Re: FUNDRAISER - roof on fire
 

Zehjotkah, don't feel too happy, this is the initial success, and you'll never again see it happen like that. So consider the results until x-mas your funds for the next 3 to 6 months.

I'd like to suggest to board to get a webpage with all sponsors/donations listed, either with full name or "anonymous" depending on what the donor states in comment of her/his donation. Similar to https://spenden.wikimedia.de/spenden/list.php

And to all community members that are reading this and wondering: board still needs your donation, no matter how much you can give. Also ponder if you might want to donate the amount for next 3, 6, or even 12 months in one transaction, especially since PayPal generally doesn't offer automatic recurring scheduled transfers.

Thanks to everybody who already donated, is planning to donate, or would donate if they could afford. You're an awesome community and you clearly demonstrate that maemo matters and is not dead. :-)

cheers
jOERG

Re: FUNDRAISER - roof on fire
 

I second what Joerg just said: it's exciting to see the number shoot up, and easy to see it and think 'oh, cool, 1000 usd raised, I'm no longer needed'. But the fact of the matter is that right now people are really aware of the issue of needed funding, so they donate willingly. But naturally, this will taper off, and likely never flow in again like this unless we're close to another infrastructure crisis. So any money that can keep rolling in, will help, if not now then in the months after.

I think, also, what might help keep community motivated, is if the Board keeps finances more transparent than typical non-profits do; give a monthly summary to the community of income, expenditures (and where those expenditures went), what the net gain/loss was, and how much money remains in reserve. If this was done, I think we're a lot more likely to see more sustained donation income. Because most projects' donate buttons/links are just an easy to ignore/forget issue. And regularly posted donation drive requests (like that of Wikipedia) often get annoying/tedious to see regularly for many people (not necessarily a rational behavior, but that's how the human mind works). But if the finances report comes out every once in a while (which wouldn't be too hard to put together, since a more detailed version would be getting put together internally anyway) to the community, the community members will have a regular reminder of how much money the Foundation has, how much it needs, and how much it's bringing in. Assuming this remains honest, this would serve as a much more psychologically motivating reminder for people to donate if they can spare it, in the long term. (Hmmm, I think I should make this suggestion on the mailing list and maybe to the Board directly as well.)

Re: FUNDRAISER - roof on fire
 

I'd like to contribute to the funding but I'm one of those guys who neither have nor want any paypal account or other "modern" means of transfer.

I agree that $500 or $1000 per month sounds quite a lot. Can we have a detailed list please of where all that money is going? That would certainly increase my motivation to donate (and maybe that of others too) and would increase the chances to find cheaper alternatives.

As I already pointed out in another thread I like the way debianforum.de handles this. They have a list in their wiki for where the money is going to [1] and one for where it's coming from [2].

[1] http://wiki.debianforum.de/Debianforum.de/Ausgaben
[2] http://wiki.debianforum.de/Debianforum.de/Spenden

Re: FUNDRAISER - roof on fire
 

I personally will donate once a proper bank account is available. My plan is to give some amount that would account for (my part of) a year.

However I still see the problem that has been mentioned above. Once the initial rush is over, there's no guarantee that the/enough donations will continue flowing. It would be a major disappointment if after 3 or 4 months the whole system disappears after having donated so much money.

I understand that a donation imposes no obligation of providing a service of any kind. That's why it's called a donation.

But in the context of Maemo, I don't quite see this as a donation, but rather as a collective support, or whatever you want to call it. That is, I want to support with some of my money, but I also want the Maemo infrastructure to stay alive in the long term.

However I don't see any obvious solution to this problem.

One thing that might be worth considering is what we really need. I don't think the autobuilder is necessary for anything. After all, developers usually have/use the SDK, so they there's no point in centrally compiling and packaging what the developer has already compiled and packaged.

Without having the full overview of what Maemo has *now* (would be happy if we were given such an overview), I think we only need the forum, the wiki (because forum posts link to the Wiki, but the Wiki articles could be integrated into a sub-forum anyway) and of course the repositories.

I don't own/rent a server, nor have I any need for that, but I cannot imagine that a few terabytes and the forum system would require so much money.

So I'd like to have a clarification of what exactly we are (or will be) paying for now, and which systems we plan to maintain/remove in the near future.

Re: FUNDRAISER - roof on fire
 

The first 2-3 comments in this thread mentioned that there may be cheaper ways to get this done. I hope that there is a way to migrate the current system that costs $500/month to something that costs less and is just as capable.
Can we get some insight into how and when this will happen and what it will take to make it happen?

Re: FUNDRAISER - roof on fire
 

Sure, by no means I meant something like "oh, we've 1000 USD, that's enough, thanks for all the fish"... ;)

The intention was to be as transparent as possible. As we don't have a site to list all donations just yet, I thought it would be good to simply mark some milestones.

Re: FUNDRAISER - roof on fire
 

just for a ballpark figure to give you an idea:
http://www.df.eu/de/server-hosting/m...roduktdetails/ "managed server pro X8" 230EUR/month.
Currently maemo infra is using 5 servers of that power class (actually quite a tad higher: http://www.fujitsu.com/fi/products/c...gy/rack/rx300/ with 64GB RAM)
Of course we hope to massively consolidate that, but that's as well some job somebody has to do fulltime.

For operating such infra you need some professional administration 24/7 that's not for free either. For sure you need some experts to set up and configure the new infra and port the whole stuff from old servers to new ones and possibly new software (see e.g. vBulletin vs alternative solutions)
For now we have no hard numbers yet, but be assured $1000/month is for sure not a high guess when we plan to run all the maemo.org services on same level as they are right now (or rather been until some months ago when deterioration kicked in)

@reinob: we'll scale the infra to what we can afford, with wiki, tmo, and repos top priority. If money doesn't suffice to get powerful servers, you'll have to live with slow response times and "sorry, try again later". If we can't afford professional support, the whole system is on peril, due to threats from net and whatnot else. Please assume that board and council are doing their very best to ensure the infra for longer than just 3 months, but we can't give hard numbers yet since we're just starting. Buying another month for Reggie's server to allow painles migration to a cheaper server will cost ~500, a licence for vBulletin ~200. getting any new server may cost ~100..200 setup fee. And we still don't talk salary for a professional administration that does all the migration and bugfixing pending.

/j

Re: FUNDRAISER - roof on fire
 

Of course that problem exists and it will always be there.
My experience with debianforum.de is that there is a core group of users who more or less carry the forum on their own. And since the current financial situation is always transparent if it's getting critical usually one or two of them jump in with a donation.
On the other hand of course we're talking about very different amounts of money here. So the core group would have to be much bigger if we actually need $1000 every month.

Re: FUNDRAISER - roof on fire
 

Great idea to work from donations, but as metnioned previously, will it be enough to keep things going?

I'm not a great lover of advertising, not the way the big concerns do it anyway. I wouldn't complain if TMO decided to run a few ads to keep the revenue flowing, as long as it isn't intrusive and doesn't follow me around the world wide web like a lost dog sticking it's nose into my shopping baskets.

Maybe a collaboration with a few other tech sites, Old School Nokia sites, Linux Forums that sort of thing.
Contact Jolla even, see if they want to help us out for a bit of extra exposure.

Just a few thoughts and ideas.

P.S In the meantime I'll see what I can afford to donate sometime.

Re: FUNDRAISER - roof on fire
 

I really want to help but sending money out of here is impossible by any way ( if you know what i mean )
is there any possibility of using ads ? like adfly links ? this is the only way i can help and bring on the clicks ;)
thanks for everything !

./Sifo