Fundraising in KDE

[Albert Astals Cid]

El dimecres, 23 de setembre de 2020, a les 0:53:34 CEST, Carl Schwan va escriure:
> 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 agree that it would very much be a good idea for KDE to pay developers.

> 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.

Yes, let's not forget that software developers are relatively expensive, I've no idea how accurate https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/it-salaries-software-developer-trends is, but i guess the numbers are not totally wrong from my own experience.

> 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. 

I agree that's one of the reasons, personally i think the lack of clear goals is another reason, there's so much money you can get with the "give us money because we're nice" message we used in stuff like the end of year campaigns.

I think it's much easier to get people to donate if you give them a more direct reason "We're going to hire this person to work on XXX".

> 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 understand what you were trying to say with this sentence, but please be careful when making blanket statements like that, you just insulted everyone that cares about accessibility and feels part of KDE by either telling them they are not part of KDE or that they don't care enough.

> 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.

Agreed.

Cheers,
  Albert