Patreon for Steering Comitee?

[saindd]

What do you guys think about setting up a Patreon page for the T3D steering comitee? This way, all the involved members can use the money to fund the project, support members who want to go full-time or buy any other stuff for dev (DK2, videocards, etc). I would love to donate monthly to the project.

[JeffR]

Definitely something worth considering!

As you said, getting something like this would open up options such as contracting artists, buy hardware, or pay out bounties, and so on.

We'll toss the idea around and see what to do about it. The biggest weird part with money is that we're not a legal entity(at the moment, anyways), so who handles the money is something that'd need to get worked out first. But definitely something we can talk about if there's interest.

[Duion]

You can just setup a Patreon account, there is no problem with it. Patreon itself is not designed to be used by organizations or groups, but for single content creators. I think you can setup an account for a group, but there would be someone responsible for it. I would say, every steering committee member opens up an account for himself.

An alternative would be to use the bounty system already setup, so you can grab bounties for specific tasks, this would be the more performance oriented way to handle it, Patreon instead is a way of funding the life of alternative content creators, where donations are monthly based.

[rlranft]

Ah, but this goes back to something I was saying before - I think that as a community we should support the creation of a legal equivalent to the Blender Foundation. A non-profit for the purpose of maintaining and improving the various Torque engines. The sticky part is how it interacts with GarageGames, but it's always possible to rebrand and break off (as lousy as that would be, it might be the most appropriate course legally - I'm not a lawyer so I don't know).

One thing that I've been mulling over is the creation of a new introductory book (or set thereof). My thought is that we, as a community, can donate chapters or feature walk-throughs that can then be peer-reviewed, revised, and edited for clarity. Then they can be collected into books and sold via whatever printing option the committee finds most appropriate as a way of generating revenue.

Also, creation of either a full, stand-alone, "just copy it and go" version of the engines - no "go get it from GitHub" or "download this, then that, then the other thing" stuff that confuses so many people - or one that is supported by an actual installer - one package, run it, it installs, done, like the commercial versions used to be. These could be sold for a nominal fee, say a couple of bucks for download or that plus shipping for a physical copy. The end-user is paying for a convenience, and installer software is definitely one of those "triangle" products as far as I can see (so expensive and good, or cheap and bad - in our equation the time part is less relevant).

Transition from a steering committee to a non-profit corporate entity would be a huge step - a whole different organization with very different legal standing and requirements, not to be done lightly. Still, I think it might be the step that we as a community need to take for future success.

[Johxz]

I would love to support t3d monetary. To fix bugs mostly and to add new feature. Even I beginning learning I always try to help in a way.

Just an opinion, if the SC and community (elders) not start adding or merge useful resources to benefit the newcomers, for easy start or easy develop I'm afraid that t3d don't take off and the money don't flow like supposed to be. I mean updating the manual and new tutorials, with at least a good updated manual/tutorials someone can not only wet his feet but maybe start something. See the a lot of examples around of other game engine or even 3d modelling tools + some game engine.

So my point is maybe t3d has bug, or the interface is not user friendly or maybe is hard or whatever, but if we have a better documentation the newcomers can start doing something.

[LukasPJ]

@Johxz

You could put a bounty on the creation / polishment of various wiki pages.

You can find the bounty-page button at the bottom of this page. Unfortunately, it seems it hasn't quite taken off yet, perhaps I should create some bounties for smaller tasks and see if that can kickstart things :P

Edit: Simple example of a bounty on a wiki-page: https://freedomsponsors.org/issue/717/wiki-page-built-in-posteffects

[Johxz]

@LukasPJ yes I know that page, sorry for not donating anything yet, but that page have ages and I not see movement yet. May be we need a different approach instead using bounty-page is look for someone to do it :lol: do a search in a freelance page or something like that, put a offer, negotiate and do it. Even may be is not bad idea to pool money and pay "BrokeAss Games", "Sickhead Game" may be the BeamNG guys or some other company to help us... Or do a mass collecting like craw-funding for one specific goal like we do with linux but something more little and attainable.

Either way all ideas are welcome... ;)

[LukasPJ]

The issue is that, pulling in someone outside of the community is more expensive than someone who already knows T3D and doesn't have to put time into learning T3D. Further more, hiring someone will be immensely more expensive than someone doing it out of goodwill, and the small reward. Example, getting a wikipage written could cost 100$, vs. 10$ if someone does it out of goodwill.

The idea is to generate a community that wants to do stuff for the community, the bounty system let's people incentivize and reward the people who work on it, not to fund new development teams. I don't think we have enough funds to actually hire someone to work on the engine.

[Duion]

We have $76 bounty now in total, if you want to hire a professional you would get about 1 hour of work from him for that.

[Johxz]

The issue is that, pulling in someone outside of the community is more expensive than someone who already knows T3D and doesn't have to put time into learning T3D.

 

@LukasPJ Yes I know for than reason I wrote

is not bad idea to pool money and pay "BrokeAss Games", "Sickhead Game" may be the BeamNG guys

some of this company develop at some point tools for t3d. So I don't think is bad idea to knock the door... If we never ask we never know how much we need to pay :lol:

[Duion]

The problem is not the lack of funding methods, there are bounties and some people already have their own donation pages.

It was since the beginning, that people always demanded a lot of things but nobody did something and even if so it was always not good enough and people demanded more. So all this discussion will not lead anywhere until you don't totally rethink the topic.

[Duion]

10.000 would be utopic, optimistic would be 10, realistic would be 1 and pessimistic would be 0.

The question is also who you want to donate to? The committee is not a person. If you split it you will end up with 2-3 dollars for each person per month.

My experience is just that nobody cares about open source development.

[JeffR]

They do, however, tend to care about things they're using.

Anyways, I'd also point out that there's a fundamental difference of kind between a perpetual dontation funding system like Patreon, and a bounty system like what's currently there. A bounty system requires active attention and specific issues the donator wants resolved.

Patreon, however, is an automated donation that doesn't require keeping thinking about it, and is simply "Keep working on the stuff you're working on", which is distinct to "work on this specific issue"