The project's current state is reflected in a dollar amount of remaining
project funds, along with an estimate of how much additional development time
it corresponds to. This amount will decrease suddenly and significantly when a
payment is made. It's not - at least supposed to be - a secret that the Freenet
project is set to run out of funds mid-September. I've mentioned to people - on
Sone, in #freenet - that the project is running out of funds and they had no
idea. This is a problem. I propose (in decreasing importance) that:
1) The donation page mention _when_ the last ~2-month payment was made.
- Or ideally, that the time remaining estimate include remaining
funded development time. This need not be exact: it would allow the
estimate to decrease gradually instead of in sudden chunks.
2) Fundraising be presented as drives for a month's worth of funding.
- This would allow donating to have goals, and be framed as increasing
toward something tangible, (a month of development) rather than building up
funds against sudden, quiet decrease.
- The estimate ceases to be meaningful if it sits at "8 days" for two
months.
3) Release announcements include statements on the project's current financial
state and how to donate.
- Fred could have integrated release announcements for greater visibility.
These could of course be disabled by the user.
4) Release announcements also be displayed on the freenetproject.org homepage
in something akin to the "Latest Releases"/"News" sidebar on winehq.org.
- Having only news posts that are several months old makes the project
appear inactive, which it is not.
It should go without saying that a 0.8 release would probably make good press,
assuming it can be made stable before funding runs out.
