I personally hope none of the suggestions 1, 2, 3, or 4, are implemented. I really worry about this desire to bring monetary value or payment into the Boost review process.
I also have some concerns when I see the same person put forward similar ideas that all revolve around paying or hiring individuals.
Every single major open source org has eventually ended up having to pay people to do the admin which keeps that org working if they wish to keep growing. And that's an empirical hard fact. Boost can decide to not do that, and to date it has decided to not do that. All empirical evidence suggests that that decision will gum up growth and put a natural cap on Boost's size and relevance to latest C++. A few years ago Boost had a problem of no new libraries at all in three years. That problem has been fixed, and I'll immediately admit surprise tinged with gratitude that it didn't require paying people to fix it. An ongoing current problem is lack of maintenance. A system of corporate sponsorship of maintenance has helped address that, and in some places it's worked well, but not in others. But I'll also admit surprise tinged with gratitude that anything non-monetary worked here at all. A big surprise to me is how much has been done on automated testing without paying people for it (though we did pay for some of their hardware and in some cases for renting infrastructure). My hat is off in thanks to those in question. Thank you. So, one could entirely argue and with good supporting evidence that you don't need to pay people to do this stuff, and you would be correct. However that does not mean that if you did pay people, that it wouldn't have gone a lot better again. And there is a much stronger argument that the fact I raised payment for stuff and people reacted violently against it helped get people to volunteer to solve the problem. So in a way, it's all good and it all helps.
Niall, I understand you have good intentions, and I (like many others) appreciate your administration of GSOC, but the repetition of these ideas looks frighteningly like you want to address any employment or financial needs that you have by getting Boost to hire you for more things. Maybe I'm drawing too many conclusions from your blog posts[1].
Heh. Funnily enough I'm coming towards the end of my active participation in C++, you've got about a year left of me being annoying before I step back majorly. Even this year you won't be seeing me at CppCon this year as I begin to step back. (To explain, we've been having children since 2013 for which my wife had to give up her career and I was the sole earner. She wishes to return to her career soon, and for which all my non-work time will be needed to support her, so no more outside-of-work coding for me for a few years until she's reestablished and back to earning. I'll be resigning from all things I volunteer for including all mailing lists, and doing nothing but basic maintenance on my open source libraries, no new code nor new features) You are right though that in *ideological* terms I think Boost and the C++ Standard Foundation ought to hire people to work on the wider C++ ecosystem, just as other major programming languages do. Whether that should be me or someone else should be the result of a competitive public tendering process.
I'm curious: The libraries that too niche or esoteric for any review manager to be interested (or reviewers to come forward) - to which libraries are you referring?
Safe Numerics is an excellent example. I've never used anything like such a thing, and despite it looking to me like a great library (and I did look over it in depth including its source code), I was aware enough of how little I knew about that domain. I definitely could not have review managed that library, I don't know enough about that domain at all to have a useful opinion.
In any case, I look forward to the mechanics of Boost being improved. I hope they're improved by better means that do not involve solving someone's employment needs.
Nobody is going to be employed permanently on bits of piece work, it's an awful life not knowing where rent will come from. Any of the remote working consultants I know prefer nice, long contracts where available, ideally six months or a year or longer. That said, when you're between those long contracts and during when you're negotiating new contracts (which can take two months like the one I'm negotiating right now has), if there were bits of small piece work available, I'm sure I and many others in this profession would put a bid in to fill the short gap at a very discounted hourly rate. That would be excellent value for money for the C++ ecosystem, and therefore a very rational system to establish. Niall -- ned Productions Limited Consulting http://www.nedproductions.biz/ http://ie.linkedin.com/in/nialldouglas/