Re: On what we want to support: travel?

On Mon, Oct 30, 2006 at 03:38:48PM -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:

> Sure, but I was hoping to avoid getting into vague arguments of
> hypotheticals, which have a tendency never to conclude on this list.  I
> think that concrete funding requests are a lot easier to resolve than
> general rules.

Well, just a second.  When we started having the discussion about
what fundraising targets and spending priorities were in the funds
group, the answer was that the general priorities have to come from
the community, so such a conversation needs to go on in public.  Now
that such a conversation is happening, I see a rush to declare
consensus without very many people in that wider community having
anything to say about it; and the hurry is apparently because we
don't like that public lists with no membership criteria tend to take
a long time to converge on consensus.

> hard-and-fast rules about priorities by category.  For example, a full
> membership in TPC is $20,000 and we'd be unlikely to be listened to even
> as full members.  Would you rate that over paying for 15 different trips
> by PostgreSQL keynote speakers to South America, Asia and the Middle East,
> each speaking to between 200 and 3000 people?  I wouldn't.

I might.  I'd have to think about it, and I'd especially like to
discuss it in terms of likely effectiveness with respect to community
goals.  Which means we need to come up with something like such a set
of goals.

For instance, if "building good database systems" is what is
important (this is a formulation Peter used recently), then actually
it seems to me that TPC or ANSI might be a better investment than the
prospect of some more users.  I don't know; but it seems to me we
need to thrash that out _somewhere_ before we charge off planning to
address funding requests.

A

--
Andrew Sullivan  | ajs@crankycanuck.ca
The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.
        --George Orwell