On Sat, Feb 09, 2019 at 09:19:10PM -0600, Ted Gould wrote:
On Feb 9 2019, at 4:26 pm, Bryce Harrington <bryce@...2...> wrote:
Funded development work (e.g. contract programming work) would be a logical thing to think about, and several of our sponsors have expressed interest here in supplying additional funds depending on what we undertake. There's a non-trivial amount of overhead work needed for doing contract management, though.
It might be worthwhile for us to take a look at some of our peer projects at SFC and see how others are using their funding.
I'm personally a fan of how the Document Foundation (Libre Office) has handled that in that they've got a policy against the foundation funding work on the project. Instead they fund infrastructure and the other stuff around the project. For instance, (and they have a bunch more money than us) they hired for some QA infrastructure work and for CI work and stuff like that. Where it was all things that make it easier to develop and work on the project.
Interesting, I wonder if they prohibit development funding because they have parter companies that provide employment for the developers? What about their approach are you finding admirable?
Blender is another peer project folks bring up a lot. They seem to have things extremely well organized, and I'm quite impressed with the quantity of recurring income they're getting:
I'd like to better understand how they've done this and how we might be able to replicate. It would be great if we could be looking to have 5-10 developers funded full time (plus the infrastructure and other stuff you mentioned.)
Another thing that Ryan and I were chatting about... I don't remember when.... was the idea that if we did instructional videos for using Inkscape that used professional actors and/or voice over. Something like that could provide some real sophistication to our materials.
I've added it to our fundrasing ideas page:
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Fundraising_Ideas#Instructional_Vide...
Tutorials given by professional artists or highly experience Inkscape users might also be something to consider. Andy Fitzsimon gave a really good presentation at the first LGM, and it was amazing, and inspiring.
Anyway, all ideas. I guess where I see us is that we set ourselves up to start organizing the hackfests, and get funding for that, and I think we've done well there. We just need to figure out where the next step is.
Sounds like maybe we need the corollary to the Fundraising Ideas page, but for expenditures.
Bryce