[Ardour-Users] Could this solve Ardour's financial headache?

[Mark Knecht]

On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 2:18 PM, Stephen Doonan <stephen.doonan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Christopher Stamper wrote:
>>>
>>> * Donate for your favorite features -- Perhaps a list of features
>>> that developers are working on or plan to work on, or which are
>>> requested by users, can appear on a web page. Each feature would
>>> have a "Donate to  this
>>> feature" button (linked to PayPal for example), and developers
>>> would give priority to and work more on the features that receive
>>> the most  donations.
>>> (I would probably donate fairly regularly to MIDI-related features,
>>> for example).
>>>
>> How is this different than the Mantis feature request donation? I don't
>> understand.
>>
>>
>> The difference is that this guy hardly knows what 'mantis' is... ;-)
>>
>> And I doubt that I'm alone.
>
>
>
> You're not alone, Christopher. :-)
>
> I had to search for mantis too by clicking random links at Ardour.org, and
> then, Mantis looked like a bug-tracking tool, not a revenue generating
> donations site. I still can't find where or how to donate at Mantistb.org.
>
> If the idea is a good one (vote with your money for the features you want),
> then, as Thomas Vecchione said, the issue is visibility. The
> feature-donations webpage _link_ ought to be visible prominently on the home
> page of Ardour.org, with perhaps a little text to encourage viewers to click
> the link, and the page itself should have a layout that makes its function
> almost immediately obvious just from its graphical content and layout, not
> buried somewhere in an off-site bug-tracking website. ;-)
>

Or an active pulldown menu in Ardour itself that tracks what features
are requested and how many dollars have been contributed so far, etc.
If you could see this in Ardour it might prompt more users to go make
a contribution.

- Mark