IRC meeting

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Sunday 26 September 2010, LukasT.dev at gmail.com wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Thanks to Silvio Grosso, I and Dmitry have been and (are still being) very 
> generously sponsored, but that will come to an end and there's always more 
> that we can do, and maybe more people  are interested in sponsoring the 
> development of Krita. Let's give them inspiration :)

Yes, after all the business for 2.3, we need to engage the community again. After the release, I am confident that we will start building a user base that can grow enough that we can have a steady stream of small, individual donations.

And I am not at all averse to using that to sponsor students working on Krita :-). The past period has been proof enough that this works for our project.

> So far we have a donate button. I don't know how much it is used or what is 
> the status of the donations from it.

Not significantly in the past couple of months. But we haven't made a lot of noise about it, nor did we have a good, new story to tell.

> But I suppose that not much money yet.

Right :-)

> My idea is to prepare some page describing what Krita community need 
> currently.

Good idea: and when that is done, we must publicize it. Maybe add a voting button to it, that always helps. Like:

"User-readiness achievede, mission accomplished! What do you want next:"

* I will donate money to get Krita on Windows
* I will donate money for a really comprehensive manual
* I will donate money for a slap-up dinner for the Krita team at their next sprint

I'm sure Kubuntiac can make our website vote-enabled :-).

> 
> There are various areas we could mention in the page:
> 
> o Google Summer Of Code 2011
> 
> Could happen for Krita, could not of course.
> We need some list of proposals - what can be done as GSoC, does not
> have to be sponsored from community. Of course with risk that GSoC does not 
> have to happen.
> 
> o Thesis for universities
> I did thesis for Krita and I think it was really interesting.
> Let's prepare possible thesis and bachelour topics and who is willing to 
> mentor on those topics. They might have some "research" aims.
> I have some friends who can help me in my university. Some Krita hackers 
> might be interested too in thesis about Krita maybe? Or maybe you have 
> contacts for teachers who would be interested.

Could you ping your university as well? I haven't heard back from them.

> 
> We already have nice page here
> http://krita.org/component/content/article/7-krita-information/49-how-to-join-
> krita
> 
> o Community sponsored projects
> Windows installer, manual. We could discuss what are your ideas. What
> could be sponsored etc.

* Manual. We have some money reserved for editing it, but I haven't written the text yet. A manual really is important, but the problem is that our core features changed too much in the past months!

* Windows compatibility. This is technically tricky, but I want to make it a focus point for the 2.4 release. There are still quite a few windows users left, it seems, and not being on Windows feels to me sort of not daring to compete for real.

> o Krita foundation
> boud plan to setup this one. I think we are interested  to know how it will 
> work. We could leave this point to the sprint probably.

This doesn't cost very much, and I might even pay for it out of my own pockets if we can use the money we have for development, though I would prefer not to, of course! We wouldn't need this if the KDE e.V. could handle our project's needs, but they can't, and I am very uncomfortable with having the funds in my personal bank account.

> My idea is to have an IRC meeting about various projects (or we can discuss 
> this at Krita sprint, but that will be little late), who would like to work as 
> sponsored developer and what kind of forms it can have (full time, part 
> time,..). Any related questions will be answered. All community members will 
> be invited.
> 
> What do you think about it?

I think that's a very good idea. How about Thursday night, 21:00 CET? I will be away for three days starting tomorrow.


-- 
Boudewijn Rempt | http://www.valdyas.org
Ceterum censeo lapsum particulorum probae delendum esse