notes on funding situation

[Nicole Harris]

Hi All

Apologies for not commenting on any of the messages about funding until 
now, I tend not to subscribe to the dev list as well, I'm clearly not a 
dev!

At the moment, we are in the unfortunate position where several of the 
developers are not being paid and I'm working hard to rectify that.  
Funding streams for the current developers have been identified, but 
there are political reasons why money cannot actual flow at the moment, 
which is always the hardest thing to work out.

Above and beyond that, we'd very much like to encourage contributions to 
the Shibboleth project from a wider base than the organisations 
currently putting funding forward.  It is always incredibly hard to 
encourage people to put money in to something that they get for free.   
We have signed up a few new members I'm pleased to say and we will be 
announcing those soon.

We are looking at a variety of funding models, including funding for 
specific developments on the roadmap (maybe I need to do a Kickstarter 
for TestShib!) and paid for consultancy directly from the shib team but 
until we bottom out the current issues we can't really take these forward.

Any help we can get to encourage donations would be very much 
appreciated.  We are pretty good value - I was able to prove to JISC in 
a recent report that even at the current high level of funding (JISC 
contributes £100K per annum), this worked out at approximately £300 a 
year just for our institutional users of shibboleth in HE and FE - not 
taking in to account schools,  UK commercial providers etc. I think that 
is fairly good value.

If anyone would like to talk about ways to contribute to the project, 
please do get in contact with me!

Much appreciated

Nicole

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