There has been some discussion on the team mailinglist, but a discussion here can be more productive in my opinion...

Rationale: Aegir needs more resources to keep on developing and maintenance.

/donate Text changes:

Some improvements have been applied in #1.
Can we do better?

Promoting on project pages

#2175709: Update project pages with credits

Additional donation/payment methods

#2175719: Additional donation/payment methods

Promoting after install

#2184619: Promoting after install via Support block

Related

#2138397: Highlight Flattr, Paypal or Whatever Opportunities on Issue Pages
#2138383: Highlight Gittip Opportunities on Project Page

CommentFileSizeAuthor
#9 piwik-support-block.png45.73 KBhelmo
Support from Acquia helps fund testing for Drupal Acquia logo

Comments

helmo’s picture

I've updated the /donate page today.

These two topics still need to be covered:
Additional Payment methods
Promoting on project pages

mengi’s picture

I think having more payment methods would help. I know a lot of people who have bad experiences with Paypal and refuse to use it, and some countries don't have access to Paypal.

More donate buttons would also help, or perhaps run a campaign ala Firefox/Wikipedia, where they show a message every time you visit the site asking for donations. That would be useful for people who only visit the discussion/documentation pages.

helmo’s picture

Any payment methods you prefer?

I'm intrigued by https://www.gittip.com/about/teams/

helmo’s picture

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helmo’s picture

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mengi’s picture

The ideal would be being able to take cards directly on the site. Other then that, there's amazon simple pay and google wallet for the US. I have not heard of gittip, but looks interesting.

There is also patchranger.com and flattr, but I do not have any experience with them.

helmo’s picture

Both flattr and gittip accept credit cards. I've added flattr and http://freedomsponsors.org to #2175719: Additional donation/payment methods

patchranger.com seems more like a person doing things with flattr and http://freedomsponsors.org not a platform.

helmo’s picture

Title: Funding - update /donate community page » Funding - Sustaining Aegir development
Issue summary: View changes

I'm generalizing this issue. The suggested text in (old revision was applied in #1 .

helmo’s picture

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FileSize
45.73 KB
helmo’s picture

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ergonlogic’s picture

I think we should really focus on subscription-type donations. It's much easier to see that $10/mth is easily covered many times by the efficiency boost you get from Aegir. But if you've used in for 2 years, the equivalent one-off donation would be $240, which is harder to swallow.

helmo’s picture

Issue summary: View changes
chertzog’s picture

Ive been using Stripe (https://stripe.com) for some subscription based projects, and its been great. The API is wonderful, and its pretty cheap, all things considered.

helmo’s picture

Canonical has an interesting form on http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/questions

chertzog’s picture

is there any possibility that we could implement our own payment system, instead of relying on third party system like gittip?

What would we need to do that? A formal organization and a bank account?

helmo’s picture

A formal organization seems a bit far fetched.
The current paypal account is entrusted to Koumbit.
Do we need a professional paypal account to create a widget like piwik has?

Do you see value in a 'old style' bank account?

chertzog’s picture

Its just that an "old style" account would be required for something like stripe or https://www.balancedpayments.com. <- which also handles ACH transfers and Payout abilities.

mengi’s picture

Piggybacking on eronlogic's idea of subscription based payments... Some sort of membership would be great. Similar to what Drupal has. We could put a nice image on our websites saying we support Aegir. Or have a special tag by our username on aegirproject.org showing that we are 'paid' members.

ergonlogic’s picture

re #18, CiviCRM can be set up to allow such subscriptions. We could then use something like http://drupal.org/project/web_widgets to generate embeddable badges. These could in turn link back to our contribution/subscription page.

helmo’s picture

Balanced looks nice to build a funding platform, and if the Koumbit has enough civiCRM experience to easily set this up then by all means...
But this depends on us having a regular back account... unless they start to support paypal (issue has been open for a year)

But lets avoid inventing our own croudfunding platform (wheels ...), and focus our own time on what we're good at.

Piwik has their subscription widget via paypal.

@mengi: Doing badges could indeed be a motivating factor.

helmo’s picture

Version: 6.x-2.x-dev » 7.x-3.x-dev
helmo’s picture

Anyone experience with https://www.bountysource.com ?

ergonlogic’s picture

So, just to update those not in-the-know, most of the core maintainers, along with other contributors, are forming a cooperative to provide "vendor" support for Aegir. Among other things, profits from this co-op are earmarked for:

  • ongoing maintenance and development of Aegir itself
  • project infrastructure (domain names, hosting, etc.)
  • sponsorship and attendance of core members at relevant camps/cons

We should be making announcements within the next few months concerning beta access to these services.

helmo’s picture

Our paypal account is currently blocked by Canadian law until we can file some paperwork :(

I added a team on Bountysource ... https://www.bountysource.com/teams/aegir/

Ping me if/when you have an account there which I can add.

I'm currently unable to link an issue tracker ... D.o is not supported but our docs issue queue on github should be possible.

helmo’s picture

I've drafted a sidebar for http://aegirproject.org/ on https://github.com/aegir-project/aegir-project.github.io/pull/3
Needs discussion and HTML/CSS love though ;)

gusaus’s picture

I'd like to suggest OpenCollective as both an open source, transparent platform and community that could help support Aegir. The following should provide some background on how other OSS projects are using:

The process for setting up a collective is quite simple and I'd be happy to help leverage the platform and community in a way that benefits Aegir.

Let me know if you have any questions.

anarcat’s picture

FWIW, the snowdrift.coop people made an amazing review of crowdfunding platforms that may be useful. they also did a thorough review of payment gateways.

snowdrift itself is interesting as well, of course. :)

gusaus’s picture

Very thorough comparison! Just looking over all the platforms is quite overwhelming. In addition to the [simplicity and transparency](https://opencollective.com/learn-more), OpenCollective has an active community already collaborating on ways to support each other. Including some folks you might regognize -
https://github.com/OpenCollective/OpenCollective/issues/345
https://github.com/OpenCollective/opencollective-api/issues/769
https://github.com/OpenCollective/opencollective-api/issues/793

Jon Pugh’s picture

That is very interesting. I think the Coop could definitely benefit from something like this, especially for the expenses part: https://opencollective.com/webpack/expenses

I fully support this idea. We need something central that draws people in and makes them feel good about spending money on a free project.

I see a tiny issue, where you have to have a GitHub project with over 100 stars (we currently top out at 11 for the documentation.).

Perhaps we can argue for an exception since we are originally developed on drupal.org.

Jon Pugh’s picture

We spoke about it in the Coop meeting today and agreed that while we don't expect a windfall, we should setup an Open Collective account.

I'm getting in touch with gusaus to get the ball rolling...

gusaus’s picture

If we're able to follow through with what we've been discussing in https://slack.opencollective.com/, I think https://opencollective.com/webpack could be a realistic example of the amount of funds that could be raised.