On 10/14/2015 03:22 PM, Ian Clarke wrote: > I think it's time for us all to take a step back and have a serious > conversation about where we are, and where we are going. > > Our current bank account balance is US$1,184.32, our current PayPal balance > is $1,201.60. > > Even at Xor's very low hourly rate (he could get a lot more commercially > given his skillset - which we should all appreciate him for) this is less > than 100 hours of remaining availability. He needs to prepare for finding > an alternate income source.
Agreed. > We have a new website in the works, which is great, and many people have > been working valiantly to support the project, but it's hard to escape the > feeling that we're almost in a "maintenance mode". The problem with that > is that you just can't generate enough excitement to attract funding in > that situation. It's true that with a small handful of part-time and almost entirely volunteer developers the project has moved very slowly. I can say that when I talk with people at cryptoparties about Freenet they are generally interested, but that has yet to result in anyone contributing code. In addition to the things you mentioned in "Behind the times," another thing that doesn't help is messy code keeps some developers from joining the project, but we'd need developers to clean up the messy code. Money can help solve that problem but we don't have it. I'm looking into holding a Freenet setup hackathon thing in December. ... > Anyway, I don't want to say too much because I'd prefer for this to be more > of a conversation than a lecture, but I would appreciate people's thoughts > on this. Here's what would make sense to me: * Stop hiring xor as soon as viable and only pay infrastructure costs: server, domain name, certificates. How much are those per year? (amortized for multi-year certs) * Make a news entry on the website that we can no longer afford to hire a developer and can be run only by volunteers. Solicit donations, mention how much infrastructure costs per year, and how much hiring xor would require in addition. * Add a useralert in build 1471 that the project is too low on funds to continue hiring a developer; see the website for details / include Bitcoin address. (to avoid the added complication of an updatable useralert.) * Replace the months of funding bar with dollar amounts and a goal of a year of infrastructure costs. (maybe? concept would be once that's met the stretch goal is another year of xor's services.) The part that seems non-optimal to me is we've always mentioned the current funding level, and presented it as something that always goes down. While that's what it is, it seems more encouraging to raise a fixed amount that will last for a longer period and stop mentioning it until it get lows again. I think another thing being staffed by volunteers has done is made the project rather directionless. By their nature volunteers tend to work on what they find interesting, and it doesn't build toward a focused goal. Volunteers are great at polishing and adding small things, but usually can't have the focus and time that paid / full-time developers do to make large changes.
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
_______________________________________________ Devl mailing list Devl@freenetproject.org https://emu.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
