Spending available 2018 budget

The Neos Project Finances & Fundraising
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Hey Neos team members and community. We currently have around 40k€ in our piggy bank.

As every year it would be a pity to let too much of that go to taxes…

So, please propose ideas how to spend some of the money for the Neos project. Please answer the questions posted in “How is a budget requested?” with your proposal: Guideline: How to apply for a budget from the Neos Project (draft)

We will collect suggestions until 14th September and vote on the suggested topics afterwards.

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[WIP] Ideas to be fleshed out:

  • Travel/accommodation for Sprint in Salzburg
  • funding an event sourcing focused sprint
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Some random quick ideas:

  • Some team member swag? Like team member mugs or whatever.

  • I don’t know if it makes sense to have some specialised workshop for something to build more knowledge? Eg. event sourcing or react or diversity or evangelism or or or

  • Funding a refactoring / fixing sprint

  • Funding an performance/caching sprint

  • funding release work (also bugfix releases)

  • Getting some help for design language?

  • Getting some UX help?

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I like the ideas from @christianm. Another idea would be to spend some money on marketing.

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Hey,

I would like to propose to spend money on the event sourced CR rewrite - so that we can push the efforts forward in a more concentrated manner. To me that is currently the most important strategic topic we should be more actively pursuing as a team.

I would like to flesh out the concept in more detail in about 2 weeks when I am back working.

All the best,
Sebastian

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To iterate on my one liner:

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Pushing the CR rewrite would be awesome. IMHO, regardless about how we spend the 2018 money, I would suggest to start a funding for the rewrite (like the Ui rewrite). It just adds so many new possibilities and use cases for projects + it would be (alongside the UI concept in general) a great marketing asset for the project itself. What do you think?

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Hey David,

I think generally this is a great idea. There are just a few points which imho are different compared to the ui rewrite funding.

  • when we started the UI rewrite, we were at 70-80% completion (main things worked, it was really about fine grained details and making it well round). In contrast, the CR rewrite is maybe at 20% completion.
  • this might make the CR rewrite more difficult to sell, as it is more risky currently - essentially we cannot promise “with 50.000€ we will get it done”; we can only say “we will be further than today”. Imho it is not possible to seriously estimate what we need, without ending up at huge numbers because of big error margins
  • the last thing is more of a personal matter - as I will work only half-time from October to February, I would love to participate in the rewrite itself technically, but I will not be able to do fundraising, communication and project management (like I tried, of course with the help&support of others, in the ui rewrite). That means somebody else would need to step up.
  • finally, we somehow have to form a bigger team around it; as only Bernhard and me actually working at the rewritten CR (and Bastian and Robert on the foundation ES package) won’t be enough; and it’s better for e.g. my personal motivation as well to regularily work on it as a team :wink:

Would be awesome to get this started :slight_smile: anybody who would like to help out? Don’t worry if you do not know the topic in depth yet; we/I can bring you up to speed pretty quickly. :slight_smile:

All the best,
Sebastian
PS I am typing this on my phone; so sorry for typos!

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PS do not get me wrong; stuff like especially the release work suggested by @christianm is also crucially important and it would be good to have some funding for it :slight_smile: - so my “talking about the Cr rewrite” does not mean we should not fund other things :slight_smile:

All the best,
Sebastian

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My favorite topics to spend money on are without special order:

  • Marketing
  • Release and Release-Tooling
  • Travel Expenses for Sprints (helps cr, ui and also onboarding new contributors)
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I will propose a more overall project and support the implementation of PSR-7. This is to benefit all kind of projects based on the Neos Flow Framework and strengthen the product in terms of decisions makers

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Do you guys think that 40k would be enough to rewrite the Media Library?
That’s a really old dusty corner we have there :slight_smile:

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Hi Sebastian, thx for your reply. I really do like the topic and would like to help out. Beside the fact that I’m quite new to all this + the fact that this topic is technically very advanced and it’s not a “low hanging fruit”, I might be able to help with fundraising and pm. happy to learn :smiley:

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ps: … and thx for the very interesting Ui rewrite insight :grinning:

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My top candidates for spending some of that money would be:

  • Release process / tooling / documentation - maybe even defining a budget of x€ for each release, as suggested by Christian in the other thread
  • Bugfixing - maybe something like a bug bounty?
  • Documentation
  • Marketing Material
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My ideas:

  • As @tobias said a trip to Salzburg
  • Marketing, marketing, marketing (Trailer Videos, A Blog to reach the majority and editors…)
  • Improving the documentation for beginners
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I‘d like to chime in… Like I said several times: Documentation is IMHO the biggest issue of Neos (and most software projects). We should really tackle this and personally, funding would help me to set fixed times for work. This goes together with release work.

The CR rework is really necessary but we have sooo many features, LOC and I think we should improve those first.

I know working on features is cool and is PR wise more visible. But having a rock solid product with easy and fully fledged docs is king.

Finally, improving Neos in small steps is a better way of working.

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Left field here - it seems a common problem to install Neos so that it works easily. I was in love with the idea of Neos (losing that love slowly) because there was no easy way to install it. I could not find a host that had a customer who had successfully installed and was running Neos on their servers. I asked some local Web Devs if they knew of a Host that could install it - and all contacted their support contacts and they said it might be possible with all kinds of Caveats, and so I could not get to a point of getting Neos onto a system to play with - Now before you all say (I have seen it in the comments previously by all you really smart tech-savvy guys) if you can’t install it and don’t understand the requirements, then Neos should not be considered. To me that contradicts the original purpose of Neos - i.e. allowing creative types to “Create” and be absorbed in the Creative process. I believe there are more creative only people out there than combination (tech and arty)!
Apple is a good example of a company that created a significant market (I am sure I don’t need to explain that one)!
The illusion portrayed in the promotional videos I saw when I was first interested was simplicity - i.e. not having to deal with WP and all its issues and convoluted way of working - but I am now directed down that path (fundamentally because I can use a simple one click install from the Web Host, and that there are tremendous no.s of people using it and developing plugins etc for it) I resisted that as long as I could - and I still would have hoped that Neos could be an option - and to get to the point of this comment - If your management team are interested in success (read adoption by the masses) then I would spend the money to get the system easy to install and to get it on the various hosting software installers - It maybe easier to do this and get 100,000’s of installs by working on a reliable scripted installer - rather than a new feature or a code rewrite or tea-shirts, mugs and or seminars (that is not going to affect no.s of people significantly interested in using Neos) but if your intention is to keep this to yourselves (expect that this will be another Beta vs VHS standards story).
Sorry for being negative - my view is shared by all those that I asked if they could get a Neos installation working - I have certainly extolled the virtues of Neos based entirely on the demonstration videos - it truly looks to be amazing - but too hard for normal people to attempt.

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Hey Peter, thanks for sharing your view.
We are in fact working to make Neos easier to use for beginners - that is the special focus of some of the core team members, such as Roland Schütz or myself. We have recently released new editor docs (https://www.neos.io/docs-and-support/editor-documentation.html) and are working on improving the installer (New Welcome Screen with Neos 4.1, finally on our way to fixing that nasty Setup bug we’ve had for ages).

To continue doing so, it’s crucially important for us to know where people are failing. So if you have made any experiences that made it hard for you to install Neos, please post them in a separate thread so we can have a look and maybe improve the installation process further.

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@ozfossil Thank you for your detailed report. Installing could be easier. But if you managed that (which is doable given a “good hosting/web server” then you have to work out how all this new tech works.

I know several people that just want working web sites and Neos could work for them but the technical barrier (installer, upgrading, composer stuff, CR, Fusion, FlowQuery, Eel, Fusion, AFX…) is just too high.

I might be stating the obvious: not all problems could be solved by money. But working on specific issues with a set budget helps. Saying we need the new CR or more documentation is not specific enough.

The goal of a piece of open source software is usage. The bigger the user base the better. For everyone: users (faster bug fixes, more features, exisitence in the future), agencies (more customers, easy to sell)…

For me, we have a cascade of issues blocking or limiting a wider adoption.

  1. Installation and first steps should be easy like WordPress (there, I said it :tired_face:)
  2. Documentation
  3. Stability (no bugs, should behave as expected, if erros happen let them have a clear error message)
  4. Marketing
  5. New features

Those are the qualities I look for in any given OSS. I’ve worked on a different CMS that depended on a handful (literally less than five) people to do development and the releases. And eventually it broke away. They were all working with this system on client websites, earning money. Now it’s close to dead.

It must seem like I am a documentation-nazi but: Documentation is the general barrier.
Good docs support marketing, make installs easy, produces good content.

EDIT: We’re telling our clients to focus on their users needs and cater to them. To write relevant content and that stuff. And we’re not any better than them…

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