Tag Archives: crowdfunding

Announcements, Geary, Yorba

Geary funding campaign is live on IndieGoGo! Donate today

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geary-192x192A couple of weeks ago, I told you we were working on a crowdfunding project for Geary:

We hope that a successful campaign will demonstrate that crowdfunding is a sustainable model for other projects to follow. Many of those projects have historically relied upon corporate sponsorship. Crowdfunding brings with it an independence that these other revenue models lack. It allows us to continue to operate independently and build the features you, the community, really want to see.

Well, that day has arrived.  Our IndieGoGo project is now live and ready to accept your donations!  Please take a look and consider contributing.  We need your donations to continue working on Geary and making a great application you can use day-to-day for all your email needs.

Here’s a nifty video we put together explaining what we’re trying to do:

We need to spread the word and get out the news.  Please share the campaign with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and your favorite open-source forums.  And if you see mention of the campaign on news sites, please upvote or share it — every little bit really does help.

Thank you for supporting us.  We can’t do this without you!

Announcements, Geary

Exciting times for Yorba (we need your videos!)

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Yesterday was an auspicious day here at Yorba: Shotwell is four years old.  It’s hard to believe that from that rather meager first commit grew the photo manager we have today!

Well, today is another auspicious day here at Yorba.  Some of you may remember that last year at GUADEC 2012, Adam Dingle and I gave a keynote discussing how the open source community could attempt to find sustainability via crowdfunding.  I’m thrilled to share that we’re ready to put some weight behind that idea: Yorba plans in the near future to begin such a campaign for our newest application, Geary, a lightweight modern email client for the GNOME desktop. Our hope is that a successful crowdfunding campaign could bring in sufficient revenue to make Geary a world-class email application.

We hope that a successful campaign will demonstrate that crowdfunding is a sustainable model for other projects to follow. Many of those projects have historically relied upon corporate sponsorship. Crowdfunding brings with it an independence that these other revenue models lack. It allows us to continue to operate independently and build the features you, the community, really want to see.

One key element to all crowdfunding campaigns is a short video that describes the vision of the project. We plan on producing exactly that kind of video. We would love it if we could include testimonials from our users about the software experience Yorba has provided in the past. Please consider making a short video of yourself (under two minutes) describing your experience with Geary and/or Shotwell: what you like about them, why you use them, and more importantly, one or two of your top Geary wishlist items — features that would make it the perfect email client.

To submit your videos, email geary-love@yorba.org with a link to your video — FTP, YouTube, Vimeo, etc. — along with your name, your work or other affiliation (optional) and your location. We plan on starting this campaign soon, so we need your video testimonials by next Friday, March 15.

Wish us luck, and let us know your thoughts in the comments! We’d love to hear from you.

GNOME, Yorba

Yorba and crowdfunding at LWN.net

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Nathan Willis at LWN.net has written a great article summarizing the keynote Adam Dingle and I gave at GUADEC, “Crowdfunding GNOME Application Development” (PDF slides are here).  For those of you who missed the talk, Nathan’s précis gives a nice overview of our presentation and the questions afterwards.  He also offers a concise explanation of today’s problems with funding open source development:

All open source software faces the same challenges when it comes to raising the money to keep developers at the keyboard. In recent years, Linux distributors have underwritten the development of desktop software through the sale of enterprise services and support contracts of various forms. Users have grown accustomed to that situation, and there is certainly nothing wrong with it, but Dingle and his colleagues at Yorba have shown that no one needs to accept that as the only viable funding model.

Read the whole thing here.

Geary, GNOME, Yorba

A Coruña on My Mind

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Ok, ok, yet another post-GUADEC wrap-up.  A few things worth sharing:

* The keynote Adam and I gave this year, “Crowdfunding GNOME Application Development”, went off great.  I would say “without a hitch” but of course there was a hitch thanks to the usual hardware juggling act of connector-A-won’t-fit-in-the-port-B.  After a quick switcheroo of computers and emailing the slides around, the keynote went on without trouble.  We appreciate everyone who attended and gave us the chance to voice our thinking on this topic.  The questions were great too.

People have asked for slides and video of the presentation.  Download the slides here.  As for video … I don’t know when that will be available, but I’ll post it here when it is.  William Ting gives a nice summary of our talk at his blog.

* Adam was interviewed about Yorba and funding open source development.  Check him out at World of Gnome talking about the history of Yorba, Vala, and more.

* One of the more exciting aspects of GUADEC was all the interest people expressed about Geary.  It seemed everyone I met had something positive to say about it or offered some thoughtful advice or suggestion about its direction.  There’s an old saw: “Three economists, four opinions.”  Well, three email users, four email workflows.  Everyone uses email differently.  I feel that’s the central challenge we face.

To everyone who is either running Geary or wants to try it: please don’t run Geary 0.1.  (I want to italicize and underline that sentence as well, but I’ll spare you.)  Although it’s only a few months old, so many improvements have been made since then, from features to performance to stability, no one should be using it.  Instead, please run from our git repository.  Or, if you’re on Ubuntu, try our Daily PPA.  I know some people find it sketchy to run from trunk — especially anything that touches your email — but trunk is far better than running 0.1.  I have high hopes for 0.2 (coming soon!) but there’s no reason to wait until then to see what Geary’s up to.

* Finally, I’d like to chime in and compliment the A Coruña organizers for putting on a great conference this year.  Everything flowed smoothly and without a bump (although I’m sure the organizers have plenty of behind-the-scenes horror stories).  I know one thing about A Coruña: I’ll never look at a lighthouse the same way again.

Announcements, Geary, GNOME, Yorba

Yorba at GUADEC, A Coruña

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Five of the Yorba crew will be attending GUADEC in A Coruña this year: Adam, Eric, Lucas, Charles, and myself.  This is Charles’ first time to GUADEC, but the rest of us should be familiar faces to many GUADEC regulars out there.

Adam and I will be giving a keynote on Friday, July 27th titled “Crowdfunding GNOME Application Development”.  This is a topic we’ve been thinking a lot about lately and look forward to sharing some of our thoughts with all of you.

Yorba will also be hosting a BoF/workshop on Geary, our new email client for the GNOME desktop.  This is for anyone and everyone interested in Geary as well as the future of messaging on the GNOME desktop.  We’ll be discussing our vision and would love to hear yours as well.  The workshop will be on July 30th, 12:00 – 13:00 in Room 2.2a.

Looking forward to seeing all of you in A Coruña!