goes to the Inkscape Foundation account administered by the Software Conservancy, who takes a small percentage of each donation. All donations are tax deductable. We maintain a list of allocations-to-jobs so we can keep track of what money "belongs" to which job, so the correct amount is paid when the job is done. Anyone in the Inkscape AUTHORS file can sign up for one of the jobs. When they assign themselves the job, the clock starts ticking. During the time limit, no one else can sign up to do the same job. When the time runs out and the job is not completed, the assignee doesn't receive the reward and can't attempt the same job again for 6 months. The job is considered completed when the identified deliverables are delivered according to the specified criteria. Open Questions: * Should fundraiser coordinators get remuneration of some sort, or is the ability to direct the funds they raise a sufficient reward? * Who decides when a given job is "complete"? Do we need to have a separate reviewer role identified (analogous to GSoC mentor)? Should that person get some form of remuneration too? Should the role be interactive with the job performer, or an anonymous pass/fail? * Should jobs 'expire' after some period of time, with any allocated funds being freed up for other jobs and/or returned to the general fund? * How do we prune out jobs that become irrelevant? * What if someone (or multiple someones) handles the job without signing up for it? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 11:40:18PM +0100, Krzysztof Kosiński wrote: > Hello all > > Chiming in with a slight delay. It would be awesome if we could get > that funding. > > If we want to use the money to fund people working on specific > features or maintenance tasks, I could help outline the goals for > that, and probably also do some of the tasks myself if I have the > time. > > If RedHat were to provide recurring contributions, we could set up a > program where performing a well defined coding task in a specified > time limit is rewarded with money. The crucial difference between this > and GSoC would be that we could use our program to pay people doing > boring maintenance tasks such as removing deprecated functions and > writing better documentation. > > When it comes to rules, I would imagine something like this: Any > existing committer could sign up to do one of the tasks, and the clock > would start ticking. During the specified time limit, no one else can > sign up to do the same task. When the time runs out and the task is > not completed, the committer who signed up doesn't receive the reward > and can't attempt the same task again for e.g. one year. > > Regards, Krzysztof > > 2013/12/10 Tavmjong Bah <tavmjong@...47...>: > > On Mon, 2013-12-09 at 14:38 -0500, Martin Owens wrote: > >> Hey Guys, > >> > >> More discussion with Máirín (mo) at RedHat. See below. > >> > >> On Mon, 2013-12-09 at 14:18 -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote: > >> > Okay, and are you guys going to be paying someone to develop the > >> > features you're looking at? Are you doing it through a program or as a > >> > one-off kind of thing? > >> > >> I think this is something the board should talk about. I know it > >> entirely depends on the amount of funds and the scale of participation. > >> But it might be worth having a couple of levels of 'we wish we could do > >> this if we had this amount of funding' > >> > >> And should it be a program? The Inkscape-Equivalence program. Donate the > >> same amount per year as you would pay for Illustrator to help the > >> inkscape project development.? > >> > > > > I like the idea of the "Inkscape-Equivalence' program. I think we should > > make it a permanent program. Do other groups do this? > > > > Tav > > > > > > > >

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LP team and repo for Inkscape Board
by Bryce Harrington 12 Jan '14

12 Jan '14

I took the liberty of establishing a team in Launchpad for the seven Inkscape Board of Directors, and added a repository for sharing documentation associated with our work. https://code.launchpad.net/~inkscape.board https://code.launchpad.net/~inkscape.board/+junk/board-docs Feel free to add documentation to this repository, just remember it's publically accessible (just as the archives to this mailing list are public). In particular, if you're working on a proposal for something that will need a board vote at some point, please feel free to use this repository for your work-in-progress. Having the working docs in version control will help reviewers track what's changed as the doc iterates. Bryce

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Fwd: [Inkscape-devel] info to devel groups
by Alexandre Prokoudine 26 Dec '13

26 Dec '13

Hello board, If you are considering sending anyone to LGM next year, my humble suggestion would be to keep an eye on this guy as well :) Alexandre ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jabiertxo Arraiza Cenoz <jabier.arraiza marker.es> Date: Mon, Dec 23, 2013 at 9:11 PM Subject: [Inkscape-devel] info to devel groups To: inkscape-devel <inkscape-devel(a)lists.sourceforge.net> Hi to all. This dates make me read the past year. My first project, except some extensions, bspline&spirolive[0] date form near september of 2012. There is some contributions from this year, and want the next year could continue: * Temporary helper path re-added to live effects [1] * Multiple path parameter editing on live effects [2] * Improved perspective_path LPE [3] * Improved Laticce LPE [4] * Fix to translate shapes whith LPE applied in trunk [5] * Changes to the lpe system whith two patch to select best, this make no strange results in LPE effects in nested groups, one patch perserve shapes but the behabiour is not perfect and the other convert this to paths but work "perfect" [6] * Retain the last applied "stroke" to the pen and pencil combo box improved whith the help of Krzysztof [7] * Bend from clipboard, this applied a bend effect to the strokes whith the shape in "stroke combo". I`m not so happy with this, but ... [8] * Live effects applied to mask and clips [9] [0] https://code.launchpad.net/~inktxof/inkscape/bspline+spirolive [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/1246550 [2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/609839 [3] https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/1068987 [4] https://code.launchpad.net/~inktxof/inkscape/lattice2 [5] https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/1247324 [6] https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/1242170 [7] https://code.launchpad.net/~inktxof/inkscape/lastApplied [8] https://code.launchpad.net/~inktxof/inkscape/bendFromClipboard [9] https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/1241902 Maybe i could get reviews and make "alive" some of my work. Special thanks to su_v that make a lot of this work be real with her encouragement. GoodYear by the way! Regards, Jabier.

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Re: [Inkscape-board] Funding Projects (Red Hat Response)
by Tavmjong Bah 23 Dec '13

23 Dec '13

On Mon, 2013-12-23 at 08:29 -0600, Ted Gould wrote: > On Fri, 2013-12-06 at 23:46 +0000, Bryce W. Harrington wrote: > > Although I'm thinking if we do sponsored work we need something to > > balance the development work with something that'll retire some of the > > accumulated technical debt. So maybe a Winter of Bug Fixing. ;-) > > If we wanted to do some sort of sprint in that regard I know that RH > has been happy to support having that type of stuff at their Brno > office, perhaps in Boston as well. It might be a good way to get the > bugs triaged and some fixed. At the GSoC mentor's meeting there was a discussion on best use for various types of meetings. It seemed the consensus was that face-to-face meetings were most useful for getting things planned out. I would propose that we have a combined bug triage/fix sprint and planning sprint, either in Boston or Brno. The sooner, the better. I've organized Krzysztof's list of projects on a Wiki page where it will be easier for people to add comments or their own projects.[1] All of Krzysztof's proposed projects are good and I would be happy to see them supported. Personally, I am very interested in SVG 2 support for reasons explained on a wiki page I've prepared.[2] Tav PS, I've cc'ed the board [1] http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Projects [2] http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/SVG2

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Re: [Inkscape-board] URGENT: please remove Google Checkout links from your site ASAP
by Bryce Harrington 07 Dec '13

07 Dec '13

On Wed, Nov 20, 2013 at 08:39:47AM -0500, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote: > Bryce, > > Bryce Harrington wrote at 17:44 (EST) on Tuesday: > > If you feel it is extremely urgent, maybe we can look at moving up the > > switchover date. Otherwise, I'd like to see things proceed as > > scheduled, to avoid errors from rushing things. > > The main problem is we don't know what will happen with those Google > Checkout links and what the donors will see. It's possible, for > example, their donation will seem successful then fail silently. It's > possible they'll get an odd error message. > > I am sure it's not a complete disaster if you can't take the link down, > but at the very least Inkscape will look foolish. At worst, it'll > create extra paperwork on the backend for us, and/or donors will think > they've made a donation when they haven't. With the website switchover complete this should now be resolved. Bryce

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Re: [Inkscape-board] updating DNS info for Inkscape: OSU-OSL needed (was Re: final steps re: Inkscape TM policy, logo copyrights (was Inkscape Committee: additional votes needed))
by Bryce W. Harrington 07 Dec '13

07 Dec '13

Thanks; I worked through OSUOSL to get the DNS changeover done. The new website is live. There doesn't appear to be a pressing need to change the technical contact for the DNS records at this time, so I think leaving things as is for now should be fine. However, I do have a Gandi account and would be ok with being the contact should we need to change things some day. Bryce On Tue, Dec 03, 2013 at 02:10:49PM -0500, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote: > TL;DR: there's no action item I am taking now to point www.inkscape.org at > py1.osuosl.org. OSU-OSL needs to do it, but we can change it so that > Conservancy and/or an Inkscape Committee member has authority to make such > changes directly with Gandi in future. > > Full Details: > > Bryce W. Harrington wrote today: > > Now that our DNS is held by SFC, who is the contact person for doing DNS > > changes? > > Actually, has it stands, Conservancy is the merely holding the registrar for > the accounting, but the DNS still points to (as seen in whois inkscape.org): > > Name Server:NS1.AUTH.OSUOSL.ORG > Name Server:NS2.AUTH.OSUOSL.ORG > Name Server:NS3.AUTH.OSUOSL.ORG > > So... > > > Our new website is ready to go immediately, we just need the DNS > > flipped. Specifically, we need inkscape.org and www.inkscape.org > > pointed at py1.osuosl.org (140.211.15.230). > > ... I bet whoever you're talking to at OSU-OSL (Lance?) who set up py1 for > you also has authority to update the DNS. > > inkscape.org is hosted at Gandi now, and it's possible to do two things to > make this easier: > > * Someone on the Inkscape committee can make a Gandi account, which can be > made the Technical Contact for the domain, and then have authority to > make non-billing-related changes like nameservers for the domain. > > * If OSU-OSL hosting the DNS isn't desired any longer, we could use Gandi's > DNS hosting in addition to being the registrar. > > > -- bkuhn

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Fwd: [Inkscape-devel] Additional Inkscape Funding - paying developers feature by feature
by Johan Engelen 04 Dec '13

04 Dec '13

Hi all, Please read Martin's email below. " Any project based funding will have to go through the board and the Free Software Conservancy who handle those aspects of the project. " The way I understood things is: if someone is payed to work on Inkscape, that is fine and is not our business (and has happened in the past though similar funding websites, correct?). I thought it becomes our business if the funding/fundraising is brought as an official Inkscape activity, or on deciding whether code lands in trunk, or trademark/copyright issues etc. So, although (much) payed development next to unpayed volunteer development is debatable, I don't think we can (or should try to) prevent such independent funding website projects. regards, Johan On 3-12-2013 19:09, Martin Owens wrote: On Tue, 2013-12-03 at 15:31 +0000, Anna Morris wrote: > Please let me know what you think and if you are interested in getting > funding this way, either as a group of core-developers or, if not, as > an individual developer. Hi Anna, Any project based funding will have to go through the board and the Free Software Conservancy who handle those aspects of the project. I wonder if we can have a license to fund from the board. A sort of sanction to seek funding in a specific way under Inkscape's umbrella. It wouldn't need money to flow through SFC, but could help routing costs. In any regard; the small project pattern should make it easier to make that request. Best Regards, Martin Owens

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Re: [Inkscape-board] final steps re: Inkscape TM policy, logo copyrights (was Inkscape Committee: additional votes needed)
by Bryce W. Harrington 03 Dec '13

03 Dec '13

On Tue, Dec 03, 2013 at 01:54:44PM -0500, Tony Sebro wrote: > On 12/03/2013 01:41 PM, Bryce W. Harrington wrote: > >Quick question. Now that our DNS is held by SFC, who is the > >contact person for doing DNS changes? Our new website is ready to > >go immediately, we just need the DNS flipped. Specifically, we > >need inkscape.org and www.inkscape.org pointed at py1.osuosl.org > >(140.211.15.230). Bryce > That would be Bradley. So, this is ready to go ASAP? If so, I'll > follow up with Bradley and get it flipped. Yep, it's ready to go ASAP. Please get it flipped. This should also finally resolve the google checkout link problem, since that's already fixed in the new layout. (Please give feedback if you see any remaining problems with the donations page). Bryce

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Re: [Inkscape-board] final steps re: Inkscape TM policy, logo copyrights (was Inkscape Committee: additional votes needed)
by Bryce W. Harrington 03 Dec '13

03 Dec '13

On Tue, Dec 03, 2013 at 01:15:14PM -0500, Tony Sebro wrote: > On 12/02/2013 05:26 PM, Bryce Harrington wrote: > >Hi, sorry to resurrect this old thread, but just wanted to check back > >again on where we are with it. I know updating the website has probably > >been blocked due to the new site development, but hopefully that should > >be live shortly. Ted, can you make sure something's included about this > >in the new website, and draft up an announce for the mailing list? > > > >Are there any other tasks needed to bring this project to completion? > > > Thanks for resurrecting this thread, Bryce. As I said back in May: > in addition to posting the policy itself as a new page on the > website, I'd also recommend including another Q & A in the Legal > section of the Wiki FAQ pointing visitors to the TM policy page. > > Once the policy has been posted, then we can start the clock on > giving the Inkscape community a chance to object to our intent to > license the copyrights in the logo itself under CC-By-SA 3.0 US. > > Thanks! Best, -Tony Thanks Tony. Quick question. Now that our DNS is held by SFC, who is the contact person for doing DNS changes? Our new website is ready to go immediately, we just need the DNS flipped. Specifically, we need inkscape.org and www.inkscape.org pointed at py1.osuosl.org (140.211.15.230). Bryce

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