Today we have an important announcement to make: nanoFramework is now accepting donations!
In the spirit of the openness and transparency that we have been following since day one, an Open Collective has been setup in order to manage these affairs.
Why do we need donations you may ask… Well, let us take a moment to explain.
PayING for infrastructure costs
Yes, there are infrastructure costs. Like the domain registration, the web site hosting, Azure functions on which our nfbot lives and some features in Azure DevOps that are outside of the free tier that nanoFramework is entitled to as an Open Source project.
CONTINUE public relation activities to EXPAND OUR USERBASE
The saying “out of sight, out of mind” is so true! What good is it to have an awesome framework like nanoFramework if it’s not known in the embedded systems industry, hobbyist communities and academia?! To overcome this, we need to continue to drive a PR effort and to do it properly, money is required to do this. For example, press releases go to a much wider audience and are generally better received when they are written by a professional and sent to the correct media and agencies. Most of us are engineers or folks that just like to code and we are better at coding than writing…
Organizing events like hackathons, or even speaking at conferences to demo the framework and what can be accomplished with it is another way of getting the project known. These have costs involved and sponsorship is welcomed!
Support maintainers and contributors that invest a large amount of time in the project
Most of the core team members and contributors are embedded systems enthusiasts, passionate about coding and people that like challenges. The work on nanoFramework is done mostly in their free time. Some of the core members also happen to work in companies that heavily sponsor nanoFramework already, offering their work time to implement features that they need, but also what the community are crying out for! Compensation for some of this work is an added incentive.
No one ever wants a project to fail, especially the team of developers that spent an extortionary amount of time to bring this project to fruition. With all the will in the world, everyone needs an incentive to continue, otherwise they will move onto the next “big thing” with a great loss of expertise’s and experience. Perhaps name your bounty on a feature that you would like to see, or just point the contribution towards a particular member for previous hard work.
Support projects that nanoFramework depends on
nanoFramework is Open Source and free to use. Free, like in free speech, not like free beer. That won’t ever change . We depend on other projects which are also Open Source and free, and we depend on them to provides us with the tools or components that make nanoFramework possible. Our core team members strive to be involved and contribute back code and fixes whenever possible.
Produce documentation, tutorials and other content to support US
We’ve all been there, and it is one of those matters that doesn’t get many disagreements. Good documentation helps a lot! The same goes about tutorials, videos and even training material. Producing all of this requires time, but most importantly, should be done by people who know what they are doing. Again, most of us are engineers or folks that like to code and we don’t always rank that high in design and communication skills. We can probably accomplish something mildly acceptable in a moment of inspiration, but it will most likely take us a serious amount of time to do that. This is one of those areas that if nanoFramework wants to gain critical momentum and grab the attention of more developers, needs to be done properly. We are either lucky and there is a designer out there that stumbles on the project and volunteers to produce content for it, or we must outsource these works. This all costs money.
We trust this blog post has listed enough reasons for why nanoFramework requires donations and how we plan to spend them. The ultimate goal is to make the project thrive, grow the community and attract more people willing to contribute with their skills.
Like the fellow with the pointy ears used to say, “live long and prosper”! 😉
