http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=389154

Though we may not like all the other monks, most of us would agree that we love The Monastery. The servers and the bandwidth are generously donated by pair. We have volunteers in a handful of groups with specific roles and responsibilities keeping the place orderly. The vast majority of us donate time in answering questions. Others feel that the Offering Plate is a meaningful way to give back to a community that gives so much.

Today I took a look at the current Monastic Slush Fund and noticed that it only reflects the last 12 months of donations without indicating total overall amount. I began wondering how much was really in reserve and how much had been spent - and on what. Using Super Search, I came up with a list of nodes.

The basic summary is that the original intention was that the fund would be used to buy hardware when the need arose but later on, it might be used for specific code contributions if no one objected. As far as I know, the only publicly announced use of the fund was for tye's Node cache refactoring.

There are always feature requests and many people have thrown their hat in the ring to build a better mouse trap chatterbox client. Many times the feature requests are a "bad idea" because they would negatively impact performance. Some times though, the reason against a feature is that the amount of work involved severly outweighs the benefit gained. And some times the only issue is free time and resources.

I know there are devils that have feature "to-do" lists. Perhaps we could use a portion of the slush fund to help see some of them to fruition. Not knowing how much is in the slush fund or what, if anything, it is routinely being used for, I have no idea if this is a "good idea". I know vroom had issues and only a few monks replied to allay those concerns, but from what was said I don't believe there are serious objections.

What do you think?

Cheers - L~R