Hello friends,
As you may already know, last year Twisted got fiscal sponsorship from the Python Software Foundation. This will enable us to once again dedicate financial resources to maintenance and development. Adi Roiban and I recently had a meeting with the PSF where we discussed bringing the Twisted fellowship sponsored maintenance program back in some form.
Our plan is currently to do something somewhat less formal than last time <https://labs.twistedmatrix.com/2015/12/tsf-sponsored-development-oct-dec-by…>. To wit, the current idea is to bring a maintainer on to do about 5 hours of work per week, mostly just keeping the review queue clear, so that contributions can be more efficiently accepted. We have a lot of code that is stalled but not technically "in review" right now, so it might also involve going through the PR backlog to integrate those, doing triage, etc.
If we are successful in raising more money, we might expand this role further. But, as it was many years ago, my conviction remains that the highest priority of funded work should be facilitating the work of volunteers, not writing more code. I am sure that at least one person reading this would be contributing a patch right now if the process weren't a bit stuck and frustrating due to reviewer bandwidth limitations :).
Also worth noting that the process is going to be somewhat more lightweight and less stodgily formal than we have had in the past. Our previous process made it difficult for people involved in the decision-making process for the project to actually do the work, so one consequence of this (and the fact that I'm working independently and doing consulting at the moment) is that I personally might be able to do some of this work directly. It also made the commitment of the person doing the work pretty substantial, but with a lighter weight process we can rotate the responsibility with more agility, allowing multiple people to step into or out of the role as their availability and our funds allow.
Since I mentioned that I would be a candidate for doing this work, I feel like I should highlight that in my independent work I have patrons who support my open source work in general rather than Twisted specifically, and sometimes in the course of that I do work on a Twisted thing here or there. So in the interests of transparency I wanted to highlight this detail, but the rule is pretty simple; if you want to support stuff that lives on my 'glyph' user on github, you can support that work directly, and if you want to support Twisted, donations to the PSF might go to me, or it might go to someone else, depending on what the project decides, but it will support stuff that lives on the "twisted" org. (In particular, I'd really like Klein & Treq to get some love in addition to the main repo, since they form a bit of a suite that makes conventional web services more viable out of the box.)
Speaking of "the project" making decisions, while it is our fiscal sponsor in the form of the PSF who has final say over spending decisions, their goal is to have an accurate reflection of "the project" as making decisions, and surely that includes some of you, in your role as contributors and interested community members. We don't really have a ton of money to spend (those aforementioned proposed 5 hours would probably eat up most of it at this point) so while we don't need a ton of big ambitious ideas, we would love to have more folks get involved in the process of decision-making (and fundraising!). Again, our process is lighter weight and less formal right now, so we do not have an elected Steering Committee or anything like that, but as more people are interested we can evolve our loose consensus into something more explicitly documented. (One role of interested, then, of course, would be someone who likes documenting processes…)
Of course, if you're excited that we are angling for this and would like to donate to the project, you can currently go here, with the knowledge that something useful will happen with the money in the not too distant future: https://psfmember.org/civicrm/contribute/transact/?reset=1&id=44 and other forms of contribution will be coming online soon (in particular, Github Sponsors is in the works).
Thanks for reading; we'd love to know your thoughts!
-g
