Fundraising and Donations and Financing. Oh My!

[patdavid]

This is really a continuation of the MIDI Controller for darktable topic. I wanted to shift gears to this topic so as not to pollute that one.

Midi Controller for Darktable

Well, my more serious answer would be, should someone try to collect money for such hardware I would suggest going for a regular MIDI device that is already supported by Linux. Adding support to darktable would be enough work already, reverse engineering USB protocols and writing a kernel driver would be too much work.

In that thread, @ukbanko asked the relevant question about why we might not have a central ‘fund’ for things like this when it comes up. Indeed.

Technically, anyone is free to donate using PayPal, but it’s not something I really push or talk about much (I’d much rather folks be focusing on having fun, learning, and sharing). It is really relevant to this idea, though.

Two related thoughts about this:

1. Shared resources.
   I’ve thought it might be a neat idea to possibly have some resources in rotation for folks to use as needed. A sort of “Lending Library” of things like (for example) a spectrometer/colorimeter, color charts, whatever else might be useful? Again, this is just a general idea I had.

2. Purchasing stuff.
   Relevant to the midi controller thread is that if we wanted support for something, then we either need to write the support ourselves - or get the hardware to willing folks. In that thread @houz seemed like he might be interested in helping, and pointed to existing supported hardware like the Korg Nano controllers as something that would likely make sense (it’s only $59usd, too).

So, does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Would a General fund make sense? Or would it make more sense to target a specific thing (like the midi controller)?

I want to be transparent. Paypal is great and easy, but opaque. With a little bit of work I think I could probably create some recurring donations using PayPal pretty easily (including one-time donations tied to specific items - like “Donate to get a Korg for support”).

Something like gofundme, indiegogo, or patreon are a little more transparent, but will also take a bigger cut of the donations.

[ukbanko (keith)]

Pat, off the top of my head, I would think we would need two funds.

1. To pay for the running of the site, as it expands (without those pesky adds)
2. A general fund, to help the devs with bits of hardware or specialist bits and bobs.
   Keep it simple at the start and see how it develops.

[paperdigits (Mica)]

However you’d like to do it is OK with me. I’d personally like the route that puts the most money towards things here, which would probably be PayPal. 10% off the top from Paterson/indiegogo et al seems like too much, especially given that we’d probably only raise a few hundred dollars or so.

Really personally, I hope http://snowdrift.coop gets going soon. I like the people, I like the idea, and I like the implementation.

[Jonas_Wagner]

I usually do some donations to the software projects I use regularly (or think are awesome like blender & ardour) at the end of the year. The last time I checked the DT people didn’t any donations (which I understand, I don’t accept donations for my tools either). In any case I’d be happy to give a bit of money to pixls.us and/or darktable.

[ukbanko (keith)]

Re reading my post, it looks wrong
After reading @paperdigits post I have to agree most funds should go to the main site.
I didn’t realise Pixls had a donate button, so don’t be shy in promoting it