Re: Crowdfunding Lightning?

Hi Geoff,

indeed, there are clearly some areas that could be improved, which you 
have wonderfully shown in the patches you contributed. I'm sorry I 
haven't gotten around to reviewing them yet.

The project only has a handful of contributors, each of them 
contributing a patch once in a while. We don't have a document 
describing a roadmap at the moment, mostly because its hard to put dates 
on anything.

For me the highest priority is keeping the project alive, which 
currently means improving the backend infrastrucutre, fixing regressions 
and improving the test automation. I would love to get the mozmill tests 
running so we have better safety for releases and I am working on unit 
tests for our caldav provider, which has been a source of critical 
regressions in the release builds lately. Also, I'd like to remove the 
burden of the binary component, but there are still a few issues with 
the ical.js library that need sorting out.

Regarding funding, we do have a donation button on addons.mozilla.org 
and there are other ways to donate. The account doesn't actually 
accumulate enough to hire a regular developer though. Even if we only 
hired someone for a specici project, the problem is finding someone who 
has the time to spare and sufficient knowledge of the Mozilla Platform 
and how it is used in the context of Lightning.

Another source of "funding" is the yearly Google Summer of Code, which I 
try to find a mentor and good projects for. This has had mixed results, 
a few have become long time contributors, but most others have not been 
able to complete the project or did not continue to maintain their code.

Finding new contributors is a crux, people without previous experience 
need someone to mentor them into getting started. Spending time to 
mentor them takes time to work on regressions and such without 
guaranteeing that they will stick with the project.

I have often wanted to spend lots of time writing new documentation and 
guides on how to work on the calendar project going by the motto "If you 
document it, they will come", but as past experience on wiki.mozilla.org 
has shown, the docs need to be maintained too and since no one wants to 
actually remove documentation that might be a good base for improving 
it, it gets outdated and lingers.

I know this is hard to come by, but what the project needs is a few more 
talented contributors that have the initiative to change something, 
paired with the endurance to not let go just because it takes a while 
for patches to get reviewed, build system changes to be completed or 
build issues to overcome (hint hint ;-).


To my mind, these volunteer positions is what the project needs most:

* People willing to write and maintain documentation
* Talented bloggers that want to write about project updates, willing to 
monitor topics worth blogging themselves
* Developers with initiative, that stay long enough that they can review 
patches.
* Someone willing to take over the whole ui-review and UX design component

I hope this helps you find out what you want to know. If you would like 
to support any of these efforts I would be very happy. Just dive in and 
get started, if there is anything I can do to support you in doing that, 
let me know.

Philipp


On 2/2/14 2:22 AM, Geoff Lankow wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Frédéric's blog posts about funding MathML [1] have got me wondering if
> a similar campaign could work for Lightning development. I've been
> poking around in the code for the last few months and can see there's
> clearly some areas that could be much improved by someone with the
> skills and available time. (Just to be clear, I'm not saying it's bad,
> it isn't. I'm saying it could be better.)
>
> I'm not too familiar with the history of the project or the calendar
> community, and I can't find much about current status and future plans.
> So I have some questions:
> * It seems pretty quiet out there. Who is actively contributing and in
> what capacity?
> * Is there a roadmap or a list of goals?
> * Have we got sufficient links with Lightning users to support a
> crowdfunding campaign?
>
> Having written all that I realise I should introduce myself. I'm an
> add-on developer and occasional Mozilla contributor [2], mostly
> interested in UX. I've been patching Lightning [3] to learn how it works
> and to create a version for myself that caters to my picky tastes.
>
>
> GL
>
> 1.
> http://www.maths-informatique-jeux.com/blog/frederic/?post/2014/01/05/Funding-MathML-Developments-in-Gecko-and-WebKit-%28part-2%29
>
> 2. https://mozillians.org/u/darktrojan/
> 3.
> https://hg.mozilla.org/users/geoff_darktrojan.net/comm-central-patches/file/tip
> (Like I said, I wrote them for me, so they're as-is, where-is.)