Let's discuss known Support, Sponsorship for maintainers

[llvee]

Thank you all for reviewing, contributing to this.

Personally I consider Anki to be a valuable tool.

Today I notice there is a backlog of over 100 issues.

Since Anki increases everyone's likelihood of succeeding at academic pursuits..

resolving the issues seems like a worthy endeavour.

Are there any known channels presently for support or sponsorship regarding open source maintainers?

Is anyone pursuing funding avenues for maintainers?

[dae]

AnkiDroid have chosen to accept and redistribute donations, so you can donate to them if you wish. I'm afraid I am not interested in such a setup for the desktop version at this time. I'm skeptical it would result in a noticeable increase in valuable contributions, and there are significant costs to bringing more developers on to the project. It would add extra administrative overhead that I'd rather avoid if at all possible.

[andrewsanchez]

It would be great if Anki had something like the Django fellowship program or something similar to https://tidelift.com/ or could do something like what Beeware has done with Anaconda. I.e., reliable ways for the community to fund the improvement of Anki and for Ankitects to make use of those funds. @dae is 1000% correct that throwing more devs and money at a project alone isn't helpful and could do more harm. IMO, there needs to be clear project management processes and governance models in place for how such funds would be used effectively. Otherwise, it's completely unclear how the funds would be used. I don't see how this could be accomplished without a more organized team supporting @dae. Even the fact that he is (I believe?) the only person with merge permissions on the repo seems like a major bottleneck to accelerating development.

It would add extra administrative overhead that I'd rather avoid if at all possible.

Couldn't that be delegated to someone else like a project manager? Of course, even bringing on a PM or similar role would create some work for you. But I imagine it would result in less work in the long run.

[llvee]

@dae

Adding a web version would likely increase user numbers a lot, so would having more people contributing to the project then donations, & support should also increase to support the new contributors if they are making useful contributions that enhance Anki somehow. Are you interested in exploring collaboration to find more support avenues for Anki & Ankitects?

[dae]

@llvee I appreciate your enthusiasm and your desire to try and improve Anki, but I'm afraid as mentioned above, I am not interested in such a program at this time, as I have enough on my plate already. Maybe at some point in the future.

Regarding a 'web version', that would mean computation needs to be done on cloud servers, instead of the user's own devices. The hosting costs would be much higher than AnkiWeb's already high costs, and it would not be practical to provide without users contributing a monthly fee.

[llvee]

@dae Not neccesarily, there are other ways to approach cloud engineering that could reduce or eliminate costs. I can help with that. Would you like to share more about the hosting costs with me?

[shigeyukey]

In my opinion there needs to be a little more official and community support for donations to L-M-Sherlock (Jarrett Ye) the developer of FSRS algorithm. Even though he is a very dedicated developer and will most likely continue to develop superior Anki algorithms and Anki schedulers, according to his comment about 8 months ago the total of all donations by FSRS is less than his salary for one month. And recently the FSRS Helper functionality has been incorporated into the native Anki and this may further reduce the donations from FSRS helpers since the FSRS helper is no longer needed. Maybe his only major route to donations is the add-on page and Reddit posts and both are too small in scale.