Perl in Catincan, an open source crowd funding proposal
I've proposed a "Perl" project on Catincan, a new crowd funding site targeted at open source software. They've said that the first 25 projects to be fully funded have their fees waived for life. That is, if a Perl project gets funded, we have a crowd sourcing platform where the developer gets all the money.
That fee waiver is interesting. I've looked at many crowd funding sites. Most at least charge the credit card fees. Fractured Atlas, where I'm a board member, charges 7% for their fiscal sponsorship program. If TPF wanted to set up their own program, not only would they have to charge some fees, even to just cover costs, but they'd have to manage it as well. If there's already someone doing all that work and doing it for us for free, so much the better.
The only way I'm really a developer for Perl is through CPAN.pm, which bundles my cpan(1) program. It's a small thing. One of my to do items was easy fastest-mirror support. For the public, www.cpan.org acts as a global load balancer (thanks DynDNS!). That's for the mirrors that the Perl NOC folks know about. My particular interest is private and local mirrors, whether for the real CPAN or the DarkPAN variety. It's a small feature that we can use as a test of the service before we think about using the service for larger projects. Maybe we like it and maybe we don't. Remember though, they are in beta, so we have a chance to help them improve their service and help other open source projects who don't have funding organizations.
I've already pledged to my own project. I don't particularly want anyone's money (after US taxes, I end up with so little anyway), but if you'd like to contribute a little bit to match me, I'll take my pledge and put it into the next Perl project. Perl developers: think about what you might want funded.
There are much bigger things we might fund for Perl through something like this, but I'll be the guinea pig. Any Perl developer (and you have to be a current contributor to propose a project) interested in funding through Catincan can talk to me privately if they like.
If you want to funding existing TPF projects, such as the general Perl Core Maintenance Fund, you can donate directly through TPF.
David Golden also pointed me to Crowdtilt, a social funding site running on Dancer.
I'm the author of Mastering Perl, and the co-author of Learning Perl (6th Edition), Intermediate Perl, Programming Perl (4th Edition) and Effective Perl Programming (2nd Edition).
Nice. I nearly commented on the "About Perl Grants" post yesterday, saying we should have a "perlstarter". I reckon I'd contribute more towards p5p development if I could explicitly support certain features, for example.
I guess my project is fully funded, and unlike other funding platforms, can't raise more money. That's okay. This is their first funded project, and I paid for it myself and with $10 from Neil.
So, I still want to play with this by putting up another small project where I am the developer. Any suggestions?
I wonder they might see your self-funding as cheating, so probably a good idea to have a relatively small task that could be entirely funded by others.
Write a review of all benchmarking modules, and get the doc in all of them updated to refer to the review. $100. I'd chip in :-)
Well, their FAQ says it's okay to fund yourself. I didn't really intend to do that, but it happened because the form was one step shorter than I expected.
I'd actually like to talk to the Catincan people first to see how expansive their project definition is. I consider "Perl" really to be the things distributed with with the core project, so I wouldn't pull in things like CPAN, MT, Bugzilla, and anything else tangentially related to Perl. Benchmark.pm does come with Perl, and maybe Dumbbench improvements would be a good thing since I've been spending a lot of time on thinking about that.
My first suggestion was nearly "Dumbbench 1.00".