From your original post : Microsoft’s $5,000 grant will be handled independently; details will be forthcoming soon on that.
What did Microsoft do ? Did they send their share of the money too ?
I think they should return the money to you.
Worse than them not using it is that you gave money to yet another undifferentiated wiki. Do we need another? Looked at another way, is it likely that THIS particular wiki will make a dent in wiki-space? I’d give money towards something that either:
a) breaks new ground or creates a new category
b) something that, if they had additional funds, had a chance of getting on the map in their category
Regards
Well, they can always use the money to move out of their parents’ basement.
May be Jeff, they need good developers or architechts more than they need money.
They might find skills of people like you more usefull.
Bug bounties. If a $100 reward is offered for the solving of the top 50 problems, that takes care of the whole amount, and does a great job of improving the application. Not only that, but it’ll get the project a bit more publicity, too, both from programmers and your run-of-the-mill online gawker.
Massive advertising blitz!
As in, put windows on all the pillows at the conference, or something equally fun.
These kind of things require some forethought and connections though. It make some time to stir them up.
They can print up some nice flyers, buy some useless chatchkies (sp) with their logo and website - hand them out at OSS developer cons try to attract more support. Maybe buy gear needed to film/record/edit/burn demo CD/DVDs.
If time is valuable - think what things $5,000 would get you that could save time (i.e. if you are stick on a desktop a laptop may be a good pick, maybe a better/faster printer, IDE license. Convention/symposium/training admission/airfare? (especially if dome developer is stick on adapting a new technology - class, video, books to get up to speed on AJAX or something)
Hire out the neglected parts of the project. These are inevitably:
-
QA and QC (There’s a difference).
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Interface design by someone who actually knows how to do it.
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Documentation (By someone who has not been corrupted by Microsoft style documentation)
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Installation (Loop back to QA)
These 4 things are usually what maims or kills otherwise good software projects - open source or not.
Cheers!
I like ScrewTurn wiki, but it could be better. Compare it to Deki wiki. Hiring a good designer would be a good use of 5K. Their homepage is terrible. Other than that, I say send Dario to the PDC.
Maybe for future donations, open source projects should apply for grants for specific things. However, just because they haven’t spent the money yet, doesn’t mean it won’t go to good use.
Also, as to the repeated comments about hiring people, as was commented before I don’t think $5000 (while a rather large sum of money to be donated in one piece) is likely to be able to buy anything remotely resembling a useful overhaul of the design of an application.
It’s certainly not enough for a complete overhaul, but should cover a basic streamlining or a new logo (without too many revisions involved).
Pay for a new design for their site and a new logo for the screwTurn Wiki (maybe via a contest, like you’ve done with stack overflow)
Good god no – contests are antithetical to the design process and just a nicer word for spec work, which most designers worth their salt will avoid like the plague.
Well I think money can help, but it has to reach a tipping point. $5K, while alot, doesn’t solve the issue of time. But $80,000+ a year, and a OSS developer can start considering going full time.
$5000 doesn’t buy you a whole lot of time.
Jeff,
Don’t jump to conclusions. Is it me, or are you making a false logical leap here?
When you say contributing money isn’t an effective way to advance an open source project
You are making the leap that contributing money doesn’t help any open source project.
And that’s just not true.
There are plenty of well-organized open source projects that need money every day.
The GNOME project posted a budget with a significant shortfall this year. I am sure they could use the money. They are just one instance. The Free Software Foundation allows for both general giving and directed giving to fund specific goals and projects such as the GNUstep Project, the GNUpdf Project and the Mailman Project. The Apache Foundation accepts donations and, at $5000, you could have had Bronze sponsorship status.
These organizations use the money to manage their infrastructure, support office staffs, hire fellows and interns, and run conferences.
I think you just chose badly.
I wonder if you made the mistake of not asking the organization if they needed
Perhaps the problem is that it’s too much money? If I were to receive 2,500 I would probably buy a car, but if I were to receive 2,500,000 I would probably spend a bit and leave the rest. To a project that has survived without money it’s almost the equivalent.
Maybe it’s the fact that projects are being given money without the explicit need for it. It’d be good to see you and a couple of other software professionals band together with some earnings and form a ‘Dragon’s Den’ type scenario, where Open Source Projects could pitch a request for money to you.
The project you donated to is just being retarded. Software developers time is in short supply, so you buy their time, just like any company does. It would be really easy for them to use it like summer of code does. I am currently a summer of code student so I know its easy. They just put up on their website that they are seeking say 8 weeks of full time work on their project to be reimbursed with $5000. Accept applications which state qualifications and what they would propose to work on and accomplish. Accept one and have someone get regular updates on their work and advise them. Pay them at half way and completion of their work is they actually do the work. You could split some of the money off to pay the person who has to do the advising and application stuff.
Looks like Mozilla Russia have put a bounty on some bugs, so one suggestion is to pay for known bugs to be fixed:
http://www.mozilla-russia.org/contribute/bounty-en.html
The previous commenter’s suggestion to pay for artwork sounds the most useful to me though. Many of us can code but are bad at graphic design.
I think he should give the money back to you.
There is no such thing as no strings attached. Clearly you did attach strings (open source, blah, blah, blah) and secondly the psychological principle of reciprocation means that the recipient of your gift will feel extremely obligated to provide something in return. In fact you’ve probably done more harm than good by providing this donation, at best it’s been a useless distraction for the developer.
A lot of small open source software gets written because its fun to write code. It isn’t a full time job and never will be, throwing money at one of these developers is like giving your neighbor $5k to spend on his woodworking hobby. Imagine how obligated you’d feel if that happened to you.
Having an artist paid for graphics sounds like a really good idea. Indeed, I agree with Gary. Most OpenSource projects produce software that looks little appealing compared to commercial software. E.g. see KDE. KDE 4.1 looks almost acceptable, everything before it looked rather poor. If KDE was a commercial project, already the first released had looked similar to 4.1, why? Because if it does not look appealing, people won’t buy it. Since OS software is not sold, it does not have to look appealing, thus it doesn’t.
Or Firefox. starting with Fx 3 it starts looking nice, everything before was more or less ugly (depending on which platform you used it). It might be just eye candy, but eye candy is what the user loves to see, even though the developer will say it’s a waste of time.
If they pay an artist for it, they will own the resulting graphics and can offer them under OS license again, that way everything stays OS and other OS projects are even free to copy the graphics for their apps as well, so it helps everyone, not just one single project.
Well first of f’ing all, if it’s just going to sit somewhere it shouldn’t be sitting in a bank. Put it where it can accrue interest at a rate better than %1. A CD, high-interest savings, something.
Secondly, I’m looking at their page and it’s ugly. Hire a designer to come up with a custom theme for their homepage. Have the designer create a series of themes for their wiki. I’m looking at their user themes page and there’s only one theme listed, the default theme. Maybe a lot of the pages haven’t been updated with new content and that’s why I can’t see any theme previews? Which brings me to my third point.
Hire someone to maintain update content every now and then if the authors don’t have any time. Heck if the authors don’t have time, take a week of vacation, pay them a weeks salary out of the grant, and update the content.
Maybe offer $50 a person to anyone who wants to do a Ooovo/Skype/Whatever usability session.
Sure, go to PDC, have fun. Maybe instead of snoring through sessions they could host a Screwturn user group party at PDC. Good marketing, bound to be a few users of Screwturn wiki at PDC. Maybe buy a booth at PDC?
It’s $5000, lots of opportunity for big bang or long term activities.
Open sourcers give time for free but still need to pay the bills so
- Buy Hardware
- Buy Time : Pay for someone already contributing to take time off to blitz the code
- Buy Time and Expertise : Pay for an expert to add to the project (Graphic designer, Web Designer, etc…)
- Buy enthusiasm : Pay for prizes for best contribution?