Bounty system to reward and encourage development of most voted ideas.
I think Blender should introduce a bounty system.
- Someone suggests an idea on here or a new Blender.org/bounties webpage.
- Blender developers approve or decline the general idea to prevent people spending time working on something that won't be accepted for whatever reason.
- A realistic deadline is assigned to the proposal based on how long it would take to code if someone works on it for 3 hours per day, plus a month for the bounty to gain traction.
- People can then vote for the feature via a donation which is held by the Blender foundation.
- The bounty is awarded to whoever's implementation is accepted first by the Blender developers.
If the deadline is met and the feature not implemented, the voters can opt to take back their donation at their discretion, based on whether there's any obvious activity. Developers should indicate on the bounty page if they're actively working on it and their estimated time of completion, just in case voters are prepared to wait longer.
This would be a second source of revenue for the Blender foundation (if they implement the feature), and if not would entice more developers who aren't employed directly by Blender to get involved.
4 Comments
Blender has specifically stated they will not apply donations tied to a specific feature deliverable.
Just the financial accounting alone, for dealing with accepting and returning individual donations based on milestones, would be a nightmare.
should be easily automated. Seems like a good way of enticing people to give to the dev fund.
It would not be easy to automate a large group of users each having a different definition of "goal achieved", arguing with the definition, arguing with the result, and then demanding refunds for various reasons.
Seems like being offered the gift of using software with features that used to cost literally thousands of dollars - for FREE - would be enough to entice people to give to the dev fund.
well unfortunately it doesn't appear to be. But regarding it not being easy, I think it would be easy because the Blender devs will accept only if the criteria of the proposal people donated for are met. Once it's in, that's it, no more refund. Maybe give it a two step acceptance, one from the Blender devs to say they're happy to put it in Blender, and then one from the donators to say it met their expectations of what they were investing for (80% approval of those that vote = approved) If it passes the deadline, then people can request refund via automated system if they wish, until it's accepted in which case they can't. Seems pretty straightforward. Most payment providers offer a way to do it via their API's.