On Sat, May 16, 2015 at 12:22:35AM -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Proposal:
[ ] a. Approve funding Tav to attend the Linkoping SVG WG meeting as outlined below, for a total of up to $900. [ ] b. Do not approve funding Tav.
Votes:
Josh Andler Jon A. Cruz Bryce Harrington Ted Gould Tavmjong Bah (recused)Resolution:
The board will subsidize travel for Tav to go to the Linkoping SVG WG meeting for a total of up to $900.
Background:
I (Tav) would like funding to attend the Linkoping SVG working group meeting, to be held June 9-12, 2015.
The SVG working group is working through remaining issues in the SVG 2 specification. The specification is essentially feature complete. At this point incomplete features without a champion are being removed or moved into separate specifications (as happened with some new stroke and marker properties at the Sydney meeting). It would be good for me to be present in person to make sure that features important to Inkscape like mesh gradients, hatched fills, auto-flowed text are not dropped. Motions to drop features can arrive quickly and without warning as evidenced by the recent removal of SMIL animation from the SVG 2 specification.
Attending in person can be very fruitful. At the Sydney meeting I was able to get text on a shape, auto-closing of paths, and smoothing in gradients into the SVG 2 specification. The major browser vendors are represented so it is a chance to lobby them to add these features quickly to the their browsers.
Progress on SVG 2 can be followed at:
My presentations at the last SVG working group meeting can be found at:
http://tavmjong.free.fr/SVG/sydney_2015.html
and a meeting report at:
http://tavmjong.free.fr/blog/?p=1226
Approximate cost for Linkoping
Transportation: Paris to Linkoping: $450 5 nights lodging/meals: $450
BTW, here is what Inkscape spent on my attending SVG WG meetings in 2015 and 2014 (additional funding to that for attending LGM and GSoC mentor's meeting):
2015: Sydney $2250
2014: Leipzig $900 (Just after LGM) London $757 (Transportation paid for by SVG Open) Santa Clara $616 (Just after GSoC mentor's meeting)
Tavmjong Bah
Hi Tav,
Thanks again for attending these SVG meetings and fighting for the Open Source side. I especially liked how you put the pieces together for me in how Inkscape enabled good visuals on Wikipedia, and how this resulted in the SVG standard remaining relevant to today. I feel your attendance at these meetings has been invaluable and in our small way has made the world a little bit better than it would otherwise. I think it's a good use of our donors' monies.
That said, we've invested a lot of money in these meetings so far. Linkoping puts us over $5500... roughly the equivalent of a hackfest. Money well spent if you ask me, but certainly one of our bigger ticket items to date.
Like you point out, at the moment we're at a good financial spot, flush with fundraised cash, and affording this particular event shouldn't be a problem.
Going forward though, I'd like to get you into a situation where the funding is more under your control, so these things can be more predictable both for you and for us. To do this I'd like to get you set up with a regular Inkscape fundraiser that earmarks money specifically to send you to SVG meetings. We now have all the infrastructure sorted out to do this, it'll just be a matter of you setting up a page our our site with the ask, and beating the bushes a little to get donors there. My bet is that this would allow us to pull in funding for you from more than just Inkscape users, since this format is vital for so much beyond just vector artwork. How does this sound to you?
Bryce