On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 11:45:04AM +0200, Tobias Ellinghaus wrote:
Am Sonntag, 10. Mai 2015, 19:55:09 schrieb Gez:
It would be interesting to let users choose how their payment is used in the project (like www.humblebundle.com lets you choose where the money goes and you can select which percentage goes to the developers, to the site and to charity). Something similar would allow people to choose if they want their money to be used for supporting inkscape for their chosen platform, for new features, bugfixing, hackfests, for using at Inkscape board's discresion, etc.
I would be very careful with letting donators decide how the money gets spent. While that might make people happy and more willing to part with their cash it has the inherent problem that only sexy and shiny new toys get support while the boring but in general way more important grunt work (cleaning up the code, building infrastructure, refactoring, you name it) gets neglected. Or do you think anyone would tick "spent my donation for C++ification" on the donation page? No. They would ask for "multi page files" and "animation". Which is nice to have but less important for the project. So I would suggest to only allow people to put money into one big box and rely on the board to distribute the money. If they decide to fund bling that's cool, but at least they will most likely not forget about priorities.
What is in our fundraising policy is sort of a compromise between these two extremes. When a fundraising coordinator sets up their fundraiser, they can pick several different buckets for the donations to be divided into. So, they could pick two "sexy" projects and two "grunt work" tasks.
This way, the sexy projects can attract the donors, but the grunt work still can get done.
Of course, this pre-supposes we can find folks like you who have good ideas on how to target donor's funding most effectively.
Bryce