Re: Targeted donations (Re: Fundraising in KDE)

[Philippe Cloutier]

Le 2020-10-04 à 17:05, Ingo Klöcker a écrit :

On Sonntag, 4. Oktober 2020 18:43:42 CEST Philippe Cloutier wrote:

Le 2020-10-04 à 11:58, Ingo Klöcker a écrit :

Currently we have a single big bucket for our money. All money that comes
in (e.g. several thousand PayPal donations per year) goes into this
bucket. All money that we spend is taken from this bucket. That's as
simple as it gets.

If we would allow targeted donations then we would have to sort all
donations into multiple buckets. And all of our expenses would need to be
taken from the correct buckets. Additionally, our contractors (e.g. our
marketing contractors) would probably need to start tracking how much
time they spend for a specific project (if we have a bucket for it), so
that we can pay them from the right buckets.

So, maybe it's more a change from O(1) to O(n*m) where n is the number of
transactions and m is the number of different buckets.

Thank you, that is much clearer (and way more sensical). I still don't
fully understand though;

   * Would this quantify the resources needed to process a *single*
 transaction, or what?

No, all of them.



Thank you, but my question was unfortunately unclear, so let me rephrase 
to prevent any confusion (apologies if you had already understood it the 
way I meant it): would this quantify the resources needed to process 
*each* transaction, or the set of all transactions?




   * What resources does this quantify? *Manpower*, or computing resources?

Mainly personpower. (Please try to avoid non-inclusive, patriarchaic
vocabulary.)



Thank you (but please try to avoid non-inclusive vocabulary, in 
particular if you're going to request people speaking a second language 
to avoid unspecified non-inclusive vocabulary).





Regards,
Ingo


--
Philippe Cloutier
http://www.philippecloutier.com

Re: Targeted donations (Re: Fundraising in KDE)

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Sonntag, 4. Oktober 2020 18:43:42 CEST Philippe Cloutier wrote:
> Le 2020-10-04 à 11:58, Ingo Klöcker a écrit :
> > Currently we have a single big bucket for our money. All money that comes
> > in (e.g. several thousand PayPal donations per year) goes into this
> > bucket. All money that we spend is taken from this bucket. That's as
> > simple as it gets.
> > 
> > If we would allow targeted donations then we would have to sort all
> > donations into multiple buckets. And all of our expenses would need to be
> > taken from the correct buckets. Additionally, our contractors (e.g. our
> > marketing contractors) would probably need to start tracking how much
> > time they spend for a specific project (if we have a bucket for it), so
> > that we can pay them from the right buckets.
> > 
> > So, maybe it's more a change from O(1) to O(n*m) where n is the number of
> > transactions and m is the number of different buckets.
> 
> Thank you, that is much clearer (and way more sensical). I still don't
> fully understand though;
> 
>   * Would this quantify the resources needed to process a *single*
> transaction, or what?

No, all of them.

>   * What resources does this quantify? *Manpower*, or computing resources?

Mainly personpower. (Please try to avoid non-inclusive, patriarchaic 
vocabulary.)

Regards,
Ingo


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Targeted donations (Re: Fundraising in KDE)

[Philippe Cloutier]

Hi Ingo,

Le 2020-10-04 à 11:58, Ingo Klöcker a écrit :

On Sonntag, 4. Oktober 2020 00:36:56 CEST Philippe Cloutier wrote:

Le 2020-09-27 à 17:29, Ingo Klöcker a écrit :

On Sonntag, 27. September 2020 22:54:07 CEST Albert Astals Cid wrote:

El diumenge, 27 de setembre de 2020, a les 21:36:46 CEST, Vincent Pinon
va escriure:

As KDE eV can't allocate
money to a specific project (if I understand correctly)

That's more a "historically has not wanted" than a "legally can't".

As one of the auditors of accounting I'll add that tracking money that is
allocated to a specific project will make book keeping much more
complicated. I'm not sure whether the simple tracking of income and
expenses that we currently do will be sufficient.


It's my hope that with the recent KDE eV board public statements about
them
wanting to help people make out a living out of doing KDE stuff this may
change.

In my opinion, paying people for doing KDE stuff (reminder: we do already
pay quite a few people for doing important KDE stuff) is orthogonal to
allocating money to specific projects. Complexity of book keeping would
change from O(n) to O(n²).

Can you clarify what you mean?

Currently we have a single big bucket for our money. All money that comes in
(e.g. several thousand PayPal donations per year) goes into this bucket. All
money that we spend is taken from this bucket. That's as simple as it gets.

If we would allow targeted donations then we would have to sort all donations
into multiple buckets. And all of our expenses would need to be taken from the
correct buckets. Additionally, our contractors (e.g. our marketing
contractors) would probably need to start tracking how much time they spend
for a specific project (if we have a bucket for it), so that we can pay them
from the right buckets.

So, maybe it's more a change from O(1) to O(n*m) where n is the number of
transactions and m is the number of different buckets.



Thank you, that is much clearer (and way more sensical). I still don't 
fully understand though;


 * Would this quantify the resources needed to process a *single*
   transaction, or what?
 * What resources does this quantify? *Manpower*, or computing resources?




I think we are way too small (in terms of cash flow) for allowing targeted
donations.

Regards,
Ingo


--
Philippe Cloutier
http://www.philippecloutier.com

Re: Fundraising in KDE

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Sonntag, 4. Oktober 2020 00:36:56 CEST Philippe Cloutier wrote:
> Le 2020-09-27 à 17:29, Ingo Klöcker a écrit :
> > On Sonntag, 27. September 2020 22:54:07 CEST Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> >> El diumenge, 27 de setembre de 2020, a les 21:36:46 CEST, Vincent Pinon
> >> va escriure:
> >>> As KDE eV can't allocate
> >>> money to a specific project (if I understand correctly)
> >> 
> >> That's more a "historically has not wanted" than a "legally can't".
> > 
> > As one of the auditors of accounting I'll add that tracking money that is
> > allocated to a specific project will make book keeping much more
> > complicated. I'm not sure whether the simple tracking of income and
> > expenses that we currently do will be sufficient.
> > 
> >> It's my hope that with the recent KDE eV board public statements about
> >> them
> >> wanting to help people make out a living out of doing KDE stuff this may
> >> change.
> > 
> > In my opinion, paying people for doing KDE stuff (reminder: we do already
> > pay quite a few people for doing important KDE stuff) is orthogonal to
> > allocating money to specific projects. Complexity of book keeping would
> > change from O(n) to O(n²).
> 
> Can you clarify what you mean?

Currently we have a single big bucket for our money. All money that comes in 
(e.g. several thousand PayPal donations per year) goes into this bucket. All 
money that we spend is taken from this bucket. That's as simple as it gets.

If we would allow targeted donations then we would have to sort all donations 
into multiple buckets. And all of our expenses would need to be taken from the 
correct buckets. Additionally, our contractors (e.g. our marketing 
contractors) would probably need to start tracking how much time they spend 
for a specific project (if we have a bucket for it), so that we can pay them 
from the right buckets.

So, maybe it's more a change from O(1) to O(n*m) where n is the number of 
transactions and m is the number of different buckets.

I think we are way too small (in terms of cash flow) for allowing targeted 
donations.

Regards,
Ingo


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Re: Fundraising in KDE

[Philippe Cloutier]

Hi Ingo,

Le 2020-09-27 à 17:29, Ingo Klöcker a écrit :

On Sonntag, 27. September 2020 22:54:07 CEST Albert Astals Cid wrote:

El diumenge, 27 de setembre de 2020, a les 21:36:46 CEST, Vincent Pinon va

escriure:

As KDE eV can't allocate
money to a specific project (if I understand correctly)

That's more a "historically has not wanted" than a "legally can't".

As one of the auditors of accounting I'll add that tracking money that is
allocated to a specific project will make book keeping much more complicated.
I'm not sure whether the simple tracking of income and expenses that we
currently do will be sufficient.


It's my hope that with the recent KDE eV board public statements about them
wanting to help people make out a living out of doing KDE stuff this may
change.

In my opinion, paying people for doing KDE stuff (reminder: we do already pay
quite a few people for doing important KDE stuff) is orthogonal to allocating
money to specific projects. Complexity of book keeping would change from O(n)
to O(n²).



Can you clarify what you mean?



Regards,
Ingo


--
Philippe Cloutier
http://www.philippecloutier.com

Re: Fundraising in KDE

[Philippe Cloutier]

Le 2020-09-27 à 04:52, Karl Ove Hufthammer a écrit :

Nicolas Fella skreiv 24.09.2020 11:42:

I would be cautious about creating a system that allows targeted
donations for specific features/requests. I don't want the e.V. to be in
a position where work is done/prioritized because it brings in money. 


I agree. KDE has a list of goals (https://kde.org/goals), which have 
been selected using a democratic process.



While this could perhaps be clarified, those are Goals with a capital 
"G". KDE obviously also wants to be more performant, lighter, more 
accessible, more portable, more multilingual, more secure, more stable, 
etc. There is no way to make an exhaustive list of KDE's goals (in the 
literal sense).



It would, IMHO, be better to say that donations from companies will be 
used to hire developers to work towards KDE’s goals. Then the 
companies can decide if they think this a good thing or not.


There are really three possibilities – a company wants work done that 
is a) aligned with KDE’s goals, b) against KDE’s goals or c) 
orthogonal to KDE’s goals.



A company can also want work which is:

1. In KDE's top priorities
2. Half as high as #1 in our priorities.
3. Half as high as #2 in our priorities.
4. Half as high as #3 in our priorities.

...and the list goes on. But we don't care about such categories, except 
for one thing: we don't want work against our goals. And all it takes to 
avoid that is realism. Promising work against our goals is unrealistic, 
since developers will not manage to integrate work against our goals. 
Just like we shouldn't promise to achieve something in exchange for 
insufficient funding, we shouldn't promise to achieve something whose 
net value to KDE is negative.


KDE consists in many different individuals with widely different goals. 
We don't require developers to do work which advances KDE's top 
priorities. One reason is many developers don't have the necessary 
skills, but an equally important reason is that developers are 
volunteers whose priorities are not KDE's, so forcing them to work on 
KDE's priorities rather than theirs would reduce their motivation.


It's understandable that allowing targeted donations requires work, but 
ignoring that, there is no reason why we should *intentionally* decline 
donators (whether these are companies, other organizations or 
individuals) all freedom to choose what they help with. Perhaps donators 
don't have the necessary expertise to contribute directly, but that is 
no reason to force them to contribute to our top priorities. We will get 
way more donations if we allow donators to specify how their donations 
should be used.


On the other hand, we must be aware that we will use the received money 
less efficiently on average. For example, if a donator gives 10€ for a 
change which we estimate costs 100€, then it could be that it takes 
years before we can fund a developer to use that money. And I guess this 
can create fair challenges; if a donator specified a donation should 
only be used for an improvement to a specific product, and then that 
product is officially abandoned/EOL-ed, do we refund the same amount to 
the donator?




[...]


--
Philippe Cloutier
http://www.philippecloutier.com

Re: Fundraising in KDE

[Uli Klinkhammer]

On 2020-09-28 09:59, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> On Sunday, 27 September 2020 21:36:46 CEST Vincent Pinon wrote:
>
>
>> Very regularly, we have video editors asking how to give money (amounts 
>> 10€ to 100€) to boost development of that tool highly useful for them.
>> When we answer to give to KDE, who shares the infrastructure and funds 
>> the sprints, they express they would prefer a more dedicated donation to 
>> pay for development (bug solving, feature development...)
> At this point, I'd advise you to do what I did: create a foundation, get a 
> bank account and take donations in. For applications like Blender, Krita, 
> Kdenlive that's really the only way to go because your users and potential 
> supporters won't understand an umbrella organizagtion like KDE.
>
> Especially once the majority of users is on Windows, the KDE story won't lead 
> to donations. KDE needs to find its supporters in the free software and Linux 
> world.


I see it the same.

When I think in KDE, I mainly think in the 2 Linux distros Kubuntu and Neon.

But... Blender, Krita and Kdenlive make part of them. So they will help
moneyfunding for KDE in some way.

So, as stated in my last email, the funding should focus on the Distros.
And better, if there are a organsiational and a private one. Because
where the organisations are, there is the money.

greez,

Uli

Re: Fundraising in KDE

[Karl Ove Hufthammer]

Vincent Pinon skreiv 27.09.2020 21:36:


The tiny team can't answer these requests on spare time (or it takes 
years). No one is ready to abandon their job, finding a good person to 
hire seems not easy, maybe contracting a consultant would be a 
solution... But then how to gather the funds? As KDE eV can't allocate 
money to a specific project (if I understand correctly), we would need 
to create a new structure: none of us is interested in this kind of 
paperworks and risks associated (having read about Krita Fundations 
difficulties few years back)...


You might want to consider applying to be a member of the Software 
Freedom Conservancy (SFC). They handle the paperwork for you:

https://sfconservancy.org/about/
https://sfconservancy.org/projects/services/

This is not unprecedented for KDE projects; in 2009, the Amarok project 
joined the SFC (but it seems that they are no longer a member):

https://dot.kde.org/2009/11/05/amarok-joins-software-freedom-conservancy-and-starts-rokvember-fund-raiser


--
Karl Ove Hufthammer

Re: Fundraising in KDE

[Julien Tremblay McLellan]

Training events for fundraising for non-profits. The one below is the one I
found the most interesting.

Reluctant Fundraiser? Not A Fundraiser? Not A Problem!
When: Sept. 29th, 2020 – 1:00pm Eastern
Cindy Wagman will give guidance and encouragement to those who need to
fundraise, but would really rather do anything but.


I ran into these with my daily news reading:

https://nonprofithub.org/hubinars/

https://nonprofithub.org/hubinars/

Hope this can help somewhat

On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 4:00 AM Boudewijn Rempt  wrote:

> On Sunday, 27 September 2020 21:36:46 CEST Vincent Pinon wrote:
>
>
> > Very regularly, we have video editors asking how to give money (amounts
> > 10€ to 100€) to boost development of that tool highly useful for them.
> > When we answer to give to KDE, who shares the infrastructure and funds
> > the sprints, they express they would prefer a more dedicated donation to
> > pay for development (bug solving, feature development...)
>
> At this point, I'd advise you to do what I did: create a foundation, get a
> bank account and take donations in. For applications like Blender, Krita,
> Kdenlive that's really the only way to go because your users and potential
> supporters won't understand an umbrella organizagtion like KDE.
>
> Especially once the majority of users is on Windows, the KDE story won't
> lead to donations. KDE needs to find its supporters in the free software
> and Linux world.
>
> > The tiny team can't answer these requests on spare time (or it takes
> > years). No one is ready to abandon their job, finding a good person to
> > hire seems not easy, maybe contracting a consultant would be a
> > solution... But then how to gather the funds? As KDE eV can't allocate
> > money to a specific project (if I understand correctly), we would need
> > to create a new structure: none of us is interested in this kind of
> > paperworks and risks associated (having read about Krita Fundations
> > difficulties few years back)...
> >
> > Also, we know that our Windows downloads are increasing by tens of
> > thousands every month, it was also suggested to ask for 1€ (or free
> > amount) for these binaries (as GCompris also did sometime), but again,
> > where to put that money ? It could be for eV (?)
> > I haven't been motivated to look at the stores stuff, as long as we
> > don't know where to put the money...
>
> Don't ask for too little. A 1€ application will be perceived as having
> less value and utility than a 10€ application. We went for 10€ on all
> platforms because we both wanted to undercut our 39,99€ competitors (Clip
> Studio and Affinity Photo) and because we wanted store customers to believe
> that Krita has a value.
>
> > So my questions are :
> > can eV gather money from Kdenlive binaries on Windows ? (and maybe Mac
> > someday, both thanks to Craft and binary-factory \o/)
> > Can it use it (or part of) to pay consultants on that project ? If not,
> > is anyone ready to help for the extra administrative work ?
> >
> > It's true that not accepting these donations maybe holds back that
> > project from increasing as rapidly as many users are expecting...
> >
> > Thanks for all the great things in KDE,
> >
> > Vincent
> >
> >
>
>
> --
> https://www.krita.org
>
>
>

-- 
Regards,

*Julien Tremblay McLellan*
[image: Julien Tremblay McLellan ]
   [image: GitHub Logomark]


*Ottawa, Canada*
Let's talk, just book me here 
*+1-613-618-6699*

Re: Fundraising in KDE

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Sonntag, 27. September 2020 22:54:07 CEST Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> El diumenge, 27 de setembre de 2020, a les 21:36:46 CEST, Vincent Pinon va 
escriure:
> > As KDE eV can't allocate
> > money to a specific project (if I understand correctly)
> 
> That's more a "historically has not wanted" than a "legally can't".

As one of the auditors of accounting I'll add that tracking money that is 
allocated to a specific project will make book keeping much more complicated. 
I'm not sure whether the simple tracking of income and expenses that we 
currently do will be sufficient.

> It's my hope that with the recent KDE eV board public statements about them
> wanting to help people make out a living out of doing KDE stuff this may
> change.

In my opinion, paying people for doing KDE stuff (reminder: we do already pay 
quite a few people for doing important KDE stuff) is orthogonal to allocating 
money to specific projects. Complexity of book keeping would change from O(n) 
to O(n²).

Regards,
Ingo


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Re: Fundraising in KDE

[Albert Astals Cid]

El diumenge, 27 de setembre de 2020, a les 21:36:46 CEST, Vincent Pinon va 
escriure:
> As KDE eV can't allocate 
> money to a specific project (if I understand correctly)

That's more a "historically has not wanted" than a "legally can't".

It's my hope that with the recent KDE eV board public statements about them 
wanting to help people make out a living out of doing KDE stuff this may change.

Cheers,
  Albert

Re: Fundraising in KDE

[Vincent Pinon]

Le 9/27/20 à 10:52 AM, Karl Ove Hufthammer a écrit :

Nicolas Fella skreiv 24.09.2020 11:42:

I would be cautious about creating a system that allows targeted
donations for specific features/requests. I don't want the e.V. to be in
a position where work is done/prioritized because it brings in money. 


I agree. KDE has a list of goals (https://kde.org/goals), which have 
been selected using a democratic process. It would, IMHO, be better to 
say that donations from companies will be used to hire developers to 
work towards KDE’s goals. Then the companies can decide if they think 
this a good thing or not.


There are really three possibilities – a company wants work done that 
is a) aligned with KDE’s goals, b) against KDE’s goals or c) 
orthogonal to KDE’s goals. For (a), the above communication is fine. 
For (b), receiving money so the e.V. can hire people to work *against* 
the communities explicit goals seems like an extremely bad idea. For 
(c), there are no technical problems, but why should KDE e.V. actively 
spend money on something that really isn’t in KDE’s interest? There 
are other companies (https://ev.kde.org/consultants/) that the company 
can hire instead.


So if a company donates/sponsors to KDE e.V., this should mean that 
they’re saying that they want to support KDE (and its goals). 
Currently, what the get back is very vague. But it can also be made 
explicit, e.g., ‘if you support the e.V. with x amount of 
euros/dollars, the e.V. (promises that it) will hire a developer in a 
20% position for a year/month to work towards KDE’s current goals’.


Hello,

For several years, and more and more often, the topic of paying devs 
appears on Kdenlive channels.


Very regularly, we have video editors asking how to give money (amounts 
10€ to 100€) to boost development of that tool highly useful for them.
When we answer to give to KDE, who shares the infrastructure and funds 
the sprints, they express they would prefer a more dedicated donation to 
pay for development (bug solving, feature development...)


The tiny team can't answer these requests on spare time (or it takes 
years). No one is ready to abandon their job, finding a good person to 
hire seems not easy, maybe contracting a consultant would be a 
solution... But then how to gather the funds? As KDE eV can't allocate 
money to a specific project (if I understand correctly), we would need 
to create a new structure: none of us is interested in this kind of 
paperworks and risks associated (having read about Krita Fundations 
difficulties few years back)...


Also, we know that our Windows downloads are increasing by tens of 
thousands every month, it was also suggested to ask for 1€ (or free 
amount) for these binaries (as GCompris also did sometime), but again, 
where to put that money ? It could be for eV (?)
I haven't been motivated to look at the stores stuff, as long as we 
don't know where to put the money...


So my questions are :
can eV gather money from Kdenlive binaries on Windows ? (and maybe Mac 
someday, both thanks to Craft and binary-factory \o/)
Can it use it (or part of) to pay consultants on that project ? If not, 
is anyone ready to help for the extra administrative work ?


It's true that not accepting these donations maybe holds back that 
project from increasing as rapidly as many users are expecting...


Thanks for all the great things in KDE,

Vincent

Re: Fundraising in KDE

[Carl Schwan]

Le dimanche, septembre 27, 2020 10:52 AM, Karl Ove Hufthammer  
a écrit :

> Nicolas Fella skreiv 24.09.2020 11:42:
>
> > I would be cautious about creating a system that allows targeted
> > donations for specific features/requests. I don't want the e.V. to be in
> > a position where work is done/prioritized because it brings in money.
>
> I agree. KDE has a list of goals (https://kde.org/goals), which have
> been selected using a democratic process. It would, IMHO, be better to
> say that donations from companies will be used to hire developers to
> work towards KDE’s goals. Then the companies can decide if they think
> this a good thing or not.

Yes, this is also why I mentioned the goals in my demo: 
https://fund.carlschwan.eu/.
These are the goal selected by the entire KDE community (not just the e.V.)
and are cross projects. The Wayland goal for example can be about improving
KWin but it can also be about making Krita work perfectly on Wayland, ...

Note that my demo page is still work in progress and if we decice to go in this
direction, we shouldn't say that the money only goes to paying for development
towards the goals, but also towards the server costs, the sprints, and events
we are organizing and non developers contractors (who btw are doing an awesome
job).

Cheers,
Carl

>
> There are really three possibilities – a company wants work done that is
> a) aligned with KDE’s goals, b) against KDE’s goals or c) orthogonal to
> KDE’s goals. For (a), the above communication is fine. For (b),
> receiving money so the e.V. can hire people to work against the
> communities explicit goals seems like an extremely bad idea. For (c),
> there are no technical problems, but why should KDE e.V. actively spend
> money on something that really isn’t in KDE’s interest? There are other
> companies (https://ev.kde.org/consultants/) that the company can hire
> instead.
>
> So if a company donates/sponsors to KDE e.V., this should mean that
> they’re saying that they want to support KDE (and its goals). Currently,
> what the get back is very vague. But it can also be made explicit, e.g.,
> ‘if you support the e.V. with x amount of euros/dollars, the e.V.
> (promises that it) will hire a developer in a 20% position for a
> year/month to work towards KDE’s current goals’.
>
>
> Karl Ove Hufthammer

Re: Fundraising in KDE

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Sonntag, 27. September 2020 15:24:45 CEST Julien Tremblay McLellan wrote:
> Is there anyone from KDE that focuses on fundraising and grant seeking?

Yes, the fundraising working group:
https://ev.kde.org/workinggroups/fundraisingwg/

Regards,
Ingo


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Re: Fundraising in KDE

[Julien Tremblay McLellan]

Is there anyone from KDE that focuses on fundraising and grant seeking?

It might be a worthwhile investment, to find someone to focus on
fundraising, either pro-bono or in a professional capacity. If so,
maybe a professional accountant can speak to the complexities that
might come from such an endeavour.

This is just my opinion, if the majority of donations is from
individuals and small in sum be sure to set a framework that is
accommodating of what they enjoy most. At this time, I see a lot of
success in offering donor badges, exclusive forums ,chat or just a
live stream that you can pay to ask questions for. Yes this will mean
branching off from purely dev work, but it isn't so far off, as it is
really community building.

Friction is needed to encourage donations at some level.

If the majority of donations are few and large, then focus on giving
more of what large patrons want.

The key message is to play to your strengths and listen to where the
money is coming from to encourage more of its kind.
-- 
Regards,

Julien Tremblay McLellan

Ottawa, Canada
Let's talk, just book me here
+1-613-618-6699

Re: Fundraising in KDE

[Karl Ove Hufthammer]

Nicolas Fella skreiv 24.09.2020 11:42:

I would be cautious about creating a system that allows targeted
donations for specific features/requests. I don't want the e.V. to be in
a position where work is done/prioritized because it brings in money. 


I agree. KDE has a list of goals (https://kde.org/goals), which have 
been selected using a democratic process. It would, IMHO, be better to 
say that donations from companies will be used to hire developers to 
work towards KDE’s goals. Then the companies can decide if they think 
this a good thing or not.


There are really three possibilities – a company wants work done that is 
a) aligned with KDE’s goals, b) against KDE’s goals or c) orthogonal to 
KDE’s goals. For (a), the above communication is fine. For (b), 
receiving money so the e.V. can hire people to work *against* the 
communities explicit goals seems like an extremely bad idea. For (c), 
there are no technical problems, but why should KDE e.V. actively spend 
money on something that really isn’t in KDE’s interest? There are other 
companies (https://ev.kde.org/consultants/) that the company can hire 
instead.


So if a company donates/sponsors to KDE e.V., this should mean that 
they’re saying that they want to support KDE (and its goals). Currently, 
what the get back is very vague. But it can also be made explicit, e.g., 
‘if you support the e.V. with x amount of euros/dollars, the e.V. 
(promises that it) will hire a developer in a 20% position for a 
year/month to work towards KDE’s current goals’.



--
Karl Ove Hufthammer

Re: Fundraising in KDE

[Nate Graham]

> On 9/24/20 3:42 AM, Nicolas Fella wrote:

Hi,

I think the discussions about the technical implementation of our
donation system and whether or not to pay developers using the funds are
relatively orthogonal. Updating our current system is a good idea IMO
regardless of what comes out of the latter discussion.

If Carl thinks that CiviCRM is not a feasible solution from a technical
POV he has my full support for leading the work on a replacement system.


Like Nico, I would be inclined to trust Carl on this, as he just won an 
Akademy Award for his excellent work on KDE's web presence and 
infrastructure. :)


I'm not in a technical position to evaluate whether CiviCRM is capable 
of meeting current or future needs, but I feel like I've been hearing 
the system described as a problem to be solved for several years now. 
The fact that nobody seems very happy with it, and that it's been in 
this state for quite a while, does seem like it's a bit concerning.




> On 9/24/20 3:59 AM, Albert Astals Cid wrote:> [...] 
https://ev.kde.org/consultants/ is for "i want to implement X,
how much it will cost? 20K€? Fine here you have, now do it for me" not for 
"i have 100€ a year, please let me pitch in with more people so we can

hire a developer to work full time on improving Qt for KDE needs".


I agree, and this is why I think it's so important for the e.V. to start 
hiring developers. Right now the "hook" (so to speak) for donating is 
fairly weak. I think potential donators are much more excited about 
supporting the technical development of our software than they are 
supporting travel reimbursements, conferences, infrastructure, 
non-technical personnel, etc. (if they even know what the money is used 
for in the first place). Even though these expenses are very important, 
I think in the minds of the general public it's harder to connect them 
with tangible results.


On the other hand, if people knew that their money would help hire 
some/more developers, I think we could eventually reach 100,000€ per 
month just like Blender gets. And this money could also be used for 
critical non-development expenses as needed.



Nate

Re: Fundraising in KDE

[Uli Klinkhammer]

Hey Eike,


On 2020-09-23 13:32, Eike Hein wrote:

>
> KDE e.V.'s expenses in 2019 were higher than its income. This was by design, 
> because the organization has accumulated large financial reserves in recent 
> years and it is obligated, as a non-profit, to put them towards its mission 
> statement. This scaling-up of our expenses was done carefully; we're not 
> dependent on this additional spending to keep up our core activities. 
> Additionally, the size of the delta is also an artifact of several large 
> membership payments slipping to the 2020 financial year.
>
> To hammer it home: KDE e.V. is currently in the financially strongest 
> position it has been in its history, and has more options today than it had 
> in the past. Our most immediate concern is spending money, not fundraising.
>
> This situation is (as it should) leading to proposals for how to scale up KDE 
> e.V.'s activities, leading to further increase in spending. One such proposal 
> is the one mentioned by Carl, submitted by Nate. As we discuss and probe 
> these proposals and their various potentials for becoming policy, their 
> sustainability is under review.

For sure, the german law does not allow to make to much profit over
several years for a "gemeinnütziger Verein". But I think the problem is
not in spending the money (there should be enough developers waiting for
a paid job out there), but in using it to provide a secure future for KDE.

So I would invest in future donation and payment models as stated in my
last email. Maybe the creation of a non-profit gAG is also an idea.

But at the end, again, I am very new to the community and this is just a
view of somebody, who is seeing it with very fresh eyes. :)

greez,

Uli

Re: Fundraising in KDE

[Philippe Cloutier]

Hi Michał,

Le 2020-09-24 à 13:59, Michał Policht a écrit :

Hi,

One of the possibilities is to team-up with cryptocurrency communities.
I know there's some aversion towards cryptocurrencies in KDE community,
but crypto devs are really about the same goals you mention: "A world in
which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys freedom
and privacy.".

There are platforms like https://flipstarter.cash/, which can help
gather funds for new projects.

KDE could also release its own token, which among many things could be
used to pay the devs. I know it requires a bunch of lawyers to
accomplish, but it's probably doable.



...and more importantly, backing :-(

However, if we want to add incentives "at no cost", we could still:

1. Create personal dashboards showing all the contributions of each
   contributor (except those individual contributors wish to keep private)
2. Reward contributors with decisional power (KDE e.V. votes). Of
   course, while giving someone power doesn't have an immediate
   monetary cost, you can't do that without effectively taking away
   power from others, if you consider the organization's value as constant.

And while I think the above ideas should be explored, let me clarify I 
am not in any way opposing reasonable monetary compensation, which 
obviously remains the simplest incentive.





Regards
MP



Hello everyone,

Nate gave an excellent talk at the Akademy about how we can konquer the world
and reach new horizons with our software. One of the first steep for Nate is
for the e.V. to start paying more developers to work on core KDE technologies.

I believe there is an even more important steep before, finding the money to
pay the developers. The current incomes of the e.V. are €183.883 while the 
expense
is €258.851. No need to be good in maths to understand that we are losing money.
This is normal because we were hoarding too much money for a long time without
spending it, but this is still not a sustainable situation and if we start
paying developers we will need to find even more money.

KDE's current incomes come from donations from companies (€60 000) but also from
doing one time donations (€35 000) or recurring donations (€9000) from
individuals. There is also a lot of companies that help by sponsoring the
Akademy and other events organized by KDE. The numbers above are only my 
prognostics
looking at the current trends.

Many thanks to all these wonderful people donating money to the e.V. but this
is unfortunately not enough and if we want to start paying developers we will
need to change our fundraising strategy radically.

One of the reasons why we don't raise as many funds as we could is because of
the failure of our recurring donation system. When the money raised through the
one-time donation system increase by 50% in just one year, the recurring
donation system lost 10% of its donors at the same time.

Currently, we are using CiviCRM as our donation system, CiviCRM is a Customer
Relationship Management for non-profit and non-governmental groups. CiviCRM
is a complex web application and has many features for non-profit, we are
currently using the CiviContribute extension to manage the recurrent donations.

Unfortunately, like the numbers are telling, this doesn't work well. We have
technical difficulties with the system. The problems are not new and there were
multiple attends to fix then by hiring CiviCRM specialized consultants. KDE e.V.
recently hired new consultants, and I'm crossing my fingers that this time it
will work. This would at least solve some problems for the time being.

Another problem to solve is the design of the website: To make it short,
[relate.kde.org](https://relate.kde.org) is ugly and needs a visual
refresh and an update of the content. So I developed a new theme, available
[here](https://invent.kde.org/carlschwan/civicrm-relate-docker/-/tree/main/aether).
It's not perfect but a lot better than the current one and it was quite a
horror story (more on that later).

And the last problem is also how we are positioning our donation system.
Currently, it's a traditional organization membership fee and this is the reason
why we are using CiviCRM. When someone pays €100 per year, they become a KDE 
e.V.
supporting member. Their donation helps KDE e.V. in its activities (sponsoring
sprints, servers, ...). This works if we want KDE to remain a small and
traditional organization developing software as a hobby, but I don't think this
is our goal. Our vision is:

"A world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys
freedom and privacy."

And to achieve this vision, we need to grow, get more people involved, making
sure that people can make a living by contributing to KDE and also contribute
to the less fun area of KDE (the thing that nobody cares about but is really
important like accessibility).

I believe that if we were to communicate more clearly how by donating, we are
able to improve our software and 

Re: Fundraising in KDE

[Uli Klinkhammer]

On 2020-09-23 11:26, j...@ohyran.se wrote:
>> Yes, messaging -- for Blender it's easy because there are many companies
>> funding them for whom blender is a complement that replaces expensive
>> alternatives. It's different for KDE, so that needs good thinking.
>>
>> Also... Just like Blender, KDE probably needs to setup a second legal entity
>> that can fund freelance developers for certain projects or even outright
>> hire them.
>
>
> This part is the tricky one to me. Where is the benefit for companies to 
> sponsor KDE? I mean we have a group of different organizations that use 
> Plasma 
> for example - but how can we leverage that in to donations?
>
> What would we or those developers sponsored be able to deliver to those 
> organisations that would justify their cost?

Organisations in general have A LOT of money. So I think we should focus
on that. I have no statistics underlying my thoughts, but I imagine that
hundreds of thousands of companies and organisations worldwide are using
one of the KDE maintained operating systems like Neon or Kubuntu. They
are saving A HUGE amount of money by doing this.

So, why not separating the userbase into a private and an organisational
part? By doing this, we could target the later one in a better and more
intensive way.

For sure, this is already done in some way, by having different type of
donations. But I mean maybe going a step further, maybe by releasing
different types of Neon and Kubuntu? (private / organisational edition?)

This could solve also in some way the problem with the abuse the
freeriders do. We could release the new edition under a special license
we could workout together.


>
> The one thing I think could be done is contacting those organisations and 
> simply dig through their usage, needs and wants and see what we are missing.


For sure, it would be great to establish a deeper connection with the
organisations and to see, what their needs are.


On 2020-09-24 11:42, Nicolas Fella wrote:

> I would be cautious about creating a system that allows targeted
> donations for specific features/requests. I don't want the e.V. to be in
> a position where work is done/prioritized because it brings in money.


I agree 100%.

I think that the Organisations should have some kind of "vote", but at
the end, the Community and the Developers should decide what to
implement and what not.


greez,

Uli

Re: Fundraising in KDE

[Michał Policht]

Hi,

One of the possibilities is to team-up with cryptocurrency communities.
I know there's some aversion towards cryptocurrencies in KDE community,
but crypto devs are really about the same goals you mention: "A world in
which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys freedom
and privacy.".

There are platforms like https://flipstarter.cash/, which can help
gather funds for new projects.

KDE could also release its own token, which among many things could be
used to pay the devs. I know it requires a bunch of lawyers to
accomplish, but it's probably doable.

Regards
MP


> Hello everyone,
> 
> Nate gave an excellent talk at the Akademy about how we can konquer the world
> and reach new horizons with our software. One of the first steep for Nate is
> for the e.V. to start paying more developers to work on core KDE technologies.
> 
> I believe there is an even more important steep before, finding the money to
> pay the developers. The current incomes of the e.V. are €183.883 while the 
> expense
> is €258.851. No need to be good in maths to understand that we are losing 
> money.
> This is normal because we were hoarding too much money for a long time without
> spending it, but this is still not a sustainable situation and if we start
> paying developers we will need to find even more money.
> 
> KDE's current incomes come from donations from companies (€60 000) but also 
> from
> doing one time donations (€35 000) or recurring donations (€9000) from
> individuals. There is also a lot of companies that help by sponsoring the
> Akademy and other events organized by KDE. The numbers above are only my 
> prognostics
> looking at the current trends.
> 
> Many thanks to all these wonderful people donating money to the e.V. but this
> is unfortunately not enough and if we want to start paying developers we will
> need to change our fundraising strategy radically.
> 
> One of the reasons why we don't raise as many funds as we could is because of
> the failure of our recurring donation system. When the money raised through 
> the
> one-time donation system increase by 50% in just one year, the recurring
> donation system lost 10% of its donors at the same time.
> 
> Currently, we are using CiviCRM as our donation system, CiviCRM is a Customer
> Relationship Management for non-profit and non-governmental groups. CiviCRM
> is a complex web application and has many features for non-profit, we are
> currently using the CiviContribute extension to manage the recurrent 
> donations.
> 
> Unfortunately, like the numbers are telling, this doesn't work well. We have
> technical difficulties with the system. The problems are not new and there 
> were
> multiple attends to fix then by hiring CiviCRM specialized consultants. KDE 
> e.V.
> recently hired new consultants, and I'm crossing my fingers that this time it
> will work. This would at least solve some problems for the time being.
> 
> Another problem to solve is the design of the website: To make it short,
> [relate.kde.org](https://relate.kde.org) is ugly and needs a visual
> refresh and an update of the content. So I developed a new theme, available
> [here](https://invent.kde.org/carlschwan/civicrm-relate-docker/-/tree/main/aether).
> It's not perfect but a lot better than the current one and it was quite a
> horror story (more on that later).
> 
> And the last problem is also how we are positioning our donation system.
> Currently, it's a traditional organization membership fee and this is the 
> reason
> why we are using CiviCRM. When someone pays €100 per year, they become a KDE 
> e.V.
> supporting member. Their donation helps KDE e.V. in its activities (sponsoring
> sprints, servers, ...). This works if we want KDE to remain a small and
> traditional organization developing software as a hobby, but I don't think 
> this
> is our goal. Our vision is:
> 
> "A world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys
> freedom and privacy."
> 
> And to achieve this vision, we need to grow, get more people involved, making
> sure that people can make a living by contributing to KDE and also contribute
> to the less fun area of KDE (the thing that nobody cares about but is really
> important like accessibility).
> 
> I believe that if we were to communicate more clearly how by donating, we are
> able to improve our software and moving forward with our vision, it should
> encourage more people to donate.
> 
> Moving forward I don't think CiviCRM is the solution for KDE. I'm quite happy
> that the immediate problems will hopefully get resolved soon but we need a
> better long term solution.
> 
> CiviCRM requires constant maintenance and since the business model is having
> a network of consultants, it wasn't developed with easy of use in mind. For
> example it doesn't use the standard PHP package manager `composer`, but 
> require
> instead of downloading each package manually and keeping track of the version
> manually.
> 
> CiviCRM uses 

Re: Fundraising in KDE

[Albert Astals Cid]

El dijous, 24 de setembre de 2020, a les 11:42:16 CEST, Nicolas Fella va 
escriure:
> Hi,
> 
> I would be cautious about creating a system that allows targeted
> donations for specific features/requests. 
> I don't want the e.V. to be in
> a position where work is done/prioritized because it brings in money.

That's one of the reasons why you're part of KDE e.V. To make sure the money is 
spent correctly :)

> Not having this kind of money-driven-development is a great strength of
> community-driven open source projects. 

That's not going away. We already have proof of it. There has always been 
people doing KDE paid development and it has never been a huge issue from my 
almost 20 years of memory collaborating with the project.

> We have a list of possible
> providers for such requests already (disclosure: I work for a company on
> that list).

I disagree, https://ev.kde.org/consultants/ is for "i want to implement X, how 
much it will cost? 20K€? Fine here you have, now do it for me" not for "i have 
100€ a year, please let me pitch in with more people so we can hire a developer 
to work full time on improving Qt for KDE needs".

Cheers,
  Albert

> 
> Cheers
> 
> Nico
> 
> 

Re: Fundraising in KDE

[Nicolas Fella]

Hi,

I think the discussions about the technical implementation of our
donation system and whether or not to pay developers using the funds are
relatively orthogonal. Updating our current system is a good idea IMO
regardless of what comes out of the latter discussion.

If Carl thinks that CiviCRM is not a feasible solution from a technical
POV he has my full support for leading the work on a replacement system.

I would be cautious about creating a system that allows targeted
donations for specific features/requests. I don't want the e.V. to be in
a position where work is done/prioritized because it brings in money.
Not having this kind of money-driven-development is a great strength of
community-driven open source projects. We have a list of possible
providers for such requests already (disclosure: I work for a company on
that list).

Cheers

Nico

Re: Fundraising in KDE

[Albert Astals Cid]

El dimecres, 23 de setembre de 2020, a les 11:10:30 CEST, Boudewijn Rempt va 
escriure:
> KDE probably needs to setup a second legal entity that can fund freelance 
> developers for certain projects or even outright hire them. 

Why do we need a second entity? KDE e.V. is already contracting/hiring people.

Cheers,
  Albert

Re: Fundraising in KDE

[Albert Astals Cid]

El dimecres, 23 de setembre de 2020, a les 0:53:34 CEST, Carl Schwan va 
escriure:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> Nate gave an excellent talk at the Akademy about how we can konquer the world
> and reach new horizons with our software. One of the first steep for Nate is
> for the e.V. to start paying more developers to work on core KDE technologies.

I agree that it would very much be a good idea for KDE to pay developers.

> Many thanks to all these wonderful people donating money to the e.V. but this
> is unfortunately not enough and if we want to start paying developers we will
> need to change our fundraising strategy radically.

Yes, let's not forget that software developers are relatively expensive, I've 
no idea how accurate 
https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/it-salaries-software-developer-trends
 is, but i guess the numbers are not totally wrong from my own experience.

> One of the reasons why we don't raise as many funds as we could is because of
> the failure of our recurring donation system. 

I agree that's one of the reasons, personally i think the lack of clear goals 
is another reason, there's so much money you can get with the "give us money 
because we're nice" message we used in stuff like the end of year campaigns.

I think it's much easier to get people to donate if you give them a more direct 
reason "We're going to hire this person to work on XXX".

> And to achieve this vision, we need to grow, get more people involved, making
> sure that people can make a living by contributing to KDE and also contribute
> to the less fun area of KDE (the thing that nobody cares about but is really
> important like accessibility).

I understand what you were trying to say with this sentence, but please be 
careful when making blanket statements like that, you just insulted everyone 
that cares about accessibility and feels part of KDE by either telling them 
they are not part of KDE or that they don't care enough.

> I believe that if we were to communicate more clearly how by donating, we are
> able to improve our software and moving forward with our vision, it should
> encourage more people to donate.

Agreed.

Cheers,
  Albert

Re: Fundraising in KDE

[Carl Schwan]

Le mercredi, septembre 23, 2020 1:32 PM, Eike Hein  a écrit :

> Hi everyone,
>
> As Carl's email has lead to people reaching out to me with immediate worries 
> about KDE e.V.'s financial health, allow me to provide some additional 
> context. :-)
>
> KDE e.V.'s expenses in 2019 were higher than its income. This was by design, 
> because the organization has accumulated large financial reserves in recent 
> years and it is obligated, as a non-profit, to put them towards its mission 
> statement. This scaling-up of our expenses was done carefully; we're not 
> dependent on this additional spending to keep up our core activities. 
> Additionally, the size of the delta is also an artifact of several large 
> membership payments slipping to the 2020 financial year.
>
> To hammer it home: KDE e.V. is currently in the financially strongest 
> position it has been in its history, and has more options today than it had 
> in the past. Our most immediate concern is spending money, not fundraising.


Yes sorry for not making it clearer on my initial mail, KDE finances are fine 
and we don't risk becoming bankrupt anytime soon. This is a proposal for 
**accelerating** our growth.
Thanks for clarifying Eike.
Cheers
Carl

> This situation is (as it should) leading to proposals for how to scale up KDE 
> e.V.'s activities, leading to further increase in spending. One such proposal 
> is the one mentioned by Carl, submitted by Nate. As we discuss and probe 
> these proposals and their various potentials for becoming policy, their 
> sustainability is under review.
>
> This is great, aand a buzz of activity around making relate.kde.org better 
> for the longer-term future is very welcome.
>
> If you have further questions about KDE e.V.s finances, feel free to take a 
> look at the financial statements in our annual reports[0] or to reach out to 
> me directly.
>
> 0 = https://ev.kde.org/reports/ev-2019/
>
> Cheers,
> Eike Hein
>
>
> KDE e.V. Vice President, Treasurer

Re: Fundraising in KDE

[Carl Schwan]

Le mercredi, septembre 23, 2020 11:26 AM,  a écrit :

> > Yes, messaging -- for Blender it's easy because there are many companies
>
> > funding them for whom blender is a complement that replaces expensive
> > alternatives. It's different for KDE, so that needs good thinking.
> > Also... Just like Blender, KDE probably needs to setup a second legal entity
> > that can fund freelance developers for certain projects or even outright
> > hire them.
>
> This part is the tricky one to me. Where is the benefit for companies to
> sponsor KDE? I mean we have a group of different organizations that use Plasma
> for example - but how can we leverage that in to donations?

For large companies, we provide two products that can encourage them to invest
some money in:

* End-user applications that are used in a professional context (Kdenlive, 
Krita,
KDevelop, ...). For Blender, they receive considerable donations because they
provided a cheaper alternative to Maya and other big 3D creative suites. For 
KDE,
this is more difficult because 2d creation suites or IDEs are less expensive 
than
Maya for example. Still, I think we will always find companies who are 
interested
in replacing their €300/year/user system with a cheaper system and willing to
invest in the long term viability of the open-source system.

* The frameworks: Companies are investing €5000/year/developer for Qt and for
other libraries because it is more cost-efficient than reinventing the wheel and
maintaining their own custom libraries. This is an additional entry point for
corporate donations if we are able to convince them that using and supporting
financially the KDE frameworks is a good long term choice. I actually worked on
trying to improve the image of the frameworks with https://develop.kde.org/. 
This
still needs work on adding more content.

But I think the real strength of KDE is the huge amount of users around the
world and using KDE's software in various ways. Unlike Blender which targets
essentially 3D artists, KDE targets everyone with education software, graphic
software, developer tools, but most importantly Plasma and various KDE
applications making it able to use your computer with only open-source and
privacy-respecting software. I think many people would pay a bit, if we would
improve our communication around how the donation help making our software even
better and this will make their life easier.

This are just a few ideas and probably there are more possibilities to explore.

>
> What would we or those developers sponsored be able to deliver to those
> organisations that would justify their cost?
>
> The one thing I think could be done is contacting those organisations and
> simply dig through their usage, needs and wants and see what we are missing.
>
> That said, when we start doing this we will be tying ourselves to this model
> for a while which can have drawbacks too.

Re: Fundraising in KDE

[Eike Hein]

Hi everyone,

As Carl's email has lead to people reaching out to me with immediate worries 
about KDE e.V.'s financial health, allow me to provide some additional context. 
:-)

KDE e.V.'s expenses in 2019 were higher than its income. This was by design, 
because the organization has accumulated large financial reserves in recent 
years and it is obligated, as a non-profit, to put them towards its mission 
statement. This scaling-up of our expenses was done carefully; we're not 
dependent on this additional spending to keep up our core activities. 
Additionally, the size of the delta is also an artifact of several large 
membership payments slipping to the 2020 financial year.

To hammer it home: KDE e.V. is currently in the financially strongest position 
it has been in its history, and has more options today than it had in the past. 
Our most immediate concern is spending money, not fundraising.

This situation is (as it should) leading to proposals for how to scale up KDE 
e.V.'s activities, leading to further increase in spending. One such proposal 
is the one mentioned by Carl, submitted by Nate. As we discuss and probe these 
proposals and their various potentials for becoming policy, their 
sustainability is under review.

This is great, aand a buzz of activity around making relate.kde.org better for 
the longer-term future is very welcome.

If you have further questions about KDE e.V.s finances, feel free to take a 
look at the financial statements in our annual reports[0] or to reach out to me 
directly.

0 = https://ev.kde.org/reports/ev-2019/


Cheers,
Eike Hein
-
KDE e.V. Vice President, Treasurer

Re: Fundraising in KDE

[jens]

> Yes, messaging -- for Blender it's easy because there are many companies
> funding them for whom blender is a complement that replaces expensive
> alternatives. It's different for KDE, so that needs good thinking.
> 
> Also... Just like Blender, KDE probably needs to setup a second legal entity
> that can fund freelance developers for certain projects or even outright
> hire them.



This part is the tricky one to me. Where is the benefit for companies to 
sponsor KDE? I mean we have a group of different organizations that use Plasma 
for example - but how can we leverage that in to donations?

What would we or those developers sponsored be able to deliver to those 
organisations that would justify their cost?

The one thing I think could be done is contacting those organisations and 
simply dig through their usage, needs and wants and see what we are missing.

That said, when we start doing this we will be tying ourselves to this model 
for a while which can have drawbacks too.

Re: Fundraising in KDE

[Boudewijn Rempt]

Ha, cool! I hadn't thought of this when I started thinkg we should copy 
blender's dev fund for Krita. I basically always look at what blender is doing 
to see whether it would fit for Krita. Here are some notes:

On Wednesday, 23 September 2020 00:53:34 CEST Carl Schwan wrote:

> I believe there is an even more important steep before, finding the money to
> pay the developers. The current incomes of the e.V. are €183.883 while the 
> expense
> is €258.851. No need to be good in maths to understand that we are losing 
> money.
> This is normal because we were hoarding too much money for a long time without
> spending it, but this is still not a sustainable situation and if we start
> paying developers we will need to find even more money.

Currently, for Krita we get about 3,000 euros a month in donations. We have 
about 300,000 downloads from the website in a month, which means we get about a 
euro for every thousand downloads. We get about 18,000 euros through sales on 
steam and in the Windows store, which is what is actually paying for the core 
team. I've also made money for Krita through NRE funding from Intel, but that 
source of income has stopped (and besides, we were usually losing money on it.)

> Many thanks to all these wonderful people donating money to the e.V. but this
> is unfortunately not enough and if we want to start paying developers we will
> need to change our fundraising strategy radically.
> 
> One of the reasons why we don't raise as many funds as we could is because of
> the failure of our recurring donation system. When the money raised through 
> the
> one-time donation system increase by 50% in just one year, the recurring
> donation system lost 10% of its donors at the same time.

Krita is losing recurring donations at a much faster rate than usual since the 
beginning of august. People really are looking into their subscriptions at the 
moment, which is totally understandable.
 
> Currently, we are using CiviCRM as our donation system, CiviCRM is a Customer
> Relationship Management for non-profit and non-governmental groups. CiviCRM
> is a complex web application and has many features for non-profit, we are
> currently using the CiviContribute extension to manage the recurrent 
> donations.

We couldn't make civicrm work either... Despite hiring consultants.

<...>

> Because of this, I experimented with a new system based on the Blender Fund
> project. Blender Fund was developed by Blender devs and allowed Blender to
> raise enough money to employ many Blender devs to work full time on Blender.
> This allowed Blender to become a leading 3D creation suite. See
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jcl3--cbULk. Blender Fund is licensed under
> GPL and is based on Django.
> 
> A demo of my proposed system can be found here: https://fund.carlschwan.eu/
> and the repo https://invent.kde.org/websites/fund-krita-org. A nice thing
> about the system is that it is easy to switch the skin for other projects
> (e.g. https://krita-fund.carlschwan.eu).
> 
> An interesting feature is that it is already integrated with the future
> replacement of KDE Identity (code name MyKDE). So you can already login in to
> these demos using your KDE Identity credentials. Another feature is that 
> donators
> get a badge that they can display on their profile page in MyKDE.
> 
> You can also try to subscribe to payment using this fake credit card:
> 4111 with an expiration date in the future and play around.

Yay!

> 
> I strongly believe that this can be a part of the solution, but just a part
> of the solution. We also need to change our messaging and make our goals more
> clear. These are a social problem and not a technical one ;)

Yes, messaging -- for Blender it's easy because there are many companies 
funding them for whom blender is a complement that replaces expensive 
alternatives. It's different for KDE, so that needs good thinking.

Also... Just like Blender, KDE probably needs to setup a second legal entity 
that can fund freelance developers for certain projects or even outright hire 
them. 

> Please let me know if this is worth putting more effort into it or if the 
> current
> system is good enough. I feel like this should be a community decision, since
> fundraising is everyone's concern. Also, any help is welcome :)

Well, obviously, I'm all for it :-)

-- 
https://www.krita.org

Re: Fundraising in KDE

[Christoph Cullmann]

Hi,

On 2020-09-23 00:53, Carl Schwan wrote:

Hello everyone,

Nate gave an excellent talk at the Akademy about how we can konquer the 
world
and reach new horizons with our software. One of the first steep for 
Nate is
for the e.V. to start paying more developers to work on core KDE 
technologies.


I believe there is an even more important steep before, finding the 
money to

pay the developers. The current incomes of the e.V. are €183.883 while
the expense
is €258.851. No need to be good in maths to understand that we are 
losing money.
This is normal because we were hoarding too much money for a long time 
without
spending it, but this is still not a sustainable situation and if we 
start

paying developers we will need to find even more money.

KDE's current incomes come from donations from companies (€60 000) but 
also from

doing one time donations (€35 000) or recurring donations (€9000) from
individuals. There is also a lot of companies that help by sponsoring 
the

Akademy and other events organized by KDE. The numbers above are only
my prognostics
looking at the current trends.

Many thanks to all these wonderful people donating money to the e.V. 
but this
is unfortunately not enough and if we want to start paying developers 
we will

need to change our fundraising strategy radically.

One of the reasons why we don't raise as many funds as we could is 
because of
the failure of our recurring donation system. When the money raised 
through the
one-time donation system increase by 50% in just one year, the 
recurring

donation system lost 10% of its donors at the same time.

Currently, we are using CiviCRM as our donation system, CiviCRM is a 
Customer
Relationship Management for non-profit and non-governmental groups. 
CiviCRM
is a complex web application and has many features for non-profit, we 
are
currently using the CiviContribute extension to manage the recurrent 
donations.


Unfortunately, like the numbers are telling, this doesn't work well. We 
have
technical difficulties with the system. The problems are not new and 
there were
multiple attends to fix then by hiring CiviCRM specialized consultants. 
KDE e.V.
recently hired new consultants, and I'm crossing my fingers that this 
time it

will work. This would at least solve some problems for the time being.

Another problem to solve is the design of the website: To make it 
short,

[relate.kde.org](https://relate.kde.org) is ugly and needs a visual
refresh and an update of the content. So I developed a new theme, 
available

[here](https://invent.kde.org/carlschwan/civicrm-relate-docker/-/tree/main/aether).
It's not perfect but a lot better than the current one and it was quite 
a

horror story (more on that later).

And the last problem is also how we are positioning our donation 
system.
Currently, it's a traditional organization membership fee and this is 
the reason

why we are using CiviCRM. When someone pays €100 per year, they become
a KDE e.V.
supporting member. Their donation helps KDE e.V. in its activities 
(sponsoring

sprints, servers, ...). This works if we want KDE to remain a small and
traditional organization developing software as a hobby, but I don't 
think this

is our goal. Our vision is:

"A world in which everyone has control over their digital life and 
enjoys

freedom and privacy."

And to achieve this vision, we need to grow, get more people involved, 
making
sure that people can make a living by contributing to KDE and also 
contribute
to the less fun area of KDE (the thing that nobody cares about but is 
really

important like accessibility).

I believe that if we were to communicate more clearly how by donating, 
we are
able to improve our software and moving forward with our vision, it 
should

encourage more people to donate.

Moving forward I don't think CiviCRM is the solution for KDE. I'm quite 
happy
that the immediate problems will hopefully get resolved soon but we 
need a

better long term solution.

CiviCRM requires constant maintenance and since the business model is 
having
a network of consultants, it wasn't developed with easy of use in mind. 
For
example it doesn't use the standard PHP package manager `composer`, but 
require
instead of downloading each package manually and keeping track of the 
version

manually.

CiviCRM uses the infamous Drupal 7 theming engine for rendering the 
pages.
It means that instead of working with a templating engine like 99% of 
the web
frameworks, Drupal 7 works with hooks, hooks are function that gets 
called
when rendering a certain portion of a page. This creates a very 
inflexible
way to create a website and with some part of the layout that can only 
be
changed using JavaScript. CiviCRM doesn't help by creating a dumping 
its forms
without any way to customize the appearance unless you again use 
JavaScript to

change the HTML dynamically.

The good news is that CiviCRM will soon switch to Drupal 8 and use a 
normal

templating engine, but it also means 

Fundraising in KDE

[Carl Schwan]

Hello everyone,

Nate gave an excellent talk at the Akademy about how we can konquer the world
and reach new horizons with our software. One of the first steep for Nate is
for the e.V. to start paying more developers to work on core KDE technologies.

I believe there is an even more important steep before, finding the money to
pay the developers. The current incomes of the e.V. are €183.883 while the 
expense
is €258.851. No need to be good in maths to understand that we are losing money.
This is normal because we were hoarding too much money for a long time without
spending it, but this is still not a sustainable situation and if we start
paying developers we will need to find even more money.

KDE's current incomes come from donations from companies (€60 000) but also from
doing one time donations (€35 000) or recurring donations (€9000) from
individuals. There is also a lot of companies that help by sponsoring the
Akademy and other events organized by KDE. The numbers above are only my 
prognostics
looking at the current trends.

Many thanks to all these wonderful people donating money to the e.V. but this
is unfortunately not enough and if we want to start paying developers we will
need to change our fundraising strategy radically.

One of the reasons why we don't raise as many funds as we could is because of
the failure of our recurring donation system. When the money raised through the
one-time donation system increase by 50% in just one year, the recurring
donation system lost 10% of its donors at the same time.

Currently, we are using CiviCRM as our donation system, CiviCRM is a Customer
Relationship Management for non-profit and non-governmental groups. CiviCRM
is a complex web application and has many features for non-profit, we are
currently using the CiviContribute extension to manage the recurrent donations.

Unfortunately, like the numbers are telling, this doesn't work well. We have
technical difficulties with the system. The problems are not new and there were
multiple attends to fix then by hiring CiviCRM specialized consultants. KDE e.V.
recently hired new consultants, and I'm crossing my fingers that this time it
will work. This would at least solve some problems for the time being.

Another problem to solve is the design of the website: To make it short,
[relate.kde.org](https://relate.kde.org) is ugly and needs a visual
refresh and an update of the content. So I developed a new theme, available
[here](https://invent.kde.org/carlschwan/civicrm-relate-docker/-/tree/main/aether).
It's not perfect but a lot better than the current one and it was quite a
horror story (more on that later).

And the last problem is also how we are positioning our donation system.
Currently, it's a traditional organization membership fee and this is the reason
why we are using CiviCRM. When someone pays €100 per year, they become a KDE 
e.V.
supporting member. Their donation helps KDE e.V. in its activities (sponsoring
sprints, servers, ...). This works if we want KDE to remain a small and
traditional organization developing software as a hobby, but I don't think this
is our goal. Our vision is:

"A world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys
freedom and privacy."

And to achieve this vision, we need to grow, get more people involved, making
sure that people can make a living by contributing to KDE and also contribute
to the less fun area of KDE (the thing that nobody cares about but is really
important like accessibility).

I believe that if we were to communicate more clearly how by donating, we are
able to improve our software and moving forward with our vision, it should
encourage more people to donate.

Moving forward I don't think CiviCRM is the solution for KDE. I'm quite happy
that the immediate problems will hopefully get resolved soon but we need a
better long term solution.

CiviCRM requires constant maintenance and since the business model is having
a network of consultants, it wasn't developed with easy of use in mind. For
example it doesn't use the standard PHP package manager `composer`, but require
instead of downloading each package manually and keeping track of the version
manually.

CiviCRM uses the infamous Drupal 7 theming engine for rendering the pages.
It means that instead of working with a templating engine like 99% of the web
frameworks, Drupal 7 works with hooks, hooks are function that gets called
when rendering a certain portion of a page. This creates a very inflexible
way to create a website and with some part of the layout that can only be
changed using JavaScript. CiviCRM doesn't help by creating a dumping its forms
without any way to customize the appearance unless you again use JavaScript to
change the HTML dynamically.

The good news is that CiviCRM will soon switch to Drupal 8 and use a normal
templating engine, but it also means that the theme will need to be
rewritten and data migrated. And Drupal 8 will be EOL in November 2021, so we
will