Are you willing to contribute some money to help diaspora*s development?

Hey awesome diaspora* community! Today I'm asking you a very special question. At the moment, the development speed of the diaspora* project is quite slow. It looks like this is not only because not many people are interested in contributing to diaspora*, but also because the volunteers who compose the core team don't have enough time to do the review work needed, adding more delays to everything.

The core team is doing all lot of background work. They maintain all the official services: the website, the HQ pod, our Discourse and the wiki. They do the sysadmin job of installing and keeping those services up to date, but they also are the moderators who fight spam. They answer many questions and help developers, podmins, and users. They do the release management and push out new versions of diaspora*. But most important of all, they are the ones doing the final reviews, the very important task of checking the code submitted by other contributors, helping them improve the code, and then integrate it inside diaspora* for everyone.

This is a lot of work, and even if it is less visible than new features, this work is critical because if it is not done, the project is stuck.

We unfortunately reached a point where the limited time of the core team as volunteers slows down the diaspora* development. Two very important features, the accounts migration and the API, are waiting for a review for several weeks while the core team currently is busy with all the tasks listed above, as well as other tasks like the creation of a new official website. To go forward, the diaspora* project needs someone from the core team to be dedicating more time to these diaspora* background jobs at least a couple of hours per month more.

So, to the important question...

If a diaspora* core team member would set up a Patreon or something similar that allows them to fund more time to do the maintenance and review work, would you contribute to that fund?

A big warning here: This is not about paying someone to be able to decide what they will be working on. There is BountySource if you want to support the development of specific features with money. This is about allowing someone to have some dedicated time to work on the maintenance tasks of the diaspora* project, mainly reviews. This core developer will be the one who will choose how they will spend their time, most of the time. But as the core team members are the ones who are the most aware of what's going on with the project, I think we can trust them to do the best choices to improve diaspora* development speed.

So, would you give a few bucks monthly? I would totally do!

#diaspora #diaspora-dev #contribute #donate