On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 02:06:20PM -0400, Martin Owens wrote:
On Mon, 2015-04-13 at 17:42 +0300, anatoly techtonik wrote:
Providing multiple channels is an interesting idea for improving fundraising
efforts. It can also cover better auditory. I expect many artists to have a Patreon account. Aside from Gratipay I've seen open source developers using Stripe or Bitcoin directly. So it would be interesting to compare donation from "open source" vs "artist" communities.
Our primary target should be end users, which I think means paypal, patreon first. A secondary target would be Bitcoin and Stripe and other more technical methods. the reasoning I have here is that part of the process of involving users in financing Inkscape's operations is the involvement itself. Many open source and technical people know how to get involved and often have a greater say in discussions already.
I'd also like to make sure we can record user contributions and donations no matter how we got them. This is so user contributions are rewarded and gives them a better community standing than currently. where I feel coding is always given almost all the reputation points, followed by docs writers, designers and other jobs and then at dead last people who help finding :-). Not everyone can pay, not everyone can code. But helping is helping.
I tend to agree, it would be nice to have the equivalent of a brick walkway of fame with the names of all the donors, however...
Presently, the only data we get about the donors is their name, the donation date and amount, and the (optional) memo. We don't get their email address or any other information that would help us confirm their identity adequately enough to link donations to, say, their Inkscape website account. Best we could do is name match, and hope there's not too many John Williams and Elizabeth Smiths and Acme, Inc.'s
There are privacy concerns to worry about. While we'd love to shout-out our donors, some people may wish (for whatever personal reason) their donation to be anonymous, or at least not have their name in the public record. So any recognition system we have needs to either be opt-in or have a clear and unambiguous way to opt-out at the time of donation.
But I don't want to be a wet blanket here! I suspect there are technical solutions to be had; possibly it's a "Simple Matter of Programming". But our current paypal interface only allows extra data to be sent via the memo field, iirc, so someone would need to code up a more sophisticated donation infrastructure for us.
Bryce