Proposal:

  1.  Purchase and distribute a programming book to the top 10 Inkscape
  contributors (as determined by quantity of commits to inkscape/src/).

  2.  The contributors can choose from one of the following three books:
  a) Effective C++
     by Scott Meyers
  b) Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
     by Martin Fowler
  c) The C++ Programming Language
     by Bjarne Stroustrup

  3.  The campaign proposer (Johan Engelen, or their designee) will be
  empowered to officially announce and introduce the campaign to the
  larger community.

  4.  The board chairperson (or their designee) will be empowered to
  i) Identify the qualified contributors as per (1), ii) Contact the
  qualified book recipients to collect their address and choice of book
  from (2), iii) Purchase and disseminiate the books to the provided
  addresses, iv) Collect reimbursement from SFC for expenses incurred.


  [ ] a. Yes, conduct this campaign as defined
  [ ] b. No, we should not purchase books
  [ ] c. Maybe, but I disagree with some definition of the campaign


Background:

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.

(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.)

Johan