Hello, I started donating to my favourite open-source projects a couple years ago, but stopped about 6 months ago for different reasons and wanted to get back into it.
I wanted to ask if anyone here has a set system or process they follow when donating
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How much money do you donate? A set amount, whatever you feel like, a percentage of your earnings?
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When do you donate? Whenever you remember, on the first of the month, Thursdays?
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Do you have a minimum donation amount?
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How do you decide what projects to support? Do you forego donations if you’ve contributed in other ways? Do you keep a list?
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Do you donate to all equally or do you have some sort of ranking? Is it by amount of use, subjective preference, something else?
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What platforms do you prefer using? Liberapay, Opencollective, Patreon, ko-fi, Paypal, Monero, actual post?
So far the system I’ve devised for myself would go something like:
- put 2 % of all my earnings, whatever they are, in a separate account
- every quarter (on the first of January, April, July and October) donate the full amount of money in the account (with a minimum of 5 €, so as not to lose a big amount in fees)
- keep a ranked list of projects that I’ve used or deemed important or promising in the last three months (projects I donated to recently go to the bottom of the list), things at the top get more money than things at the bottom
- prioritise Liberapay since it’s open-source itself
I’m not quite that organized,
I’ve donated around 2 euros to huge projects like Wikipedia when they have a donation campaign, or 20 euros to projects like draw.io when I notice on github that they haven’t met their monthly goal yet.
The amount and frequency completely depends on my financial situation at the time and I only donate when I am using a piece of software/project (so when I remember, basically) on my free time and decide to check updates/state of the project.
So I’m not a frequent donor to any specific projects and several months may pass without donating any money, but when I have a bit more disposable income and when I’m doing free-time computer related hobbies I take a sum (lets say 50e) and distribute that money depending on project size. Smaller projects get more (less likely to have a lot of donors) big projects less (hopefully they have a lot of people donating small amounts that add up).
Very true!