Fwd: partnership
This came to the Community Working Group, when it should have been sent to KDE Community ML. Please do not CC the Community-WG list in replies. -v -- Forwarded message - From: Date: Wed, Sep 23, 2020 at 1:07 PM Subject: partnership To: , , , , , Dear Friends of KDE eingetragener Verein, We are a little team of 3 scientists who defend ethical values provided by free/libre software and "free culture" in general. Currently we are creating a french structure named CDOSS (Compliance for Data Open Source Software, www.cdoss.tech) in the the mission to certificate every person using AI and Big Data Open Source Softwares to prove its compliance with standards, legislation and contractual requirements. As specialists we feel the need that it could be important to demonstrate technical competence and adherence to an ethical code for the emerging data processing technologies. We are preparing 6 certifications to present abilties to : - implement a IA models - administer and perform maintenance tasks in Big Data platforms So we would ask for your support (as a possible partnership) to carry out our projects. More over, we plan to offer a certification body for persons on an ISO/IEC standard So that a CDOSS certified engineer could provide its clients comprehensive services that inspire trust and benefit society as a whole. We remain at your disposal for further information, Sincerely yours, Jérôme Filippone, CTO and Co-founder of CDOSS Ltd, Data Project Manager, https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerome-filippone-172a9910/ Dr Bassem Benhamed, Full professor & IA Expert, https://www.linkedin.com/in/bassem-ben-hamed-02b43713b/ Dr Heni Bouhamed, Senior Lecturer & Big Data Consultant, https://sites.google.com/site/drhenibouhamed/
Re: Fundraising in KDE
Le mercredi, septembre 23, 2020 1:32 PM, Eike Hein a écrit : > Hi everyone, > > As Carl's email has lead to people reaching out to me with immediate worries > about KDE e.V.'s financial health, allow me to provide some additional > context. :-) > > KDE e.V.'s expenses in 2019 were higher than its income. This was by design, > because the organization has accumulated large financial reserves in recent > years and it is obligated, as a non-profit, to put them towards its mission > statement. This scaling-up of our expenses was done carefully; we're not > dependent on this additional spending to keep up our core activities. > Additionally, the size of the delta is also an artifact of several large > membership payments slipping to the 2020 financial year. > > To hammer it home: KDE e.V. is currently in the financially strongest > position it has been in its history, and has more options today than it had > in the past. Our most immediate concern is spending money, not fundraising. Yes sorry for not making it clearer on my initial mail, KDE finances are fine and we don't risk becoming bankrupt anytime soon. This is a proposal for **accelerating** our growth. Thanks for clarifying Eike. Cheers Carl > This situation is (as it should) leading to proposals for how to scale up KDE > e.V.'s activities, leading to further increase in spending. One such proposal > is the one mentioned by Carl, submitted by Nate. As we discuss and probe > these proposals and their various potentials for becoming policy, their > sustainability is under review. > > This is great, aand a buzz of activity around making relate.kde.org better > for the longer-term future is very welcome. > > If you have further questions about KDE e.V.s finances, feel free to take a > look at the financial statements in our annual reports[0] or to reach out to > me directly. > > 0 = https://ev.kde.org/reports/ev-2019/ > > Cheers, > Eike Hein > > > KDE e.V. Vice President, Treasurer
Re: Fundraising in KDE
Le mercredi, septembre 23, 2020 11:26 AM, a écrit : > > Yes, messaging -- for Blender it's easy because there are many companies > > > funding them for whom blender is a complement that replaces expensive > > alternatives. It's different for KDE, so that needs good thinking. > > Also... Just like Blender, KDE probably needs to setup a second legal entity > > that can fund freelance developers for certain projects or even outright > > hire them. > > This part is the tricky one to me. Where is the benefit for companies to > sponsor KDE? I mean we have a group of different organizations that use Plasma > for example - but how can we leverage that in to donations? For large companies, we provide two products that can encourage them to invest some money in: * End-user applications that are used in a professional context (Kdenlive, Krita, KDevelop, ...). For Blender, they receive considerable donations because they provided a cheaper alternative to Maya and other big 3D creative suites. For KDE, this is more difficult because 2d creation suites or IDEs are less expensive than Maya for example. Still, I think we will always find companies who are interested in replacing their €300/year/user system with a cheaper system and willing to invest in the long term viability of the open-source system. * The frameworks: Companies are investing €5000/year/developer for Qt and for other libraries because it is more cost-efficient than reinventing the wheel and maintaining their own custom libraries. This is an additional entry point for corporate donations if we are able to convince them that using and supporting financially the KDE frameworks is a good long term choice. I actually worked on trying to improve the image of the frameworks with https://develop.kde.org/. This still needs work on adding more content. But I think the real strength of KDE is the huge amount of users around the world and using KDE's software in various ways. Unlike Blender which targets essentially 3D artists, KDE targets everyone with education software, graphic software, developer tools, but most importantly Plasma and various KDE applications making it able to use your computer with only open-source and privacy-respecting software. I think many people would pay a bit, if we would improve our communication around how the donation help making our software even better and this will make their life easier. This are just a few ideas and probably there are more possibilities to explore. > > What would we or those developers sponsored be able to deliver to those > organisations that would justify their cost? > > The one thing I think could be done is contacting those organisations and > simply dig through their usage, needs and wants and see what we are missing. > > That said, when we start doing this we will be tying ourselves to this model > for a while which can have drawbacks too.
Re: Fundraising in KDE
Hi everyone, As Carl's email has lead to people reaching out to me with immediate worries about KDE e.V.'s financial health, allow me to provide some additional context. :-) KDE e.V.'s expenses in 2019 were higher than its income. This was by design, because the organization has accumulated large financial reserves in recent years and it is obligated, as a non-profit, to put them towards its mission statement. This scaling-up of our expenses was done carefully; we're not dependent on this additional spending to keep up our core activities. Additionally, the size of the delta is also an artifact of several large membership payments slipping to the 2020 financial year. To hammer it home: KDE e.V. is currently in the financially strongest position it has been in its history, and has more options today than it had in the past. Our most immediate concern is spending money, not fundraising. This situation is (as it should) leading to proposals for how to scale up KDE e.V.'s activities, leading to further increase in spending. One such proposal is the one mentioned by Carl, submitted by Nate. As we discuss and probe these proposals and their various potentials for becoming policy, their sustainability is under review. This is great, aand a buzz of activity around making relate.kde.org better for the longer-term future is very welcome. If you have further questions about KDE e.V.s finances, feel free to take a look at the financial statements in our annual reports[0] or to reach out to me directly. 0 = https://ev.kde.org/reports/ev-2019/ Cheers, Eike Hein - KDE e.V. Vice President, Treasurer
Re: Fundraising in KDE
> Yes, messaging -- for Blender it's easy because there are many companies > funding them for whom blender is a complement that replaces expensive > alternatives. It's different for KDE, so that needs good thinking. > > Also... Just like Blender, KDE probably needs to setup a second legal entity > that can fund freelance developers for certain projects or even outright > hire them. This part is the tricky one to me. Where is the benefit for companies to sponsor KDE? I mean we have a group of different organizations that use Plasma for example - but how can we leverage that in to donations? What would we or those developers sponsored be able to deliver to those organisations that would justify their cost? The one thing I think could be done is contacting those organisations and simply dig through their usage, needs and wants and see what we are missing. That said, when we start doing this we will be tying ourselves to this model for a while which can have drawbacks too.
Re: Fundraising in KDE
Ha, cool! I hadn't thought of this when I started thinkg we should copy blender's dev fund for Krita. I basically always look at what blender is doing to see whether it would fit for Krita. Here are some notes: On Wednesday, 23 September 2020 00:53:34 CEST Carl Schwan wrote: > 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. Currently, for Krita we get about 3,000 euros a month in donations. We have about 300,000 downloads from the website in a month, which means we get about a euro for every thousand downloads. We get about 18,000 euros through sales on steam and in the Windows store, which is what is actually paying for the core team. I've also made money for Krita through NRE funding from Intel, but that source of income has stopped (and besides, we were usually losing money on it.) > 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. Krita is losing recurring donations at a much faster rate than usual since the beginning of august. People really are looking into their subscriptions at the moment, which is totally understandable. > 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. We couldn't make civicrm work either... Despite hiring consultants. <...> > 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: > 4111 with an expiration date in the future and play around. Yay! > > 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 ;) Yes, messaging -- for Blender it's easy because there are many companies funding them for whom blender is a complement that replaces expensive alternatives. It's different for KDE, so that needs good thinking. Also... Just like Blender, KDE probably needs to setup a second legal entity that can fund freelance developers for certain projects or even outright hire them. > 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 :) Well, obviously, I'm all for it :-) -- https://www.krita.org
Re: Fundraising in KDE
Hi, On 2020-09-23 00:53, Carl Schwan wrote: 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
