Once a year, say during November, there should be a feature ranking donation month.
During this month, with every donation you can rank up to ten feature requests.
At the end of the month, Qubes OS team will decide which features to go forward with and which to reject.
If all of your rankings are rejected, then they must return the donation to you.
If even one of them is selected, then they can keep the donation with the guarantee they will implement said feature within a year or before the next ranking month.
If you chose to rank nothing, then they can keep your donation no matter what.
During this month, donations will be capped per IP in order to hopefully prevent wealthy individuals from controlling the future of Qubes OS.
Once again, I know I am shaking things up, and I expect criticism, I only ask that you also try to think of ways this could work as well, instead of just criticizing.
I am really curious what kind of amounts we can expect when people donate. My naive and perhaps cynical assumption is that people generally don’t donate more than $100 and you generally won’t get more than 100 people donating if you do one of these drives. In that case you end up with $10 000 which probably is enough for a couple of features but it’s not close to a engineers salary for a year. It might be that donations from users is a doomed funding model for a project that isn’t of a mega size. Correct me if I’m wrong but most FOSS projects live and die by their corporate donors, no? You don’t really see grass roots funding usually. Another issue is that it’s not stable, you generally want to have a stable income when you hire someone since they’ll be a continual cost but donations are flaky.
Well I agree that’s the current model, mostly relying on corporate donors but I’m hoping things like this will change that.
Personally, I could see myself spending $1000 a year but maybe that’s just me.
As for the stability maybe it should then be a multi-year pledge for big features and single-year for small features. Or we could also throw in a take x dollars every week/month system similar to how people do for investing in stocks (not that this would be an investment). I could see people giving 1-3% of their paychecks for a feature they desperately want.
Also you would hire the developer on a contract basis, like you’re here for one year, we can’t guarantee a future salary but if things go well at the next donation month we might re-up your contract.
Of course you could be right and this doesn’t bring in much, but it could also be a game changer, especially in the long run after you get past initial setup.
I’m curious how many people attend the summit and pay for the on site ticket, those numbers could help project how successful this proposal would be.
As for calculating the developer’s salary, you would take 70% of the weekly/monthly pledges as reliable and the remaining 30% unreliable. You would base their salary on the 70%+the full in advance donations and leave the remaining 30% as an end of year bonus/severance/backup source.
Also, if the result was weak you’d hire someone part-time, so for each feature you would list a part-time time-frame and a full-time time-frame. Users could select whether they would support the part-time time frame with their donation, and there would be two funding minimums for each feature.
One neat thing about this is if they see that their feature isn’t going to reach it’s minimum, they’ll donate or pledge more towards the end of the month.
What do you think about instead just having a big board of potential features with an estimated budget requirement and the ability for people to donate to that feature specifically?
If the feature is implemented you’d pay, if it’s not; within a certain amount of time you get your money back.
I like that it’s simpler and easier to implement but I also like the urgency/ranking/weekly pledge aspects of my version. I guess I could put both to the Qubes OS team sometime next week and let them decide, I’m fine with either.
Of course that’s assuming they reply to me this time, RIP dreams =p.
-30-40 cents of every dollar goes to the general development of Qubes OS
I think the main reason they disallow feature requests is because they don’t want the general development to suffer, this way they would hopefully get much more donations overall and still be able to use a good chunk for general development
I think you can bypass affiliation with the core team entirely: just organize this event in the community and post bounties. If bounty is large, it will attract attention. It also skips the overhead of moving the money around and returning them: such an event may induce overall loss due to transfer fees in spite of donations.
That is my pet project. With two notable differences compared to what is discussed here: first, developers post requests, not users. We already have feature requests for users on github.
Second - no guarantees. It should be a community grant system, not a store. Engineering tasks are famous for being hard to estimate. If you want guarantees post a bounty, use a smart contract, hire a freelancer on a platform with built-in escrow… Options are plentiful.
p.s. I probably should post a more thorough description since we’re here already. Tell me what you think or if you have questions or any criticism.
First, nobody requires the patron to fund the whole requested amount. Just like with donations, you can give sum as small as your payment processor allows you to. Don’t trust the guy, but like the idea? Throw in a single dollar. Very ignorable for you, an important sign that there is gold in the hill for the other side.
Second, the system is meant to help the developers that have ideas they already want to implement. Nothing stops the developer from starting to work on the project or releasing a small proof of concept even when no funding have been granted. Hell, you can post funding requests for specific features of a project you already a developer of, people like @arkenoi with his liteqube and QWT could benefit from that. People already know you, product and “street cred” already exist.
There is an argument that this is just a complicated way to donate, and it may be true, but what I like is that it lets people vote with their money, and lets developers post their ideas (which I believe may have a tendency to be better than user ideas). Highlight to the user what they might get in exchange, and tell the dev what people want to have.
There are other advantages to this approach. It should be easy to implement with already existing software using limited community resources, it helps aggregate many qubes-adjacent projects in a single place, it doesn’t deter developers (including core devs, of course) from participating with binding agreements…
p.s. you already mentioned monero’s ccs. What do you think we could grab from there?
I feel like someone more experienced/knowledgeable/trustworthy should organize that, I’m just going to send to the Qubes OS team by end of next week and see what happens. I think I’ll refactor the whole thing as an event system though so thanks. If they ignore/reject it, I’ll report back here in case anyone wants to organize an event independently.
Does your project allow for weekly/monthly pledges? I think that’s important too because giving $5 a month is also ignorable for each person but if enough people do it that could help
Yeah this sounds like a cool idea, the only other thing I would suggest is some sort of pooling or ranking method. The one shortcoming of these systems I feel is that each person will put their money somewhere and almost nothing will get done because each individual item is lacking enough funding. Whereas with some pooling system you don’t necessarily get exactly what you wanted but at least something moves forward. Although this could be a later stage implementation if I’m right and you could just do it as you planned at first, just thought I’d mention it.
I think you’re right that there is a good chance that developers have better ideas than users, at least in some cases. I think the low stakes donation model is a good idea, chipping in $1 as encouragement is cool.
I think not having an escrow makes the idea way more feasible and easy to implement, way less logistics and platforms etc. You could in theory just have it be on the forum. It’s probably more of a cultural project than a technical one, or at least I’d expect the culture to be the bottleneck originally.
I think a escrowe’d pool is the way to go for any serious amount of money, just like monero.
Make the proposal outline what the release conditions of the money is and how much is required for it to start. People donate to an pool behind an escrow and if enough is allocated the person can start work (or they can start work whenever they want) and if they complete it the pool releases the funds.
No reason the escrow needs to be complex, you could theoretically just have a third party guy that both parties trust be the holder of the money and have a clear contract for when the money is to be released.
Bitcoin makes this all technically simple instead of having to use paypal or stripe.
I also think encouraging an internet culture where we send small amounts of money to each other for small reasons would be great. In general the internet needs more money flowing around between people rather than it all being ad-driven or B2C stuff.
I would just add that the money is released in two stages, a small initial part so the developer feels the good faith/is motivated. And then the vast majority of it when they finish the job.
Also, it sounds like your system could integrate with mine in that it could be a yearly event where the forum poster collects the money and hires someone.
The reason I suggest this is because we shouldn’t work against each other, rather than have two all year boards that compete, we should let otter2 be the all year board that collects small amounts and ours be the big money drive once a year. The other distinguishing things would be the user driven requests and we don’t accept weekly/monthly pledges in order to have a guaranteed sum and to leave that to otter2’s project.
Just a rough version would be
Create forum post as follows
-Title: “If you could use money to control the future of Qubes OS, what would you want and how much would you donate?”
-Content:
"-Don’t forget to include the currency
-Out of respect for the general development of Qubes OS, 30 cents of every dollar should go as a normal donation to the Qubes OS team
-Recurring donations should go to <Insert Otter2’s Project>
"
After a while, tally the results
Post the tally and consider asking “Would you any of you consider switching your theoretical donation to one of the front-runners”
Tally the final results and ask people if they would trust you to pool the funds and make it happen
If they don’t trust you, ask someone to step up
Have you or said person do it
Repeat every year with title change “future of Qubes OS In 20XX”
Would any of you three be interested in creating or administering a system as follows?
Base Idea (from Nexus’s reply on my old thread) : Give titles/badges to those who are monthly Qubes OS donors, just as like a vanity thing, not as a ticket to premium support (you would stress that while giving the title)
Purpose: This might lead to increased donations, or just be a nice way to reward donors
Method 1) They provide a screenshot or pdf printout of a recurring donation to a volunteer moderator
Method 2) Direct integration with Qubes OS Donation system
And I was thinking a scheme like
$5-$19 - Monthly Donor
$20-$49 - Good Monthly Donor
$50-$99 - Great Monthly Donor
$100-$299 - Amazing Monthly Donor
$300-$499 - Legendary Monthly Donor
$500+ - Godlike Monthly Donor
Either currency agnostic to be fair to smaller economies or based on the EUR/CAD to avoid people using smaller currencies to enhance their title
Thank you for taking the time to read this and I totally understand if you’re not interested, just thought I’d put it out there!
Also just a side note for michael, what do you think of the ideas in this thread?
That sounds good, but if there is popular demand for higher tiers I think at some point it should be considered. And I don’t want to edit the post until the others see it, so I’ll just say that to match what you’ve said, I’d base it all on the EUR, change amazing to $100+ (essentially 100 USD), and drop Legendary+Godlike.
I’m not interested and I don’t think flagging individuals is the right approach.
This kind of system would need an approval from other forum members, IMO.
I don’t like this idea because that’s not how I think “donations” should work, but I have to admit this kind of thing is quite common so my opinion is not really important here.