[haiku-inc] Re: Fresh funding sources
- From: "Adrien Destugues" <pulkomandy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-inc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 04 Mar 2015 15:14:09 +0000
> Fresh funding sources definitely needs to be found, but it is important to
> keep in mind that people
> are less likely to give money if they think their money will not have a
> direct 'cause and aftect'.
"definitely"? why? There currently isn't anyone willing to do a contract for
Haiku, inc, as far as I know. And there is some money available, as I guess
donations continue to come, and there is no contract currently running. So
maybe there should be a discussion on how to spend the available money, before
discussing about how to get even more money?
Also, better communication on how the money is used (even after the donations
are made) sounds like it could work. I think Haiku, inc. failed on that aspect,
and indeed, that may have stopped some people from donating (or failed to
attract more). But it doesn't need to be an upfront target ("here is what we
want to spend the money on"). It can also be exposing what was already achieved
with previous donations. We do have some nice work to show that was done during
contracts, including our package manager, our web browser, our media player,
and a part of the Locale Kit. Showing this "here is what we could do already,
give us more money so we can continue this" can work as well to get donations.
Of course if there is a "bigger" project being planned, communication about it
can't hurt.
Currently, it is not Haiku inc. role to draft such projects. People running the
org have always been very careful about this, in order to let the project
member make the decisions. The org is just a tool to manage the money. Maybe
this needs to change, but it is a much bigger change than just setting up an
account on some crowdfunding website.
>
> That means that less people will give much less money to a 'call to action'
> that simply asks
> "donate to Haiku", compared with a more targeted 'call to action' which asks
> you to "donate to
> Haiku so it can contract a devoper to release beta1".
But to do this you need a developer who wants to do it. Either this must be
agreed on beforehand with one of the existing devs (most of them are ready to
work at a lower price than they would ask for in a purely "work" project), or
massively scale up the needed amount of money to attract and hire a 3rd-party
developer, with the risk that he has problem integrating with the existing
team, doing things "the Haiku way", etc. A normal developer contract for
someone with the required skills would cost 2 or 4 times more than what I was
getting paid last year. It can work, but it is a wise way to spend the money?
(I'm not saying it isn't, but this needs to be discussed)
>
> The more targeted the 'call to action' is, the more people will give. It is
> pretty much marketing
> and political communication 101.
But it comes with a contract of actually doing what was advertised. There are
two problems with that:
1) Handling of failures: what to do if the hired developer can't actually
deliver as promised? Cancelling the payment is an unrealistic option for
big/long contracts (no one will want to take the gamble). But you can't take
the money from the donators and still not deliver.
2) Lack of flexibility: my contract for example was originally on WebKit, but
then I worked a lot on Haiku to make WebKit work better, and switched to a
"beta 1" focus after some time. Such things are not possible if the contract
has a set and "locked" goal.
--
Adrien.
Other related posts:
