brian d foy

My experiment to crowd fund Jeff Thalhammer's Pinto development is going well. It's 87% of the way there. We need $503 to reach the campaign minimum. We have a week left to get that remaining 13% to get the campaign to "tilt", and I think we can get even more than that. Our secondary money goal is $5,000, all of which goes to Jeff to work on open source features of Pinto. I like $6425 (two perfect squares next to each other). That's 0b0001100100011001 (repeats the bit pattern) or 0x1919 (repeated, and the same prime next to itself).

On Monday Sean Quinlan became the 100th contributor. We have a week left to get 128 contributors. Part of the experiment is to get as many people involved as we can, at any level. I don't care how much you donate: a $1 donation is just as good as $100 when we are counting contributors.

I've received lots of feedback. Some people want to contribute without creating a new account on yet another website. Some people don't mind a new account since they can login with Facebook, but they don't want to give their credit card to a site they haven't used before. Some people don't want to use a credit card, or the US-based payment processor doesn't like their non-US credit card.

For the final week of the experiment, we want to open this up to alternate means of funding. If you've been put off or excluded by the crowd funding site, you can donate directly to Jeff through the PayPal or Flattr buttons on his MetaCPAN page. Although this money won't show up on the Crowdtilt site, we can make a virtual donation to represent everything Jeff gets through the private channels so the Crowdtilt campaign still "tilts".

This also works for the people who want to make a semi-anonymous donation. Jeff will know who you are through your PayPal of Flattr account, but we won't list you as one of the contributors.

If none of these work for you and you'd still like to contribute, let me know what would work. Part of the experiment is to discover the ways that the Perl community would like to contribute directly to projects they like. There are other experiments I want to try once this one ends, and I'm collecting feedback and listening to what people have to say before I think about those.