Give them a free copy of Meteor, heh.
There’s more than one crowdfunding service. I’ve seen ‘Help my kid’s school go to the pumpkin festival’ and whatnot linked on facebook quite often. Sure there’s one that will suit.
Haha yeah. Worth trying
Sashko I am interested in hearing more about the “governance structure” you mentioned. I am curious if you mean something similar to what Node has with their Collaborators and the Technical Steering Committee?
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It would also indicate to MDG how much true support there is for a Blaze upgrade. 200 people each giving $50-$100 would go a lot further down that road than 5 people posting walls of angry text.
However, if only a few hundred to a thousand dollars is raised… well it might end up being somewhat embarrassing 
Blaze was free, now you need to pay for its development. I would be pissed off as a developer if I used it. Expect new walls of text. Maybe even articles.
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I really like this idea. The direct analogy for me is https://www.coreinfrastructure.org/
Core infrastructure, like Blaze and testing, supported by the community and businesses which rely on it. I would fund this.
I know there are some packages where money is not the limiting factor. But there are others where funding would definitely help. Sanjo has explicitly stated that funding would help speed improvements for testing:
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I guess it comes down to what the core issue is to speeding up maintenance and development of Meteor… Is it a code quality issue or a lack of time issue?
This sounds interesting to me, @benstr! Would love to figure out how to get some key people ‘off the bench’ and into the game.
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Basically, I think community funding is a good idea for pure community projects. But as long as I understand things right, MDG got some decent funding by well-known VC’s and is trying to establish a business model around this (I guess Galaxy is the core of it).
So before setting up community-based funding, it would be interesting to have some more transparency about the actual current funding situation of MDG. Things may get too complicated if you have to match the interests and expectations of the VC’s with the community-based funding approach.
I think the biggest problem of Meteor at the moment is that it is lacking a stable and reliable set of core libraries that go beyond the pure basics. @XTA already mentioned CollectionFS, which definitely needs more love at the moment and is in principle such a core feature that should something like it should be included in the core stack IMHO. Same goes for SASS support, prefixers and things like that. Sometimes I spend more time with (unnecessary) refactoring, because community-based packages became broken, than with developing the features of my application. This is quite disappointing.
So, coming back to the original question: For me, it’s a question about MDG’s future strategy to involve the community, and how this fits to the interests of their other stakeholders.
RE: Kickstarter. This is a nonstarter from my perspective. I don’t want to have to do due diligence on the Kickstarter group to figure out if they are qualified and able to do the work. My assumption is that MDG knows who are qualified to (say) maintain Blaze and who they feel comfortable working with. My preference is for the funding process to be “officially sanctioned and managed” by MDG because that minimizes (but does not eliminate) several risk factors, and I think maximizes the odds that the project succeeds.
RE: MDG’s “decent VC funding”. If it’s the case that MDG has plenty of cash and simply doesn’t want to deal with (for example) continued development of Blaze, then that’s probably also a showstopper for my vision.
RE: Being pissed at having to pay for Blaze. If you don’t want to pay for it, don’t. No one is forcing you, and no one is suggesting that the improvements paid for won’t be available to all. You can also feel free to continue to rant at MDG for not supporting it with their VC money. I’m just proposing a third alternative: a “curated” funding model for development that the community feels is important enough to sponsor. Such development might not be on the VC’s critical path in terms of ROI, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be very important to a lot of people.
RE: what is MDG’s future strategy to involve the community? Yes, I agree that is the central question. Hopefully this thread gives them another option to consider.
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I like the idea your @philipmjohnson and I am ready to pledge like you ($100/year)
Regards,
Sanjay Kumar
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That’s unworkable. If MDG ran it, then the money they receive from ‘donations’ would be viewed as income. Meaning, they would have to pay taxes on it before the developer even sees it. If they hire a FTE, then well you just lost more money due to benefits.
Now there’s nothing to say that MDG can’t suggest capable individual(s) to the community who the crowdsourcing project should contract. They just can’t have their hand on the money.
It still gets you what you want, it’s just a framework.
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I think The issue here is whether we can get an “official” statement saying we are okay with so & so working on this & that they will actively “guide” that endeavour with the promise of accepting the pull requests.
Which payment gateway the individual dev/s will use is just trivial. There are tons of them.
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Good point, I agree.
This is certainly a true fact.
- MDG tells you who they believe best qualified to work on feature x that gives them no roi.
- Community has that person/firm set up a crowdsourcing project themselves for the work with goal being the contract price.
- People who think it’s somehow mission critical for them, donate. They get a ‘free’ version of Meteor in return.
That should satisfy all concerns from your OP and could be done in a few short days.
Plenty of someone else’s cash!
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I think this is the core issue here - MDG needs to guide people to understand what the priorities are, and allocate a certain amount of time to only reviewing and guiding community contributions. Right now we don’t have that time allocation but we’re actively working on figuring out how to budget a significant chunk of time for this.
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But to be clear, that unfortunately doesn’t translate into unlimited engineering resources.
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The mythical man month and other classics 
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