Kickstarter project funding

Sounds like a reasonable sum from a business point of view, balancing your personal needs with the communities. For some it would be free, for others it would cost just a little. It is an interesting balance of Open Source and Paid models.

However, it does seem to go against the current Drupal culture. I could see a time when modules were "Held Hostage" for updates, especial for new Drupal core versions. But I could also see a rise in module productivity after a core release, which would be a good thing. This model could end up making the Drupal community a very different environment than it currently is. Good or Bad, who knows.

Heh. I found this issue because I was searching d.o for any discussions about a 'kickstarter for drupal'.

First off I think that sounds very reasonable indeed. I think 5k should be achievable as there is clearly a large amount of interest in this module. It also 'feels' fair as a community member who knows that $50 an hour is a good deal for donaters. I'd expect complaints from those that don't realise that's a discount though. But haters gonna hate.
Also, I suspect you would be able to find developers willing to chip in with their time as well - though I don't know if/how this would effect the distribution of funds (I would assume it wouldn't but if someone did contribute a significant number of hours the question would probably come up).

Secondly, I'm generally all in favour of more of this community funding (though I would like to see a funding system built into d.o itself - and I know many others share that view).
There is certainly a risk that it could have a corrupting influence on the community. I think that the drupal community can make it work though - after all, if folks start holding projects hostage then they're going to be draining their karma bank and no-one wants that!

Finally, @Dave: Do you know of anywhere where this sort of funding initiative is being discussed on d.o?

...Excuse me if this didn't quite make sense at all. I am ridiculously tired and just can't tell any more.

Interesting. I just happened to propose a crowd-funding effort in this thread for Geo: http://drupal.org/node/849354#comment-4336892. Considering that currently companies also fund module development (e.g. as an investment in very useful modules, or as a result of building a website where it was needed), crowd-funding is just another way of funding and it seems like a reasonable option.

I must admit I hadn't really thought about possible unintended consequences of such a model. How do module developers feel about this? There are so many coders who have contributed awesome modules to the community, and when some projects will get funding and others don't, I could imagine, I don't know, maybe bitter feelings about the perceived value of the unfunded modules.

On the other hand it seems a very promising model: often there are threads with dozens and dozens of +1's for feature requests, D7 ports, etc. With a Kickstarter project you can refer these masses to a concrete goal: raise X amount of dollars to make it possible. I think the Kickstarter model could be much more effective than a PayPal donate button.

I just made a post about this over in the Prairie Initiative group: http://groups.drupal.org/node/142779
It's rather long but hopefully will generate some discussion.

Very interesting commentary on whether this is good or bad for the community. Either way, I'm looking forward to your Kickstarter listing. If everyone who posted in the Meta tags - Is there a release date? issue kicked in $10.00, you should be able to make the $5,000.00 goal easily. You may even get a few of the website development firms to cover most of the goal—I can probably get my company to contribute. What were you thinking of for the rewards?

Hi Dave,

PreviousNext would be happy to pitch in with funding, and even become a project sponsor. Let me know when you have your kickstarter project up and running.

Kim

I didn't want to just tag this into the Kickstart discussion, but ultimately it's a duplicate, so I will.

When do we think is a reasonable time for this module to be ready? Think that by August we'll have a solid dev release that could be used?

I haven't been able to be involved here directly, but would like to know how to plan around this critical module for a client.

I'd really think we should be putting out a big plug on the Nodewords module for folks to contribute there to the development of this module. We really have to get the vast community of users to find other ways to contribute to getting these changes in not simply based on the good will of those who are closest to the code base.

Lots of folks depend on this code & lots of folks should find it easy to see that it is maintained, secure, usable.

5K is totally reasonable given the huge benefit to the community for years to come.

We know that many of individual organizations who presently use this module have paid much more than $5k for questionable SEO advice.

It's really not a question of whether or not it's reasonable, it's a question of how we streamline the process to get the $5k into the hands of a developer who can actually do this in a timely manner. $$ can't be the only motivator, but it does help to shift priorities in our society.

I would be willing to pitch in money. As a non-developer who depends on Drupal, it's an easy way for me to contribute. The lack of this module is a huge hole for D7 IMO, and whatever it takes to get it rolling is completely appropriate.

This is definitely an interesting topic, I am a developer that was looking for a metatags creator for seo purposes and came accross this one, I was actually looking to apply meta tags for personal projects, I already saw the git was quite wasnt as complete as I had hoped, looks like im going to have to use js to inject my meta tags in the head for the time being but I would like to help out with the development if possible, this would be invaluable to SEO and I will gladly contribute my time, paid or unpaid. Of course getting money is always nice but like others mentioned before, straying away from open source might not be very receptive... who knows.

I *would* have been willing to pitch in money but there's another metatags module for d7 and I hate to say it, but I'll be using that one instead ...

If you were going to do an upgrade path for nodewords on the other hand, I'm there.

@giraffian : And what project is it you mention as alternative for adding metadata?

Metatags_quick, which has an upgrade path from nodewords submitted by a user in the issue queue.

giraffian, Metatags_quick is rubbish... it's just a quick fix and to fill the gap that nodewords has left behind. We all rely on this D7 module, witch is pretty sad if you contemplate that some of us have waited over 8 months! to see the release of this module. But when it's done i'll be happy to contribute! Soon we will have a full functioning D7 thanks to Dave Reid!

I really need this module app so happy to contribute on Kickstarter to get it up