Benjamin Melançon

It took another several months, but +1 subscribe comments were finally killed without Snowball/Leapfrog/Coordinating-community-initiative's help. I would like to think the Drupal Association blatantly ripped off this idea though :-)

From today's DA newsletter:

We matched community donations to end +1 subscribes. We've all hated the avalanche of +1, sub, and subscribe comments on issue queues around Drupal.org, so we're doing something about it. As part of our continued efforts to make using Drupal.org a great experience, we've matched community donations to solve an issue posted almost 6 years ago! Thanks to everyone who has been working on this, especially Derek Wright. Follow the progress and help with the testing: http://drupal.org/node/34496. Let this "+1 Subscribe" be your last.

Hello all interested in coordinating and funding initiatives for the good of Drupal and the world as a community, not only as individual or companies,

Barry Madore has organized a Birds of a Feather to continue the effort begun in Chicago. Apologies for using this old list (details below*); please forward this to anyone in Croydon who may be interested.

Time slot:
24 August 13:45 - 14:45
Room:
Room 334 Part 2

http://london2011.drupal.org/bofsession/community-initiatives-paying-plu...

Note: Please let me know if you are actually notified of this posting. We are having an issue with contacting members of this group You can also sign up at http://eepurl.com/db4nI and pick how involved you can be.

(Note: I am not in London but obviously am very interested in this.)

benjamin

Agaric
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The name Snowball lends itself to great graphics, like that winter Sunday comic staple of the snowball that starts tiny at the top of the hill and becomes huge at the bottom— or better, a dozen kids pushing a six foot snowball. And the first level of a project funding could be: "Snowball's chance in hell." If you double your funding goal, you get Avalanche. Giving Snowball.VisionsUnite.org the tagline: "Helping snowballs make it through hell since 2011."

Earl Miles asked for fundraising suggestions for the continued development of in-place editing. Doing this, in addition to helping get more awesomeness into the Drupal universe, would greatly help kickstart the effort to begin the cultural shift in the community toward self-investment.

Hi Earl!

At DrupalCon Chicago a whole bunch of people tried to start planning a better infrastructure for coordinating community initiatives, including with funding. Barry Madore of Advantage Labs is at DrupalCon London one of those continuing the work.

The idea is to be Kickstarter-like but better adapted for Free Software and interested parties finding each other over time, allowing more flexibility with revisions to the amounts needed and the deliverables planned, and potentially more integrated with other community resources in terms of credit for supporting.

I think Kickstarter would work for you in this case but i'd be honored if you would be one of the pilot projects of this initiative, which would accept tax-deductible donations directed to open source development. A lot of details have to be worked out but the

Thanks,

benjamin, agaric

In late 2008, a founder of FossFactory pitched Collective funding, design and development of Drupal projects to the Marketing of Drupal group on g.d.o. Very much what we are trying to do here. And nothing happened. One significant difference is that they were a for-profit venture. Another difference that shouldn't matter, but we are a tad insular: their site is not Drupal. (It is open sourced and PHP.) The comments to the thread make further points.

The discussion at Module "Black-Hole" revival, especially by dahacouk and myself, predates this and presents clearly the needs we are trying to address.

And the most recent, Supporting Sponsorship for Drupal Contribution, posted in the Prairie Initiative group.

Drupal funding and training initiatives (a listing)

Funding Dojo (a lot of pushback against any focus on money!)

Funding Usability and d.o. Redesign Work

Setting up a dual-purpose dedicated fund?

Fund raiser & community service manager | Drupal associaiton

Drupal sites raising funds/providing resources for Haiti earthquake victims

Marketplace for Module Development and Improvement– pooling resources of developers

BrainStorming about how Drupal is able to "compete" with community product usable out of the box

Structuring and sustaining community-driven projects BoF

Fund the ability to use external URLs with the Audio module -- A successful Chipin!!

DruBB - Proposals, Features and Funding! -- Charity raised (or said was close to raising) the money for this.

More background: http://data.agaric.com/raw/funded-free-software

Derek Wright explaining that bills don't pay themselves:

http://drupal.org/node/34496#comment-3805550

We should run this campaign, maybe with a matching grant, before we even have any software. It is just too obvious and long-standing and high profile a need to pass up.

To do that though we do need to better define and brand the initiative codenamed Leapfrog, for coordinating community projects / funding free software. OpenSource.VisionsUnite.org ?

(I don't care if Webchick is afraid of developers not volunteering their time once they start to get paid, that boat has already shipped here. I wrote in 2007, "Yes, I'm worried about what happens when you inject money where things were volunteer. I hope that instead funding particular improvements will support, and indirectly reward, the volunteer code and patches that are central to open source free software development." A little bit more plan behind the design of Leapfrog and a little less mere hope there would be good, i'll admit.)

Discussed with Nena W. Wong

Community, non-profit operated site

(at software.visionsunite.org or some other domain owned by a non-profit and operated for the community)

Features

1. Exchange Platform listing projects a. Drupal Contributions – Free Posting b. Private Project – Posting Fee
2. Directory of Vendors
3. General Donation Fund

Incentives to Donate/Participate

1. Tax Deduction [research needed]
2. Discounts
3. Badge/Karma
4. Developer “tips”
5. Priority of Donation Fund Projects

Payments

1. Upfront
2. After Project Done

Third party (including Paid) Features

(To be provided by vendors on separate sites with some degree of integration.)

1. Project Management
2. Scope of Work a. Group Project b. Branches of Scope of Work
3. Points to Recruit Buyers
4. Project Management Tools (Open Atrium, Webenabled)
5. Repository Hosting
6. Dispute Resolution
7. Payment Processing and Fund Management
8. Hosting

GroupXE/Vendor Integration Features

1. Share Listings
2. Share Points
3. Handle Payments

Because we couldn't quite settle on what to call the community coordinated initiatives / funding free software / open collaboration site we were talking about, Kathleen Murtagh and i codenamed it Leapfrog (for what it will allow free software to do to proprietary software).

List moved to book/wiki page so others can signup

Original list:

• Formal Requirements - Kathleen Murtagh
• Information architecture - Mitchell Tannenbaum (with participation from Claudina Sarahe and others)
• Wireframes - Mitchell Tannenbaum
• Design - Romy (Carolyn Hong)
• Development - Kathleen, Benjamin, ... "the community"
• Theming - Claudina, Romy ... ?

All these are volunteer positions (and not everyone has even formally assented to their assignment!) so please feel free to lighten the load by getting involved.

Base functionality:

• Posting visions
  • goal & values (values can be re-used?)
  • [insert magic collaborative project planning tools here? so as to define needs]
  • needs
  • time (according to skill/ability, such as moving)
  • resources (according to type, such as money or office space)
• Sharing available time and resources (and pledging them to specific visions)
  • same time and resources and categories as available when posting needs for a vision
• Collaborative planning
• Project management
• Tracking and report back of vision results

Add link to scholarships for London here http://chicago2011.drupal.org/news/drupalcon-chicago-scholarship-recipie...

Background

• Lots of background notes on Funded Free Software with links to apparently more than three years of the same idea.
• Drupal Union/Foundation: http://itsmisscs.com/node/3