On 11-12-2012 5:41, Ted Gould wrote:
On Mon, 2012-12-10 at 18:03 -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote:
On Fri, Dec 07, 2012 at 05:11:19PM -0600, Ted Gould wrote:
... PROPOSAL 2: Inkscape should release a donation edition of Inkscape to Ubuntu extras at a price set by the board.
What are people's thoughts on all of this? Yea, nay? I'm not sure it would end up being a large donation stream, but I do think it's worth trying. There will probably be some people upset at us trying to "commercialize" Inkscape, but I don't think that's really the case here and I'm willing to have that conversation.
...
- Like njh pointed out, we ought to have a plan for usage of the revenue before undertaking this. Which really means we need an organizer to make whatever arrangements/purchases/etc. required. A hackfest focusing on bug fixing or implementing a few highly requested features could perhaps stimulate a lot of donation activity.
I feel like that would be good, but orthogonal to putting the donation edition in USC. The reason being that I don't think people will seek out the donation edition, I think that they'll install Inkscape on their new machine and notice that there's two entries in the Software Center and go "Oh, $5, sure, why not?" and install that one. I'm hoping to get people that never visit our webpage and have any ideas of our programs.
So, I don't think spending money on a hackfest and putting in USC need to necessarily be connected. I think that'd be more important for a normal fund raising campaign, I see this more as "background" fund raising.
For any kind of fundraising, I think we need to have an idea of how that money could be spent. We should not be asking for money if that really is not spent on anything. I don't like the idea of ending up with money that is never spent. I don't think the ideas have to be very detailed but vague ideas are necessary I believe.
I agree that one hackfest and USC are unconnected, and I also see USC as "background" fund raising. I think such background fund raising requires an recurring/ever-present target instead of a one-off thing. For lack of inspiration at the moment: it could be as simple as the intention of organising a hackfest every year.
Off-topic: can we have chat meeting where I can ask questions to the (older members of the) board? Can be public, but no need to make a big hype about it, let's simply agree on a date and time so we can chat a bit :)
Ciao, Johan