I am thinking that paid webinars given by core developers of Darktable (eg. Aurélien) would be a good way to both increase the use of Darktable and pay back the people who are putting their time and effort into improving it. I would keep the number of people small for each webinar (10-20) and the fee quite low (say 5-10 dollar/euro for 1 hour), so to optimise both interaction and accessibility. If the number of requests are high, these webinar could become a regular feature – say once or twice a week – thus providing a somewhat stable income for the developers (perhaps a more effective strategy than Patreon). The webinars could also be made available to the community at large after being recorded, but paying for participating to the live event would give you the possibility to ask questions directly and, for instance, having the developer work directly on a photo you submitted in order to show you how you could process it effectively.
I feel like I have a reasonable understanding of darktable from reading these forums/irc, Aurelien and Bruce’s videos and generally screwing around and as such would benefit more from taking an art class, but I like the technical side so here I am. I think it would be nice to have a live discussion of a difficult edit and would be willing to pay €10 for something like that (though only once or twice, since I am a poor student ).
One thing that would be tricky is that while I like PIXLS, I feel this community is not big enough for these sessions to be a regular thing, but maybe I’m underestimating.
But I don’t know if developers are interested in sacrify part of their time for that and if 50 to 100 dollars per hour would be enough reward.
Doing that once twice a week is a high compromise for people that dedicates their spare time to develope a program they love and would take a significant time of the time they dedicate to develope.
But if it is done it would be great to have webminars on how to use darktable for several porpuses from people that knows darktable deeply.
The only problem for me is that they will be in english and that is a language barrier for me.
).