Let's plan on doing a short meeting tomorrow, March 4th. It'll be in
#inkscape-devel at noon Pacific time (2000 UTC).
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Board_Meetings
Shortened Agenda is:
* Hackfest 2016
* GSoC 2016
* Other business
If time permits we'll tackle some of remaining topics from last meeting,
but I'd like to keep the meeting to under an hour for folks, and to
reserve as much as necessary for the hackfest and gsoc planning work.
Bryce
Hi Bryce, Martin, Tavmjong, Krzysztof, Ted, Josh, & Jon...
Apologies for the cold group email, but I'm hoping that this will be of
interest, and maybe mutually beneficial.
I'm Justin Maxwell, and I'm the founder of London startup tibit
<http://www.tibit.com/>. We're also just a tiny wee early-stage company,
taking on one of the great unsolved Internet problems of the past couple of
decades - casual micropayments (and micro-donations!). This gives us a big
'chicken and egg' problem - to succeed we need sites and software that are
'tibbable', to bring in the users - and we need the users to bring in the
recipients. We're different to Flattr etc, in that we address the
cognitive barrier to making small 'in-the-moment' payments or donations
online. We set out to achieve making a micro-donation as easy as dropping
a couple of coins into a buskers hat, once a user has signed up.
Specifically, we're hoping to tib button on your donations page, but the
longer term plan is to give appreciative users of Inkscape (and similarly
other appreciated software and content) a way to tangibly show that
appreciation repeatedly, perhaps with a means to tib directly from the
application help menu. Not so much as a request for donations as much as
enabling users to easily show their support.
We have pretty basic tib buttons on the Notepad++ donate page
<https://notepad-plus-plus.org/donate/donate-action.html> and PyDev home
page <http://www.pydev.org/>, and we see open-source software as a real
beneficiary of our service once we get some traction.
We use bitcoin at the back-end, but local currency for the donating user,
paid with their existing Visa/MasterCard. You don't seem to currently
have a bitcoin donation option, and there might be some minor issues with
passing payment along to the Software Freedom Conservancy, but if we add to
the reasons why Inkscape might get and publish a donations bitcoin address,
so much the better.
Here's how it works:
Users buy a bundle of ten-or-more tokens (we call them tibs) of a value
they set (say €0.25) and can then give/pay them out wherever they see a tib
button (it also works as a simple link). Because the tibs have already been
paid for, and the value pre-set, the user doesn't have to think twice,
consider price fairness, or decide how much, for each tiny transaction.
This makes deciding to show some support or reward something worthwhile a
near-instinctive decision for a user.
Once five tibs are collected for a particular bitcoin address, the combined
value is paid out to your bitcoin address. We take 2p (~3¢) regardless of
the value of the users tib. Because it's bitcoin, there isn't any signup
required by the recipient, just set the bitcoin address as a parameter.
Have a look at this codepen
<http://codepen.io/tibit/pen/cabc38c7a517a2756b2a20922dc70e94> - it's set
up to use a testnet bitcoin address, so operates in demo mode, but it'll
give you an idea of how slick and easy the tibbing process is, and a feel
for why this can work where so many other attempts to solve 'The
Micropayments Problem' have not. (note that there is a Chrome bug relating
to Codepen sand-boxed child windows that makes it work better in other
browsers) or you can spend the two free tibs we give every new user via our
home <http://tibit.com> or about us <https://tibit.com/about-us/> pages, or
the other projects linked above.
I’m not going to pretend anyone has made a lot of $£€ from one of our
buttons yet! But as tib buttons pop-up in more and more places people will
start to give, little and often, to the services, products, and content
that they use and appreciate.
We’d love to work with you on this. If you’d like to, you can just use the
button from the Codepen after getting a bitcoin address, but if we can can
help in anyway to integrate it further, please drop me an email.
Meanwhile, as someone who uses every few days, I wouldn't be reaching out
to you if *I* wouldn't be sending tibs your way...
Best regards,
--Justin
Hi,
So far we have allocate $9000 for travel expense for the hackfest,
$3000 for travel to LGM, $1300 for the venue (includes lunches,
snacks). $600 for Hackfest dinner. The actual amount for travel should
be considerably less (for example, it include $2000 for Alex who is
local).
See: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Hackfest2016_Attendees
I believe we allocated $7500 for the hackfest + $5000 for LGM + $600
for the dinner. At the end of 2015 we had $11,600 in the hackfest
"account". Bryce, can you confirm these numbers?
It has been suggested to me that we selectively invite recently new
active participants in the Inkscape community who would not otherwise
qualify for travel assistance. I like this idea as it would help to
encourage new participants to keep contributing. I would propose asking
the Inkscape community to nominate people for a $500 special
invitation.
Tav
