On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 5:19 PM, Eric Kow <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi everyone, > > As you know, we have been working on joining the Software Freedom > Conservancy. Joining the SFC makes it easier for us to raise funds and > to hold assets (such as the darcs.net domain name, which is currently > owned by David). > > I think most of us here would agree that having access to money is a > good thing. But before we launch into any fundraising campaigns, I > wanted to make sure that we as a community, come to some sort of rough > consensus about (a) what are acceptable ways for us to raise this money > and (b) how uses we should make of it. > > Context: the Day Job Problem > ---------------------------- > At the risk of over-steering, I would like to suggest a bit of > context for this discussion. Since August 2008, when I started becoming > more active in the darcs community, I have been very interested in > solving what I call the Day Job Problem, which simply the fact that > while we have loads of things we want to do with darcs, most of us are > busy trying to fulfill our other commitments. > > How can we get the time to work on darcs? > The four anwsers I can see so far are to > > (a) increase the number of darcs developers > > (b) allocate tasks and decision-making roles more efficiently > > (c) concentrate small shards of time into useful bursts (sprints) > > (d) increase the availability of the darcs developers > (e.g. 20% time, see below) > > So my interest in fundraising is ultimately about buying time, directly > or otherwise. But how exactly should we go about it? > > Raising funds > ------------- > Is there anything about the following ideas that anybody finds > objectionable? What would be the most effective approach? > What other ideas do you have? > > - Sponsors page. Would folks here object to a sponsors page on darcs.net? > How should this be set up? > > If we do have a sponsors page, I would like to offer the University of > Brighton to put their logo on it. The University are effectively > subsiding darcs development, as they have agreed to have me spend 20% > of my time working on darcs, as opposed to my normal research. > > - Fundraising drives? This is National Public Revision Control. > Please give us your money. > > - Donation button on the home page? > > - Selling t-shirts, mugs, cookies, books? > > Spending them! > -------------- > What kinds of things should we be spending money on? Are there any > essential services that we need to secure, for example? Any devious > schemes, perhaps involving an unspecified number of sharks, lasers > and pieces of twine? > > Ideas I have are > > - Hardware? hosting? any essential services that we need to secure? > > - Prizes for contests? It's great that the Real World Haskell > authors are willing to donate a copy for a darcs hacking > contest. Are there other kinds of prizes we could put together? > We would likely want to keep the prizes small, though, as prestige > and fun may be better motivators for these contests than prizes. > > - Paying for travel and accomodation to sprints. We could either > try to spread money evenly, or try to subsidise those that have > to go the furthest. > > - Hiring talent we don't have access to (for example, our current > logo was put together by a paid professional) > > - Marketing: perhaps not the right time for this > > - Bounties: I doubt that bounties work, but maybe in the right > contexts, and with some creative twists, we can make them work > > - Hiring developers: if we manage to raise lots of money, could > we find a way to get some paid darcs hacking done? > > Maybe one way we can break things down is by the amounts we can raise. > What could we do with $500? $1000? $5000? $10000? $50000?. > > Dream big, dream small! Advice wanted!
I think one of the best things might be to hire students for a summer, like in Google's Summers of Code. It would be really elegant I think if we could reuse an existing process - perhaps we could go to Google or Jane Street and say "here's $4000 for a Darcs-only project (if any show up)"? Kind of like a scholarship or endowment. It's not like we couldn't easily pull together a long list of things to do - "rewrite our test scripts in Language.Sh/ShSh", "make our mmap support do awesome things" etc. Given how many current darcs developers *are* students, seems like a good idea to me. Not that I have any idea who to contact in Google or Jane Street. -- gwern _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
