Re: Fundrasing for FOSS Projects - meetup this saturday

Bryce Harrington <[email protected]> Mon, 18 Mar 2019 21:52:11 -0700
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.graphics.inkscape.user
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
On Sun, Mar 17, 2019 at 04:56:11PM -0400, [email protected] wrote:
> On Sun, 2019-03-17 at 13:47 -0700, Andrew Kurn wrote:
> > Why does Inkscape need money?
> 
> The low budget requirements are for things like hackfest travel,
> hotels, stickers, posters, hardware, DNS, trademark registration, legal
> defense, (and then accountancy because of said needs for money).
>
> Depending on the source of money, there can be lots of things Inkscape
> could do with a good budget. We've been using money for a long time
> now.

With the support from sponsors and our generous donors, we've had more
than adequate funding to cover all of the expenses we've incurred.
Inkscape is quite lucky to have such great support from so many.

But a message we've been hearing consistently is that people want to see
Inkscape scale up to take on larger challenges.  Being completely
developed by volunteers in their spare time, it's hard to assemble
enough manpower to do everything that needs done, particularly for the
less sexy items, and some stuff is just completely out of everyone's
wheelhouse so never gets tackled.

Many other open source projects have achieved sustainability after
working on scaling up their financial support.  The recent activity
around funding is inspired by these other projects, and is hoping that
if we all invest effort on Inkscape's funding, we could potentially
shift Inkscape to a reliably sustainable model.

> > Can you give some idea of how much we spend each year and how
> > much we take in?  Doesn't need to be a full income statement,
> > but hit the high points.
> 
> Bryce publishes an account each year. I think he'll be happy to post it
> again here.

Sure, here's the high points:

 Year          Income      Expenses        Change         Total
 FY2006     $3,399.50                    $3399.50      $3399.50
 FY2007    $10,232.65    $-4,718.00      $5514.65      $8914.15
 FY2008       $358.48      $-460.98      $-102.50      $8811.65
 FY2009     $2,784.57      $-500.00      $2284.57     $11096.22
 FY2010     $4,803.28    $-2,081.60      $2721.68     $13817.90
 FY2011     $8,798.50    $-2,314.98      $6483.52     $20301.42
 FY2012     $6,957.72    $-1,653.90      $5303.82     $25605.24
 FY2013     $8,068.04    $-2,501.70      $5566.34     $31171.58
 FY2014    $13,338.47    $-9,604.68      $3733.79     $34905.37
 FY2015    $12,829.87   $-10,970.43      $1859.44     $36764.81
 FY2016    $13,058.44    $-8,077.25      $4981.19     $41746.00
 FY2017    $43,932.18    $-4,772.44     $39159.74     $80905.74
 FY2018    $64,687.41   $-23,314.87     $41372.54    $122278.28

For FY2019, estimate $10k expense for the Pasadena hackfest, and
probably another $10-15k for the one in Saarbrücken this May.  No idea
what income to expect in FY2019 - if we worked hard enough at it, could
we double the 2018 numbers?

If this sounds at all intriguing to anyone, and you'd like to pitch in,
ping me off list.  We're going to be building a new team in Inkscape,
like the Vectors team, but chartered to focus on financial matters.
This could be a great way to contribute non-technically, and make a huge
impact towards the project's long term future.

Bryce

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