RE: Project partners: another trial idea...

> Before taking a final decision about which groups will be `official'
> partners for OROCOS, I first want to have your opinion on the
> following suggestion: what if we would take all 10+ interested
> partners, and each gave them 0.5 man year/year + two brainstorming
> travel grants?
Excellent idea, even better than "clustering" related organisations.
This way the total "official" man-power of the project remains the same, but
every single partner will be much more motivated to put additional (paid by
other means) man-power.  

> The advantages:
> [.. some good reasons to do it that way ... ]

> The disadvantages:
> - a larger consortium brings more management.
Open-source projects tend to find a pragmatic way of project management,
since the "normal" management approach simply doesn't work. In my opinion,
it doesn't make a significant difference if there are 5 or 10+ partners
involved.

> - it might be difficult to hire people with only partial funding.
For us this is not a problem, it might be difficult for universities. 

One more disadvantage/concern:

- work/task distribution amongst the partners is more difficult if there are
more partners (e.g., how do you want to cope with this in the proposal stage
or is that not an important aspect in such kind of funded open source
projects?).

Summing up, I am a strong supporter of your idea :-))

Regards,

Kurt Häusler
Profactor Produktionsforschungs GmbH
Wehrgrabeng. 1 - 5
A-4400 Steyr
Austria
Tel.:   ++43(0)7252/884-221
Fax.:  ++43(0)7252/884-244
Email: [email protected]