Sorry - this is a long post! This discussion so far has focused primarily on the QGIS developers' viewpoint, but I think it may be worth considering the situation from the perspective of those with the money. There seem to be (at least) four major groups that could help, each with their own agendas/motivators. 1) National and governmental. These organisations potentially have access to very large amounts of money with decisions being driven (probably) by a mix of political agenda and perceived national benefit. I think money from this group (if gained) would be in relatively large amounts (in the UK, projects would be unlikely to be less than £10k and could lead to much larger amounts), with quite broad targets and little or no day to day overseeing. To get such money I think we need to have increased use of GIS seen as important to national success and QGIS perceived as the best solution to support. Not only do we want to encourage use of QGIS directly but also we need to publicise it wherever possible and try to get it added to government software lists. 2) Medium to large organisations. These organisations typically will have a specific and (hopefully) well-defined requirement and would see the developers as external consultants. The solution could possibly be at two levels with QGIS consultants helping deliver overall solutions that have additional work sub-contracted within the developer group. Typically, before any formal quote is requested, someone would be asked for an order of magnitude estimate of likely cost and timescales. I've spent decades on both sides of this fence working as a consultant and managing a variety of sub-contract projects - if someone cannot quickly answer the basic questions at this stage (availability of competent people, range of daily rates, complexity and risk/uncertainty, very rough estimate of likely effort required) then the project dies at birth. The next stage would be a formal specification and quotation phase, neither of which should be overly complex. If there is a lot of uncertainty, I've usually run a small pre-project to remove the uncertainty and reduce development risks. 3) Small organisations and individual users. These people generally have little money... but there are lots of them. The main voluntary payments that they make are to charities so, while not going as far as suggesting that QGIS become a registered charity, could we try to convince people to make small regular payments? 1,000 people giving £50 each on average per year would pay for a useful amount of bug fixing etc. 4) Current and potential developers. Developers put a lot of their time and often personal money into QGIS. The easier it is for new developers to contribute, the more everyone benefits. Can we make it easier for potential new developers to get started? Could we have an OSGeo4 type of installer to create a working development environment for plugins and/or trunk? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Group (1) needs marketing effort. Pete Wells, Saber Razmjooei (both Faunalia UK) and I have been doing this in the UK with Ordnance Survey, national and local government for about three months and progress is looking promising. Group (2) is also part of our marketing, but there is a clear problem in that even the first "order of magnitude cost" question would be difficult to answer... although in reality I would come up with a number based on what I know of QGIS and lots of years making educated guesses. Group (3) we could have gentle encouragement to make payments... but it must be easy! My experience making a donation for hackfest was that it was hard work and has resulted in a rash of Italian spam. We would need foolproof way to make local currency payments including by cheque. And finally, don't forget the documentation. User manuals and tutorials are as much part of "selling" QGIS to users as its functionality. Andrew Chapman
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