Fundraising in KDE

[Michał Policht]

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
>