Crowdfunding campaign for specific functionality

Hi! I’ve always thought about the possibility to speed up the development of a specific feature by a crowdfunding campaign. The idea is to select a bunch of features most wanted by community and start a crowdfunding campaign in order to see those features development prioritized. Maybe some work can be externalized and done in parallel with MOD Team, just speculating. Please share your thoughts!

5 Likes

That is a good idea, but I’d raise the money to give to Mod to implement, otherwise, you’ll have less chance of getting it right for all users.

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I like it! But it will be difficult to

  • specify it exactly (ie find agreement with users)
  • negotiate compromises (sound quality vs. performance vs. compatibility with other devices)
  • work splits on topics that affect MOD devices
  • determining who is responsible if the feature cannot be implemented fully and/or correctly
  • discussing time lines

Basically all the boring project management stuff. :frowning:

I was thinking about something similar from time to time. I really love the community driven open source idea. However I have no programming skills and so I can’t contribute much, and even though I’m not so fond of capital ideas, money seems to be the only and easiest way. :sweat_smile:
So I think crowdfunding would be a great way to get things going.
But maybe a option to donate for community made plugins could be a good way to show appreciation for the hard work. Something like bandcamp for developers, maybe something like this already exists…
Supporting mod devices - yes, but I see more potential for user/community content.

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Yes, of course the campaign should be managed by MOD Team. If there’s shortage in human resources they could outsource the job.

Yes, would be not an easy task but it could be simplified: MOD Team (I suppose) has a list of features to be implemented for upcoming releases. Let’s say that a new amp plugin or a new driver to minimize latency are in the list but they plan to release them in 2025 with version 1.28. We could prioritize this development supporting it with a crowdfunding campaign.

I am a bit apprehensive about this, as new development is not all that it entails.
There is testing needed to be done on 3 different units (Duo, Duo X and Dwarf all work slightly differently) plus then maintaining such feature from that moment on.

If crowdfunding developments, in my opinion makes more sense for that to be related to plugins.
They are more or less self-contained, and don’t get in the way of regular releases.

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Yes, of course. I’m thinking about features that are already planned and free of dependencies with other mandatory releases. If is not the case, even plugin development speedup (or optimization of existing in terms of CPU usage) would remain interesting.

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I think it would have even more sense to create crownfundings to port preexistent lv2 plugins instead of create new ones. You know what the product would be, we’ll just have it in the Dwarf

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I think it would be best if Mod Devices did the prioritizing. They have both the input from us users, the technical knowledge (what is possible) and hopefully a strategic path planned for the platform.

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Yeah, kind of. I mean, if something can be released faster but more money is needed to reach the goal, crowdfunding should be an option to consider.

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