Re: On what we want to support: travel?

On Wed, Nov 01, 2006 at 02:57:53PM -0800, Josh Berkus wrote:
> There's a thing we do at Sun and other large corporations called an
> "ROI" where we go: this is how much money I need, and this is what I
> expect us to get out of it. I really think this is the approach we
> should take on evaluating expenditures, rather than trying to say
> "category x comes ahead of category y".

I don't disagree with this; but every company also evaluates whole
classes of things from time to time, and says, "That's just not a
line we want to pursue." My guess is that one could come up with a
proposal at Sun for a high-ROI on, say, a disposable cup line, and
nobody would even look at it, because it's not a line of business
they want to pusue (I know that's true of every place I've ever
worked).

Which is why asked the question, do we want to be in the business of
subsidising travel. Others seem to think that the answer to that is
obvious. But "travel" covers a lot of ground, and it seems to me
that we ought to have some set of ideas of what we're likely to fund
and what not, so that we don't have to waste a great deal of time
evaluating requests that we were never going to fund anyway.

Here are categories of travel, for instance, that I think might be
good to support:

- Invited talks to conferences in areas of current growth

So, e.g. talks to PHP conferences, SIGs for communications
and industrial developers, and geographic areas where we seem
to have some traction.

- Developer travel to feature-development sessions

I'm told that some people find it better and faster to get in
a room together and work out how a feature should be
implemented (particularly big, complicated ones). Meetings
for that sort of thing.

- Industry/standards bodies meetings

I dunno about TPC or ANSI, but I'll tell you that IETF
meetings are actually productive, in my experience. It isn't
especially what is decided in formal sessions, so much as the
thrashing out of nascent proposals in the hallway, that make
it worthwhile. I suppose this is related to what's above.

But, for instance, I _don't_ think we should fund travel for
"regular" conference talks, or sending people to places where we have
a well-established presence like OSCON.

One thing about ROI analysis that does not translate well from
industry to open projects like this is the "return" part. It isn't
plain _at all_ what the return in a project like this should be. For
a company, it is plain: expected financial reward. Since everything
in a firm's ROI calculation is measured in money, the comparison is
relatively easy. But because we haven't monetised the community, we
can't compare everything in terms of money. Therefore, we need to
think not only in terms of ROI, but also in terms of general goals of
the community. That's what I'm trying to learn through this thread.

A

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