Fundraising ideas

Diaspora started as a kickstarter project. And everybody seems to be a fan of crowdfunding right now. Nothing to say against that. But I'd like to point your sight to different sources of money that are more oldschool, but still quite efficient.

• In germany we have the bmbf that is able to help research on communication technologies: http://www.bmbf.de/de/1398.php
• The european union commission makes investements to all kind of groups and technologies. This is quite complicated, the only url I found to that is here: http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/portal/page/fp7_calls;efp7_SESSION_ID=GnzjSfdGWsLQYZ5Q5SNhnh1tksg7lHZJg7S9nhShKLLtfWsVgPDv!-394695172#
• Mozilla Foundation gives money to all kind of open source projects, when they are worth it.

The FSF is not aiming to help special projects with money, but with advice and jurisdictional advocacy. So they might be a good option.

Main problem for us is: we would definitely need to have a diaspora foundation - some institution to get the funded money.

Main problem for us is: we would definitely need to have a diaspora foundation - some institution to get the funded money.

Did you miss this announcement, Rsamus? Where have you been, man? ;)

I think we should first clear out the funds thingy with the FSSN - how funds are stored, who gets to call their usage, who is our contact, etc. Then we put a donation page on the project site and tell our users that they can now donate.

After this we go for funding outside.

@jasonrobinson I'm not suggesting we start raising funds until we know exactly how it works, but that now we know a structure is in place (or is soon to be) which will enable Diaspora to raise funds, let's start talking about why and how we might want to raise funds so that when we know exactly how it's going to work, we'll be ready with ideas.

Low goals on indiegogo might be good. Like $1000 every 3 months but not at too close intervals because they'll lose attraction

An idea to have money: we could edit a Creative Commons book will the public content posted on diaspora*. We could call it "The diaspora* experience" or something like that, and put on each page a beautiful photo and a nice quotation, we see dozens of each every day on diaspora*. The whole book would be under the CC-BY license, and we could propose to people to buy it if they want to support the project. This would be at the same time a way to have money and to promote diaspora*, presenting the awesome content you find inside the network.

Hey guys,

this is my first post here. :)

I think the next big step for diaspora* should be a crowdfunding campaign aimed at getting developers working on diaspora on a regular basis.

What I have in mind is not the usual crowdfunding campaign but a campaign more focused on developers and community. It's about paying a developer (or more if enough money is provided) to write code for diaspora* regularly.

The concept is as follows:

1. We set a fixed time period. I'd say 6 months. (could be more, could be less)
2. developers that are willing to work full-time (or part-time) on diaspora* for the next time period apply to the community
3. either the community or the developers themselves propose a plan what should be happening in the code in this time frame
4. the community decides which developer(s) to take in for the time period
5. crowdfunding for the timeframe starts with the goal to have a salary for the programmer(s), also mentioning the plan that was laid out.
6. work starts, programmer(s) get monthly salary through diaspora* foundation / FSSN

7. community continuously evaluates work and changes

8. repeat.

The goal is not to gain a huge chunk of money by one crowdfunding, but rather a continuous flow of "lower" money chunks.

This way the community gets an outlook on what should be happening and might be more inclined to donate and sees that work is done much faster. The developer(s) are able to work full time on the code. Everybody wins.

I think it's also a good job for students, especially for someone doing a thesis or something like this.

There are a lot of variables that can be changed in this model according to the scale and bits and pieces should be more specific, but I think it is a good approach to get continuous work into a free software project like diaspora*.

What do you think?

The idea is good, as I personaly would like to see more progress on D* but lack time and skills to help directly :(

BUT you should keep some more aspects in mind:
- D* was already crowdfunded with big rumours but "failed" to become what most people expected when they donated
- Who can judge if a dev that applies is able/skilled to solve certain bugs/features within the given period?
- A talented freelancer might earn around 100.000€ a year (just to get a dimension), how can we compete?

With that in mind, I like to suggest something like http://www.freedomsponsors.org to put bounties on certain bigger features (interserver sync, chat, UI design, ...) or even smaller bugs.
Anyway, this process needs management, so what does the D* Foundation say?

To be really honest, here is my opinion about the diaspora* project at the moment:

We are currently improving the software, very slowly, waiting for motivated devs to come (and that's not really often, I think because of so many different technologies + a big lack of technical documentation), pick up a bug or a feature, develop it, and when we see that some months past for the last release and enough stuff has been modified, we release a new version, and start again. It looks like only a few work (and it is), but reviewing + maintain gem and libs + refactor the old code is already a full time job and Florian and Jonne are doing this very well (thank you guys).

BUT, we don't need money if we stay organized like that. In fact, we should really not do a crowdfunding campaign, because people will expect more progress if they give money.

That's why so many persons say that the diaspora* project is dead. Because there is no roadmap, no real organization of the work, no vision for the future, nobody behind it. We need someone to stand up and say "Okay, I'm going to work on diaspora* and make it awesome". But that's not enough. Because somebody (full time) alone would become crazy, waiting weeks to have a review of his pull request, feedback on his proposition, decisions on controversial points taken.

So, here is where we are. We are a cool project, we're still experimental and we will not be able to compete against Facebook. We can improve the way diaspora* go forward, reducing the number of technologies used, completing the documentation, to allow more devs to contribute, patch and improve diaspora*. And we can continue to do that without money and promoting discretely.

And if one day, someone come and say "I'm going to devote my next 6 months to the diaspora project, I have a precise idea of what I want to do and how I will do it, and I need money for that", then, we will be able to vote on the idea and the way to do it, and then, we could make a crowdfunding campaign. Before that, to earn money is useless.

I agree with what @flaburgan have said.