From: Eleanor McHugh Date: 2009-12-20T09:17:43+09:00 Subject: Re: How to fund an open-source project? On 18 Dec 2009, at 07:11, Phillip Gawlowski wrote: > On 18.12.2009 00:19, Eleanor McHugh wrote: > >> It's potentially a big project and I'd like to be able to work on it full-time so as to make reasonable progress in the coming year but I'm completely clueless about how to raise sponsorship or even whether that's practical. Does anyone with greater experience of driving an OSS project have any advice they're willing to share on this or any related topics? > > Is progress more important, or hacking on it? > > If the former, do what other OSS projects do, find volunteers, and share the workload. That should be comparatively easy, but requires a lot of public relation work which can be quite Non Fun. Then there's the collaboration tools that'll be required, and you can find yourself doing managerial stuff full time instead of, well, doing the fun bits. Naturally I'm also looking for collaborators but I'll admit to being something of a lone wolf as I'm used to working solo on ambitious but underfunded commercial projects. It's not that I don't trust other people to pull their weight, just that it's a luxury I've never had! Managerial stuff definitely isn't something I want to spend too much time on though as I suspect just publicising this project will eat into my time - I'm already thinking that it's likely to be something I'll want to talk about at conferences next year and having done five of those this year I know how much time that will eat up. However I'm sort of crossing my fingers and hoping that for a small team the combo of github and wave will be enough to coordinate things. I guess time will tell. Ellie Eleanor McHugh Games With Brains http://slides.games-with-brains.net ---- raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason