Our New Pull Request and Issue Manager

[Mike Parker]

A few months ago, Razvan stepped away from his PR and Issue 
Manager role and into a new one as our Project Coordinator. That 
left Dennis working the job alone. Without additional funding, 
there would be no way for us to hire on someone new to take over 
Razvan's empty spot.

Today I can finally announce that funding for the new hire has 
materialized, courtesy of WEKA. I can also publicly welcome 
Nicholas Wilson to the DLF team. He's been doing part of the job 
for quite some time on a volunteer basis, reviewing PRs across 
our repositories. Now that he's getting paid for it, you can feel 
free to pester him about your most annoying open issues and PRs 
and we can throw more work at him!

WEKA has also generously agreed to step up their funding for 
DConf '25. We're facing increased costs across the board and were 
looking at the real possibility of a significant increase in the 
registration fee. The additional funding from WEKA allowed us to 
actually lower the fee to $300 instead.

Additionally, they have taken over a percentage of the funding 
for the existing sponsored positions which are primarily funded 
by Symmetry.

We're extremely grateful for the support both Symmetry and WEKA 
are providing us, and for all of the smaller scale support from 
all of the donors across PayPal, Open Collective, GitHub, and 
elsewhere.

(For the record, all four sponsored staff--Razvan, Dennis, 
Nicholas, and myself--are paid for 20 hours per week. I receive 
$12,000/yr in sponsored funds and $14,400/yr from the general 
donor pool. Razvan, Dennis, and Nicholas each receive $25,000/yr 
in sponsored funds.)