[Ardour-Dev] Sponsorship

[Patrick Shirkey]

Paul Davis wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-11-18 at 11:36 +0100, Harold wrote:
>
>   
>> US$ 50
>> US$ 40
>> US$ 30
>> US$ 25
>> US$ 21 <- mine!
>> US$ 20
>> US$ 20
>> US$ 10
>> US$ 10
>> US$ 10
>> US$ 10
>> US$ 5
>> US$ 5
>>
>> If the top 5 sponsored mantis issues were in a block on ardour.org, maybe
>> they will draw some more attention and some more 'drive' to keep them in
>> the top 5...
>>     
>
> this is an excellent idea.
>
> the current scale of sponsorship is all wrong for the existing developer
> base. i have no doubt that there are skilled programmers in bolivia,
> hindustan and rwanda who would be very happy to spend the hours needed
> to implement any of these requests and receive the sums listed. the
> problem is that as a programmer in the "first" world, it is hard to
> justify spending more than 1 hour or two on *any* of these issues at
> present. last time i looked, none of them were 1 hour projects. 
>
> there are several ways out of this: more sponsors, sponsors willing to
> pay more, developers willing to be paid less. not sure which one wins.
>
> i will look into the block idea. shouldn't *too* hard to create some PHP
> that rips the data out of mantis' SQL DB.
>
>   
(I don't know how much of this is already in place with the mantis 
donations system)

In addition it would be useful for people to know how much needs to be 
raised in order to get a feature implemented. This is a time/money 
estimate that would have to come from the dev team when a feature is 
requested.

It could be displayed next to the pledges so that people know how close 
the feature is to being on the priority list.

That way when the pledges are getting close to target the feature will 
gain momentum as people will bump up their pledges to make sure it hits. 
You could also enable a dev plan whereby partial pledges would justify 
starting on phase 1 to partially implement the feature to get testing 
and feedback for future modifications/development.

This could be something like:

30% of the target enables phase 1 dev - skeleton proof of concept
60% enables phase 2 - modifications, body
100% enables phase 3 - debug, Q/A rollout of finished product

Of course this makes the whole payment process very transparent and you 
may not want that information being publicly accessible but it's 
probably one of the only ways to truly monetize the dev process without 
getting a big sponsor on board or relying on people to donate their 
time/skills.

This whole process is effectively what you do for a larger sponsor 
anyway just not in public.



Cheers.

-- 
Patrick Shirkey
Boost Hardware Ltd.