First of all, we’d like to thank the 49 contributors who generously contributed to our IndieGoGo fundraising campaign and to all who helped support and get the word out about our efforts. Special thanks go to Elizabeth K. Joseph, Todd Lewis and his incredible team at IT-oLogy and Ken Starks for supplying us with items to offer as perks during the campaign. We’d also like to thank Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols and Carla Schroder for writing articles for FOSS Force supporting our efforts.
At just before midnight pacific time Monday night, our IndieGoGo fundraising effort ended after a six week run. In the end, we raised exactly $2,300, or 38.33% of our goal of $6,000 (its nice to see that the folks at IndieGoGo are nothing if not precise when it comes to figures). The money is to be used to expand our coverage of FOSS and free tech by offering compensation to writers. Although this is not enough to fund our planned expansion for six months as intended, it is enough to get us started while we put “Plan B” into effect.
Although we don’t have exact figures yet on how much we’ll be receiving after IndieGoGo and PayPal get their small cuts, we figure this will be enough to fund our expansion on a scaled-back basis for fourteen weeks, beginning in about two weeks when IndieGoGo disburses the funds to us. In about six weeks, or somewhere around the beginning of August, we intend to launch another fundraising campaign to raise the additional $3,700 needed to fund our expansion entirely during the necessary six month period. In the meantime, we’re accepting contributions directly, and any funds contributed directly to us will be counted toward our goal, which will lower the amount we’ll need to raise via IndieGoGo.
In the next day or so, we’ll have ways for you to contribute built-in to the site (we intended to have that done by now, but being short staffed and all…). In the meantime, contributions can be made through PayPal to christine at FOSS Force dot comm.
Again, thanks to all who took part in our campaign.
I had intended to contribute, but ended up getting more hours at work than I like, and was too tired to think straight enough about donation to do it most of the time.
Still, in the final hours I actually hit the button and started filling stuff in, only to hit the paypal terms of service. I don’t have a paypal account and really don’t want one as I’ve read too many horror stories, including from FLOSS community members of good standing who had paypal yank funds and close accounts for no good reason (well, to read their account at least, but it has been more than one so…), but might have signed up for this anyway, but when I came to those 16 conditions in the terms, I was simply too tired to process it (and as I expect has happened to many, once I found the FLOSS community my tolerance for EULAS and fine-print-terms of any sort dropped dramatically) and said screw it. And unfortunately, while it seems IGG /can/ take non-paypal fund-routing, the paypal button was the only obvious way I had seen to continue with the contribution from the IGG site, so either paypal was all that you had enabled (there were other symbols but they all appeared in black and white, as if disabled), or the others only appear for those with IGG accounts, or IGG needs to make other ways to contribute a bit easier for first-time-users to figure out.
But as a result I was strongly considering getting in touch with you to ask about a direct contribution instead, so I’m glad to see that you’re setting up something to do that. I’ll be watching for it. =:^)
I chiped in, but also find concerning to only be able to use Paypal, though I didn’t actually had to open an account (they supposedly discard my data after making my payment effective, and also make it a bit too hard to find the way to opt-out of creating an account).
Anyway, I wanted to point out that there are some patronage sites that might interest you as a more steady source of income, this seems like a good usecase.
The one I know more about is https://www.patreon.com/ (used briefly by Aaron Seigo to fund his hangout videos “The Luminosity of Free Software, for example).
Cheers.