Hi, One of the possibilities is to team-up with cryptocurrency communities. I know there's some aversion towards cryptocurrencies in KDE community, but crypto devs are really about the same goals you mention: "A world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys freedom and privacy.".
There are platforms like https://flipstarter.cash/, which can help gather funds for new projects. KDE could also release its own token, which among many things could be used to pay the devs. I know it requires a bunch of lawyers to accomplish, but it's probably doable. Regards MP > Hello everyone, > > Nate gave an excellent talk at the Akademy about how we can konquer the world > and reach new horizons with our software. One of the first steep for Nate is > for the e.V. to start paying more developers to work on core KDE technologies. > > I believe there is an even more important steep before, finding the money to > pay the developers. The current incomes of the e.V. are €183.883 while the > expense > is €258.851. No need to be good in maths to understand that we are losing > money. > This is normal because we were hoarding too much money for a long time without > spending it, but this is still not a sustainable situation and if we start > paying developers we will need to find even more money. > > KDE's current incomes come from donations from companies (€60 000) but also > from > doing one time donations (€35 000) or recurring donations (€9000) from > individuals. There is also a lot of companies that help by sponsoring the > Akademy and other events organized by KDE. The numbers above are only my > prognostics > looking at the current trends. > > Many thanks to all these wonderful people donating money to the e.V. but this > is unfortunately not enough and if we want to start paying developers we will > need to change our fundraising strategy radically. > > One of the reasons why we don't raise as many funds as we could is because of > the failure of our recurring donation system. When the money raised through > the > one-time donation system increase by 50% in just one year, the recurring > donation system lost 10% of its donors at the same time. > > Currently, we are using CiviCRM as our donation system, CiviCRM is a Customer > Relationship Management for non-profit and non-governmental groups. CiviCRM > is a complex web application and has many features for non-profit, we are > currently using the CiviContribute extension to manage the recurrent > donations. > > Unfortunately, like the numbers are telling, this doesn't work well. We have > technical difficulties with the system. The problems are not new and there > were > multiple attends to fix then by hiring CiviCRM specialized consultants. KDE > e.V. > recently hired new consultants, and I'm crossing my fingers that this time it > will work. This would at least solve some problems for the time being. > > Another problem to solve is the design of the website: To make it short, > [relate.kde.org](https://relate.kde.org) is ugly and needs a visual > refresh and an update of the content. So I developed a new theme, available > [here](https://invent.kde.org/carlschwan/civicrm-relate-docker/-/tree/main/aether). > It's not perfect but a lot better than the current one and it was quite a > horror story (more on that later). > > And the last problem is also how we are positioning our donation system. > Currently, it's a traditional organization membership fee and this is the > reason > why we are using CiviCRM. When someone pays €100 per year, they become a KDE > e.V. > supporting member. Their donation helps KDE e.V. in its activities (sponsoring > sprints, servers, ...). This works if we want KDE to remain a small and > traditional organization developing software as a hobby, but I don't think > this > is our goal. Our vision is: > > "A world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys > freedom and privacy." > > And to achieve this vision, we need to grow, get more people involved, making > sure that people can make a living by contributing to KDE and also contribute > to the less fun area of KDE (the thing that nobody cares about but is really > important like accessibility). > > I believe that if we were to communicate more clearly how by donating, we are > able to improve our software and moving forward with our vision, it should > encourage more people to donate. > > Moving forward I don't think CiviCRM is the solution for KDE. I'm quite happy > that the immediate problems will hopefully get resolved soon but we need a > better long term solution. > > CiviCRM requires constant maintenance and since the business model is having > a network of consultants, it wasn't developed with easy of use in mind. For > example it doesn't use the standard PHP package manager `composer`, but > require > instead of downloading each package manually and keeping track of the version > manually. > > CiviCRM uses the infamous Drupal 7 theming engine for rendering the pages. > It means that instead of working with a templating engine like 99% of the web > frameworks, Drupal 7 works with hooks, hooks are function that gets called > when rendering a certain portion of a page. This creates a very inflexible > way to create a website and with some part of the layout that can only be > changed using JavaScript. CiviCRM doesn't help by creating a dumping its forms > without any way to customize the appearance unless you again use JavaScript to > change the HTML dynamically. > > The good news is that CiviCRM will soon switch to Drupal 8 and use a normal > templating engine, but it also means that the theme will need to be > rewritten and data migrated. And Drupal 8 will be EOL in November 2021, so we > will need to rewrite two times our theme in 1 year. > > There are many other parts of CiviCRM that I think are not great, and > if someone interested in hearing more I would happily give you more details. > > But more importantly, I don't think CiviCRM is adapted for our needs of a > simple > but also a super-efficient donation system. > > Because of this, I experimented with a new system based on the Blender Fund > project. Blender Fund was developed by Blender devs and allowed Blender to > raise enough money to employ many Blender devs to work full time on Blender. > This allowed Blender to become a leading 3D creation suite. See > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jcl3--cbULk. Blender Fund is licensed under > GPL and is based on Django. > > A demo of my proposed system can be found here: https://fund.carlschwan.eu/ > and the repo https://invent.kde.org/websites/fund-krita-org. A nice thing > about the system is that it is easy to switch the skin for other projects > (e.g. https://krita-fund.carlschwan.eu). > > An interesting feature is that it is already integrated with the future > replacement of KDE Identity (code name MyKDE). So you can already login in to > these demos using your KDE Identity credentials. Another feature is that > donators > get a badge that they can display on their profile page in MyKDE. > > You can also try to subscribe to payment using this fake credit card: > 4111111111111111 with an expiration date in the future and play around. > > I strongly believe that this can be a part of the solution, but just a part > of the solution. We also need to change our messaging and make our goals more > clear. These are a social problem and not a technical one ;) > > My plans for migration would be to run the old CiviCRM system and the new > one at the same time, encourage the CiviCRM donors to renew their > subscriptions > in the new system and shutdown CiviCRM then we decide it's not worth > supporting > anymore. This is why it is so important that CiviCRM still works and the > recent > efforts to make it somewhat work again won't go to waste. > > Please let me know if this is worth putting more effort into it or if the > current > system is good enough. I feel like this should be a community decision, since > fundraising is everyone's concern. Also, any help is welcome :) > > Regards, > Carl Schwan > KDE Web lead developer > https://carlschwan.eu >
