[Funding]: Develop a spending plan

[fricklerhandwerk]

Description

The NGI0 grant agreements provide the foundation with financial means to sustain its operation. Concretely this amounts to ca. 35 000 EUR just this year, and a total of ca. 120 000 EUR until end of 2026. This money could be invested in maintaining and developing critical code that helps keep the ecosystem afloat.

Judging from experience, the board does not have the time to make spending decisions at that granularity, which would also often involve technical decisions; not even speaking of seeing projects through to the end.

My proposal is to gather projects to be funded from that budget, including people to implement them, and present the board with a big-picture recommendation to sign off. This would happen in a similar manner as it did with the STF proposal in 2023, probably even more transparent because less rushed.

Technically the budget is already in scope of my current responsibilities under the NGI project manager contract, so in principle I could just go ahead and do it. But I'd like to have a clear stance from the board on that issue, since it's a strategic one, and ideally also feedback from the contributor community.

Budget amount

3 000 EUR (from the NGI0 grants)

Budget description

Paid time for me to do the work. We can specify a deadline, a format of the proposal, and other boundary conditions, if the general direction is agreeable.

PS: This effort could also involve planning or already doing some fundraising.

PPS: There is of course a short-cut where we simply divide the money across community teams as proposed in https://github.com/NixOS/teams-collaboration/issues/2