Re: [kde-community] KDE fundraisers and things we've learned
On Monday 22 December 2014 21:00:25 Mario Fux wrote: > > One can see it from the perspective of distracting each other and fighting > for the audience. But I'd see this as a rather destructive way of handling > this discussion. I would like to talk about the opportunities we miss(ed), > we can and should learn from each other, base new fundraisers on the what > we've learned before, use our strength like the KDE community as a social > network, the dot.kde.org as one of our bigger communication channels, so > let's crowd distribute the information for our crowd funding. We can and > will do better than we do now. It's great to see that we have increasing success with fund raisers. Last year we have raised more money with fund raisers than ever before, and that is an excellent sign that we have a community which is able to sustain the work we are doing for free software. The discussion has gone on some tangents which don't do this success justice. We should not discuss how to distribute a fixed cake, but how we can grow the cake bigger. Bruno has put it the right way, that successful campaigns demonstrate that projects are active and are doing the right things, and Boud has told the stories about how Krita reaches out to people we have never reached before. This is the stuff which I find exciting. We can build on that. It is a truism that our money is finite. But this community consistently deals with requests for money in an extremely responsible way. It actually is amazing how many people try hard to only request the money they really need, bring in own resources or try to get others to help before they ask KDE e.V. Of course we need to manage the budget of KDE e.V., but the best way we can do that is with the happy feeling that we are able to help, not with a feeling of envy or unfairness, if an active and successful project gets a good amount of support. Mario is right in saying that taking the perspective of fighting for the audience within KDE is destructive. We don't need to go down this path. We can grow our audience. We can multiply our success by working together. Fund raising is about asking for money. We should not be afraid of doing that, no matter if it's for a single application or for the overall community. If we do it with the passion for our work and with the awareness of being part of a bigger community, we can reach much more than if we try to limit and control it. > What we definitely need is better coordination and communication. What do > you think, would a fundraising workgroup help? Not really a group that's > doing a fundraising but that's there to help, coordinate and teach and > distribute their knowledge. Coordination is extremely important. It should be clear to everybody that each project and we as community are operating in a larger context. I don't think we need to introduce more formal organization here. People do want to do the right thing, and we should remove obstacles, not create new ones. We do have the kde-ev-campa...@kde.org mailing list, which is meant as the central place to coordinate fund raising campaigns. Let's try to make best use of this, invite people working on fund raisers to subscribe there and share their plans, so we can all learn and align the activities which need to be aligned. > Additionally we should add it to our Manifesto. Money is not an easy topic > but avoiding it doesn't solve the problems. And if people don't know about > certain things like that they should coordinate with KDE e.V. in the case > of money they won't. So it's on us to tell the community and tell new > members of the community. I don't think that this should be in the Manifesto. It is a very concrete issue and it is valid, but I think it is not on the level of what should be in the Manifesto. The Manifesto and other documents like the code of conduct define higher-level values, and things such as coordinating about fund raising can be derived from them. We should approach this from a pragmatic point of view of how to get things done best and do what is needed for that. This will be much more helpful than trying to nail down a documented rule. -- Cornelius Schumacher ___ kde-community mailing list kde-community@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-community
Re: [kde-community] KDE fundraisers and things we've learned
On Tue, 23 Dec 2014, Jaroslaw Staniek wrote: Well, KO GmbH wasn't involved with the Krita fundraiser at all -- that was purely a volunteer effort in the Krita community. When we're out of the 2.9 crunch, we'll have to do another one, work on that will start in January, and we really should go live with it in March. Strictly speaking, true, but what I mean: KO in this case were the enablers. Krita was a quite widely used and finished app prior to the fundraising efforts. No, definitely no. This needs to be hammered home. KO GmbH never, ever was the Krita 'enabler'. KO worked with Intel on two projects, Krita Sketch and Krita Gemini. Apart from improved Windows stability, neither project added core features to Krita. KO paid my salary, but I did things outside of Krita for KO. The core improvements for Krita that made Krita into a five-out-of-five-artist's-choice in January's ImagineFX were the work of the Krita community and the Krita Foundation. When KO was already in some trouble, one of the things we tried was to start earning money by selling support for a product: the only product that was ready for end users in our competence was Krita. So that's what we tried to do. And with a better sales team and less distractions, we would have succeeded. We also sold Krita Gemini on Steam; that's something the Krita Foundation will try to continue doing. All those Phoronix-type rumours of "krita has lost its main backer" are much exaggerated. KO never employed the majority of Krita developers, or even the most important one, because that's not me, that's Dmitry. > So risks of Catch-22 situations like these were reduced: [User] I'll start using your product and maybe even support you if you a add feature FOO; [Dev] We have this fundraising exactly for the feature FOO. [User] -EINVAL That, basically, was the problem why we, at KO, couldn't sell support for Krita. "It's awesome, if you only add this, we'll start giving you money..." Boudewijn ___ kde-community mailing list kde-community@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-community
Re: [kde-community] KDE fundraisers and things we've learned
On 23 December 2014 at 21:45, Boudewijn Rempt wrote: > On Tue, 23 Dec 2014, Jaroslaw Staniek wrote: > >> We had opportunity to learn about the positive example of Krita. I >> don't extrapolate to other projects. Fundraising for *single* >> sub-project is a part time job alone or two, with incredibly >> intelligent people knowing the domain (art), with project's brand >> present at conference booths. >> Most likely for large apps we need business partners for that to >> happen (Krita had one), to get them we need ability to align to their >> needs, whatever that means in every specific case. > > Well, KO GmbH wasn't involved with the Krita fundraiser at all -- that was > purely a volunteer effort in the Krita community. When we're out of the 2.9 > crunch, we'll have to do another one, work on that will start in January, > and we really should go live with it in March. Strictly speaking, true, but what I mean: KO in this case were the enablers. Krita was a quite widely used and finished app prior to the fundraising efforts. So risks of Catch-22 situations like these were reduced: [User] I'll start using your product and maybe even support you if you a add feature FOO; [Dev] We have this fundraising exactly for the feature FOO. [User] -EINVAL > The topics will be animation, osx, python scripting and making krita faster > than photoshop, I expect. Cool to see this phase... -- regards, Jaroslaw Staniek KDE: : A world-wide network of software engineers, artists, writers, translators : and facilitators committed to Free Software development - http://kde.org Calligra Suite: : A graphic art and office suite - http://calligra.org Kexi: : A visual database apps builder - http://calligra.org/kexi Qt Certified Specialist: : http://www.linkedin.com/in/jstaniek ___ kde-community mailing list kde-community@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-community
Re: [kde-community] KDE fundraisers and things we've learned
On Tue, 23 Dec 2014, Jaroslaw Staniek wrote: We had opportunity to learn about the positive example of Krita. I don't extrapolate to other projects. Fundraising for *single* sub-project is a part time job alone or two, with incredibly intelligent people knowing the domain (art), with project's brand present at conference booths. Most likely for large apps we need business partners for that to happen (Krita had one), to get them we need ability to align to their needs, whatever that means in every specific case. Well, KO GmbH wasn't involved with the Krita fundraiser at all -- that was purely a volunteer effort in the Krita community. When we're out of the 2.9 crunch, we'll have to do another one, work on that will start in January, and we really should go live with it in March. The topics will be animation, osx, python scripting and making krita faster than photoshop, I expect. Boud ___ kde-community mailing list kde-community@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-community
[kde-community] KDE fundraisers and things we've learned
On Monday, 22 December 2014, Mario Fux wrote: > Good morning dear KDE people > > After KDE's first fundraiser (crowdfunding attempt) in 2012 [1] we had (or > it's still ongoing) six more this year: Thanks for the update, Mario. Here's some brainstorm that was like two sentences initially ;) Your summary helps me in one extra way: I must admit I didn't know about the Kommander effort -- the whole idea of reloading it, and of course about its fundraising. I don't recall a single blog about the idea, and I read blogs very often. This case alone is an argument for improving information flow. How can we convince non-KDE (often non-FOSS) people to our ideas without first knowing our goals. No committee is needed, in this particular case *one email or blog entry more* makes the difference. Here, did anyone think about split efforts since there’s direct overlap with Kexi? Maybe it would be easier to catch this if I managed to conduct my 'Point & Click Apps' Akademy lecture. Sometimes it helps to think about coordinating of what's the Akademy content and where do we want to expand, where's the potential. As soon as we want funds, picking of what topics interest us is not enough. Also related: be *realistic*. Be focused and crazy but set reasonable goals. Start small to show success. From the results I see common KDE fund-raising is a success, per-app fund-raising rarely is, so far. GCompris gets 10% of funds now, and it's popular app with business model behind it, I'm glad I met Bruno in person. So the fund-raising is an extra thing there, not the only option. There's content that's clearly defined as separate part. The app is widely available. We generally suck at badly at availability: by not offering easy installation options for 99% of our users. Raising $12,000 for Kommander that was not in active development for years? I'd love to see that it's possible and it's a game changer - I think 10x more isn't, the task is that complex. This should be a discussion elsewhere. We had opportunity to learn about the positive example of Krita. I don't extrapolate to other projects. Fundraising for *single* sub-project is a part time job alone or two, with incredibly intelligent people knowing the domain (art), with project's brand present at conference booths. Most likely for large apps we need business partners for that to happen (Krita had one), to get them we need ability to align to their needs, whatever that means in every specific case. Finally there's a niche. many KDE apps have FOSS competition and FOSS suffers from fragmentation and the deasktop-is-dead saga. I tend to think with these folks who are rarely wrong, Krita would get similar support *even* if it was written in MFC. Enjoy learning what's important for your user base. It's so often everything but what we love, not another re-factoring nor more configuration dialogs. Learning this can be cool as a new experience. PS: There are some actions on BountySource for Kexi, these are not listed here only because they're not really fundraisers, rather means to show the cost of developing actual features. -- regards, Jaroslaw Staniek KDE: : A world-wide network of software engineers, artists, writers, translators : and facilitators committed to Free Software development - http://kde.org Calligra Suite: : A graphic art and office suite - http://calligra.org Kexi: : A visual database apps builder - http://calligra.org/kexi Qt Certified Specialist: : http://www.linkedin.com/in/jstaniek ___ kde-community mailing list kde-community@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-community
[kde-community] KDE fundraisers and things we've learned
Good morning dear KDE people After KDE's first fundraiser (crowdfunding attempt) in 2012 [1] we had (or it's still ongoing) six more this year: - For the Randa Meetings 2014 [2] - For Krita: open source digital painting | Accelerate Development [3] - For Tupi: 2D Animation Software for Everyone! [4] - Make the World a Better Place! - KDE End of Year 2014 Fundraising [5] - New Unified Graphics for GCompris [6] - Kommander [8] Did I forget one? And all these had different ratios of success. One can see it from the perspective of distracting each other and fighting for the audience. But I'd see this as a rather destructive way of handling this discussion. I would like to talk about the opportunities we miss(ed), we can and should learn from each other, base new fundraisers on the what we've learned before, use our strength like the KDE community as a social network, the dot.kde.org as one of our bigger communication channels, so let's crowd distribute the information for our crowd funding. We can and will do better than we do now. What we definitely need is better coordination and communication. What do you think, would a fundraising workgroup help? Not really a group that's doing a fundraising but that's there to help, coordinate and teach and distribute their knowledge. Additionally we should add it to our Manifesto. Money is not an easy topic but avoiding it doesn't solve the problems. And if people don't know about certain things like that they should coordinate with KDE e.V. in the case of money they won't. So it's on us to tell the community and tell new members of the community. Proposal: Addition to the Manifesto of KDE [7] and there to the Commitments section. Something like: all KDE projects coordinate their financial "work" (better wording?) with the KDE e.V. (board?) Let's improve together, share your knowledge and happy holidays Mario [1] https://pledgie.com/campaigns/18045 [2] https://www.kde.org/fundraisers/randameetings2014 [3] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krita/krita-open-source-digital- painting-accelerate-deve [4] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/tupi-2d-animation-software-for- everyone/ [5] https://www.kde.org/fundraisers/yearend2014/ [6] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/new-unified-graphics-for-gcompris/ [7] https://manifesto.kde.org [8] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/676098424/kommander-point-and-click- application-development ___ kde-community mailing list kde-community@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-community
