Community funding
=================
[...]
ITL will not benefit from of any of the money donated
through Open Collective. Instead, the funds will be paid directly to individual
developers who have been hired to work on the open source edition of Qubes.
[...]
If you are a user of Qubes and want to help us continue working on it, please
donate now [07].
I often donate to various projects I like but I don't know *anyone*
around me (friends, acquaintances, ...) who do. It's not because of
wealth (you could donate something a low as 10$ to a project you like,
which is the price of a meal at a random restaurant where I live).
Rather, I see it as a problem related to mentality and then to lack of
information: mentality, because open source = free, so why should I pay
for something ? And then, lack of information, because when I get over
the mentality problem and know that there ain't such thing as free beer,
I either
- #1 don't know that a project is struggling
- #2 don't know how to donate
- #3 don't know to whom my money would go if I donate, and how it would
be used (ie., transparency).
- #4 don't know what amount to give.
- #5 don't know if the project got enough money for a given period (eg.
monthly) with donations from other people.
Your post made a good job at describing issues #1 and #2 (donating only
via bitcoin was a burden), and a little bit #3: donations would go to
pay a hired dev, but what would he work on ? I like the way development
is done now, with ITL people vetoing features/choosing what to develop,
as I trust them to know better than me what is needed and what is not. I
wouldn't want large donators to impose features and/or bloat the project.
Some kind of report on the current amount of donations and how they
were/are used would be welcome too, as most of the projects I've donated
to don't do that and just send a "we're struggling" message every now
and then in order to trigger donations. That would solve issue #5 and
the remaining of issue #3.
Some sites have a "donation bar" where you can see if the project has
reached (or not) an expected amount of money, that might be something
worth considering, that's a good visual cue. I often thought - ah, let's
donate - when I would see the end of the month looming, and the monthly
donation bar of a project still in the middle of expected funds (of
course, you need a cash buffer of at least a few months in advance).
Now with issue #4 - what amount to give. IMO you should make clear how
much a dev / devs costs, because I'm sure people think - yeah I'm going
to send 10 or 20 bucks - but they have to understand that this amount is
probably worth only 1 or 2 hours of paid programming work.
Addressing the "mentality" problem (that there isn't such thing as free
beer, that donations are *required* to keep the project running, ...)
should be advertised prominently on the web site instead of relying on
people clicking on the "donate" tab. The "donate" tab would then have
all the details covering the issues mentioned above.
Those are my 2c from experience I have donating to projects. Sorry for
the long post :)
Side question: what is the amount of "significant resources" above which
one should contact you directly rather than going through Open Collective ?
Ivan
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