[kde-community] KDE fundraisers and things we've learned

[Jaroslaw Staniek]

On Monday, 22 December 2014, Mario Fux <kde-ml at unormal.org> 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