Funding reorganization and follow up (Patreon)
Content
This is a follow up to the previous post about reorganizing how our fund flow happens. As many know, we got an Epic Megagrant two months ago which basically has been used so both I (Juan) and George Marques can work full time paid by it (the Megagrant was specifically requested and granted for working on rendering and scripting, can't be used for anything else).
Rémi remains hired by the donations, and we also raised his wage a bit, because he lives in Denmark, where cost of living is very high (and because he is working tirelessly, of course :) ).
While we had other contributors in mind for hiring, it's getting difficult to do so, as many companies are now starting to use Godot and they are able to hire and pay them considerably better than we can at this time. In the end, we are only able to hire those who really prefer to work directly for the project, even if being paid less.
We don't discard hiring more contributors in the future but, for the past months we decided that it might be best to just let some donations accumulate and (when we have enough saved up) use them to hire specific contributors (or companies owned by those contributors) to do specific work packages.
Examples of work packages are, tasks like:
* Improving the documentation browsing experience (better search, allow users to ask questions or write comments), as well as paying educators and technical writers to improve the quality of the docs themselves.
* Hire contributors or external developers to improve specific aspects of Godot, such as performance in some areas, editor usability, or just adding new features.
We have been working on putting together those work packages, but it still takes considerable time to write them and then to find someone who may be interested in doing them, see how much it would cost the project etc. We have been thinking of holding monthly meetings with the core contributors to discuss proposals, work packages, etc. and decide which ones should be done, who should be hired etc. The results and what was discussed will be posted here and in the website, so our patrons and sponsors can know what's going on and give feedback.
Unfortunately this does not map perfectly to how Patreon goals work, so we may need to keep a more generic "hire developer" goals and use the average of how much they cost us per monthly hours. Blender is doing this approach and it seems to work for them.
And then again, we definitely want to give back to our patrons, I think the previous suggestions and discussions gave us a much better idea about this, so we'll proceed back too.
We'll discuss this and then will do a reorganization as soon as possible!