@Jehan Thank you volunteering to help me the open collective account and being a true third party to help keep it organize and me accountable.
@odysseywestra I’m not only a third-party by the way, but even at times a (small time) MyPaint contributor.
In any case, I’m happy to help. I was a bit sad to see the low (or even near absence of) activity around MyPaint for 2 years. So it’s nice if it can get back.
The one thing I need help is creating tiers
Tiers are things like “Backer” vs. “Sponsor” vs. “Donation” in the current page? If so, my advice (from years of doing crowdfunding myself and having made many of the possible mistakes about it) is to keep it simple. Don’t go and do complicated stuff. Most people are just happy to donate and aren’t there for rewards or complicated process.
So yeah the current tiers seem fine to me. Unless I misunderstood what tiers are on OpenCollective and you were talking about something else.
Right now it’s mainly being used to cover the costs of the domains and in the future will be used to cover the costs of the community fourms and costs for github if any. If you are okay with helping with that
Sure. It’s sad if all the funds do are supporting costs (which should be fairly minimal). I was hoping your goal would have been to be able to fund developers like yourself or any others who would make MyPaint into a great painting application.
Of course you’d have to develop funding (right now it’s too low for this), but if you tell explicitly people that they can help MyPaint to be developed more actively, I know you can raise more funds than currently (where development has been mostly abandoned for years).
Anyway whatever you decide to do with funds, I’m happy to help with my voice. These days, I’m not sure I can help a lot with code as my hands are very full with GIMP. But helping on the admin side is not a problem (I definitely know the “accountability” problem as I am doing similar process on GIMP and always want to get others to help me by at least voicing their concerns).
how open collective works and whether you want to use it for GIMP. If you do, I’ll be happy to be part of that collective too.
I don’t know more than this how OpenCollective works. As you saw, I created my account just now for you (I have heard of OpenCollective for years but never had to subscribe). Though I’d be happy to discover the internal working with you as we go.
And we don’t use it for GIMP nor plan to (at this point in time at least). We are also working on improving our funding in order to be able to make developer grants and better spend our funds, but by tightening our links with the GNOME Foundation right now.
By the way I’d be happy to discuss with you about our own plans at GIMP if that can help you organize and have ideas. GIMP is clearly in a different situation though, but I also have much more generic knowledge on funding because I studied a lot what others FLOSS projects have been doing and also because of experience with our Libre Art project where we started from scratch.
So yeah basically I can advise, I can give my voice to validate spending (or raise concerns), and also share experience. I was mostly just happy to see that MyPaint project may have been looking for a bit of sustainability and I want to support the project in that.