Linterna Mágica campaign
Hey Free Software users,
I know that there are some Linterna Mágica users reading the Trisquel
mailing list, so I would like to inform them about some of our latest
developments.
We are running crowd funding campaign [1] for Linterna Mágica T-Shirts,
that would help development and spread the word about us. [2]
Our goal is at least 20 preorders for the prints to be produced and
delivered. The campaign ends at 20th of March. Help us get there!
As usual, any feedback (about the campaign or in general) is greatly
valued.
Thanks!
Well, honestly I don't quite understand.
The purpose of this campaign is to raise money for "linterna magica t-shirts" and not for linterna magica itself?
Why did you choose this indirect way?
I mean I'm glad to hear that you started a campaign, please don't feel offended.
But I think there will be very few people be interested in t-shirts for a piece of software and those people are mainly interested in the big projects.
Maybe I'll buy someday a GNU t-shirt - it's my operating system, after all. But linterna magica?
People who buy this t-shirt do it for the sole purpose of giving money to you for your work, so why taking away some part of this money for the t-shirt manufacturer etc....
В 18:43 +0100 на 28.02.2014 (пт), name at domain написа:
> Well, honestly I don't quite understand.
> The purpose of this campaign is to raise money for "linterna magica t-shirts"
> and not for linterna magica itself?
If the campaign is successful everyone who ordered a T-shirt will get
one. The money will be split between me, Anton (the designer) and the
campaign site. If the required minimal amount of preorders is not
reached, the campaign fails, the people gets their money back and that's
it.
> Why did you choose this indirect way?
The direct ways were always on the website. Donations for Linterna
Mágica are rare. We had one big donation from ThinkPenguin (Chris
thanks again!) few years ago. Only few people donated (you know who you
are, thanks!) over the years. Last year we had a survey [1] in which
very few participated. It showed that we have a problem in the donation
are.
> People who buy this t-shirt do it for the sole purpose of giving money to you
> for your work, so why taking away some part of this money for the t-shirt
> manufacturer etc....
This is a zero-cost-entry campaign for us... well I've spent one night
with 4 hours of sleep, but still. :) The campaign on the T-shirts
themselves could reach people (offline) whom we cannot, because we don't
walk on the same path over the Internet. As I've said donations are
rare, so we are trying this more dynamic approach with additional
benefit for those who are wondering should they make a financial
contribution.
I would love it if people donated more, because I would be able to spent
more time on Linterna Mágica and they would get better Linterna
Mágica. Work on LM cannot be compared with anything for hire,
unfortunately I can work on it in my "spare" time. Thats the cruel
reality. :)
Thank you for telling us about the situation.
I like the design of the T-shirts, I Think I'm ging to buy one. I'm still deciding which one I prefer.
Let see how it goes. Good luck,
В 22:33 +0100 на 28.02.2014 (пт), franparpe[@nospam] написа:
> I Think I'm ging to buy one. I'm still
> deciding which one I prefer.
>
> Let see how it goes. Good luck,
Thanks!
I've already ordered one... And I'm happy to be the first in supporting your campaign.
Sadly there is only one sold at the moment but don't worry because I'm sure more people will support you.
I think you made the right choice both in informing about what is happening and the campaign, because larger projects seem to get priority while others struggle.
Your initiative got my attention and now I'm conscious about your situation; that's good.
I wish you luck and, please, tell us how it goes.
There's a lot of these campaigns. There was in addition to this one on this forum the one about Pitivi [1] and GNU MediaGoblin [2]. I'm sure there are alot of others I don't know of. I wonder wouldn't a centralized way be better?
Like say FSF would do a huge annual fundraiser and then publicly distribute the funds. It would be easier to promote one fundraiser. Besides this way the middle man wouldn't take a cut.
Looks like the Pitivi campaign goes via GNOME and the GNU MediaGoblin via FSF. Both are 501(c)(3)s (non-profits in USA).
1 https://trisquel.info/en/forum/pitivi-needs-your-help
2 https://trisquel.info/en/forum/mediagoblin-campaign
В 15:20 +0100 на 01.03.2014 (сб), mikko.viinamaki[@nospam] написа:
> I wonder wouldn't a centralized way be better?
I think this is what the Software Freedom Conservancy does (for
donations?). [1] See the list of member projects. [2]
> It would be easier to promote one fundraiser.
A centralized fundraiser has one disadvantage. It is not clear how the
funds should be divided and between which projects. One option would be
to choose which project should benefit during the contribution
submission. I think the FSF had an option to choose if a donation is for
specific project or cause, or one that they decide how to use best.
> Like say FSF would do a huge annual fundraiser and then publicly distribute
> the funds.
The FSF helps mainly official GNU projects. The two main reasons are:
* they have limited staff
* for GNU projects there are requirements, which guaranties that the
project will stay free software, follow other useful guidelines and
behave well towards its users.
I've made a small donation last night.
It's: much better than to order a t-shirt that I won't use (I'm not much a fan of letting strange people know my personal tastes, any more); a way to save a lot of money, that I would spend on an international delivery; and, a way for the Linterna Mágica project to get all the money - or almost all, since I suspect that PayPal takes a fee...
It's a great project.
I can get a much better video playback quality (than if I use the proprietary flash plug-in) when using the VLC plug-in with Linterna Mágica.
And, by using VLC as the player, I can have a much less resource-demanding playback, since I can then use the GPU hardware acceleration capability of my video card - which makes /a lot/ of difference, in my single-core Pentium computer (the CPU fan doesn't make as much noise - which, otherwise, would be *a lot*).
Being another *great* end result of using Linterna Mágica that, I can watch YouTube and other Internet videos in *HD quality*, with no tearing, or any other problems, in my 9-year-old computer - eliminating the need to upgrade it, just to be able to watch such videos in HD.
Congratulations to everyone involved in the project.
В 20:49 +0100 на 02.03.2014 (нд), fernando.negro[@nospam] написа:
> I've made a small donation last night.
Thanks!
> It's: much better than to order a t-shirt that I won't use
> (I'm not much a fan of letting strange people know my personal tastes, any more);
I can totally understand and relate to that. Having different and
non-mainstream point of view and opinion is hard, promoting in publicly
is even harder.
> a way to save a lot of money, that I would spend on an international delivery;
Yes, that is a downside, but we had no better way to try such campaign.
> and a
> way for the Linterna Mágica project to get all the money - or almost all,
> since I suspect that PayPal takes a fee...
It gets. :)
> It's a great project.
> Congratulations to everyone involved in the project.
Thanks again.
Congratulations, you reached the goal.
В 09:34 +0100 на 03.03.2014 (пн), franparpe@[nospam] написа:
> Congratulations, you reached the goal.
True. You are the bearer of the good news. I haven't checked the
campaign today until now.
Thanks to everyone who participated!
В 10:42 +0200 на 03.03.2014 (пн), Ivaylo Valkov написа:
> В 09:34 +0100 на 03.03.2014 (пн), franparpe@[nospam] написа:
> > Congratulations, you reached the goal.
> Thanks to everyone who participated!
The campaign ends at the 20th of March. We met our base goal. How
further can we get?
Wow, congratulations!
But what happened here??
The counter increased from one tshirt to 20 overnight.
Did you promote the campaign on a big website or something?
В 11:30 +0100 на 03.03.2014 (пн), name at domain написа:
> Wow, congratulations!
> But what happened here??
> The counter increased from one tshirt to 20 overnight.
> Did you promote the campaign on a big website or something?
It was a surprise for us too. An announcement for the campaign was
posted on Reddit on multiple categories. I just discovered that someone
else also posted on Reddit with much better title than ours. That
thread received more comments and probably attention. I'm guessing this
thread is the cause for the success.
В 12:43 +0200 на 03.03.2014 (пн), Ivaylo Valkov написа:
> В 11:30 +0100 на 03.03.2014 (пн), shiretoko[@nospam] написа:
> > Wow, congratulations!
> > But what happened here??
>
> > The counter increased from one tshirt to 20 overnight.
> > Did you promote the campaign on a big website or something?
The Linterna Mágica T-Shirts campaign is over.
Thanks to a Reddit (and probably Linterna Mágica as well) user, we met
our goal at the second or the third day of the campaign. Although only
the base goal was reached the campaign is successful. Thank you!
We decided to use the money from the T-shirts campaign and the donations
relevant to it, to fund a new interesting and exiting project related to
free software.
Stay tuned!
Congratulations!
I didn't notice the campaign in time :( as I've been so busy. I would have loved to get a shirt. I'll just have to do without I guess. None the less I'll still throw in a little over $200 USD equivalent in bitcoins as a donation. You should see it shortly.
I'm glad to see a less-obvious project make an effort to raise funds for itself. I know it is especially difficult to do when your users don't normally even download or visit. There are so many projects that get forgotten because the codes distributed as part of a distribution and the user never has to visit the projects site. There just isn't an opportunity to seek donations from the user base.
I think it would be great if (particularly with a bigger distribution) some of the larger distributions were more proactive in requesting funds on behalf of non-obvious projects like Linterna Mágica.
I think we (ThinkPenguin) need to investigate being more proactive in seeking donations on behalf of projects that need funding. Despite working with quite a few distributions I think we could do more for the smaller projects. We attempted to do that via aligning with a very large distribution a few years ago. Unfortunately it didn't work out as desired due to the lack of interest of the lead developer of the distribution.
We get a significant amount of traffic to the site itself though and I suspect that it would pull in some amount of funding anyway. For a small project it would probably be significant. We would just need to do it during the checkout process. Maybe something along the lines of "You donate $5 USD we'll donate $5 USD" with a list of projects to which to donate to. Of course we would have to discuss such efforts with the projects themselves. There are some projects which don't want the hassle of dealing with funds.
Perhaps the distro should come with an (opt in) donate application that would poke the user when a free software project puts out the hat.
Or the FSF could have a subpage or somethang...
Thank you Chris!
Is there even a (distributed or federated) directory of all projects?
Someway to plug that info together, along with info/directions on how to donate or help a project?
There probably is something already that can accomplish this but I am not aware of how I might quickly look at the various software I use/enjoy and easily learn more about it or donate to it. Perhaps there needs to be something more obvious built right in.
Here's a (centralized) list https://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Main_Page
On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 02:44:58AM +0100, name at domain wrote:
> I didn't notice the campaign in time :( as I've been so busy. I
> would have loved to get a shirt. I'll just have to do without I
> guess. None the less I'll still throw in a little over $200 USD
> equivalent in bitcoins as a donation. You should see it shortly.
Wow! Thanks Chris!
> I'm glad to see a less-obvious project make an effort to raise funds
> for itself. I know it is especially difficult to do when your users
> don't normally even download or visit.
> There are so many projects
> that get forgotten because the codes distributed as part of a
> distribution and the user never has to visit the projects site.
> There just isn't an opportunity to seek donations from the user
> base.
That is generaly true, but I don't think it is the case with Linterna
Magica. I'm not aware of any distribution that has it in its
repositories.
> I think it would be great if (particularly with a bigger
> distribution) some of the larger distributions were more proactive
> in requesting funds on behalf of non-obvious projects like Linterna
> Mágica.
>
> I think we (ThinkPenguin) need to investigate being more proactive
> in seeking donations on behalf of projects that need funding.
That is a great idea. If you need any assistance in that direction I
would be glad to help (for any project).
If/when it happens it'll probably be when we deploy the new site we are working on...
While all of this is secondary to the critical features it's something on my radar.
There are a few similar things I want to be able to more easily participate in. Free software and internet freedom campaigns for instance. Something that would tie into efforts to promote freedom online. There are so many people who just don't follow the news. Right now it's not resource-free to support campaigns like the one against SOPA where sites shut down in protest. Ideally I should be able to get something in an email from a freedoms campaigns projects, click a link, and say "activate". Then that should probably pull in the campaign info and promote it to our customers when they visit. Not sure how easy this would be to do though as I think right now the code that you can just plop in hi-jacks things (ie your not in control).
В 22:34 +0100 на 29.03.2014 (сб), name at domain написа:
> Free software and internet freedom campaigns for instance. Something that
> would tie into efforts to promote freedom online. There are so many people
> who just don't follow the news.
I've been thinking exactly about that lately. We are on the same
page! :)