I donate periodically to KDE, but my major gripe is that I don’t know where the money is going. They have no financial reports that can be easily found
this is because giving money individually to a KDE subproject is a lot of logistic and unless the project is big and receive a lot of money, the amount collected for the individual project won’t be enough to do anything meaningful for the project. But we had a trial with Kdenlive specific fundraising, which worked reasonably well last year so maybe we will see more subprojects specific fundraising in the future.
there’s no public tracking of their income or expenditure like on opencollective
yeah aside from the graphs in ev.kde.org/reports/ev-2022/#working-groups_ we don’t publish detailed logs of every single transactions as they contain private details like how much our contractors are getting paid. KDE e.V. is a registered non-profit in Germany and the tax offices is very vigilant that nothing weird happens.
it’s not easy to find KDE devs (aka who is actually on the KDE team) so that one could sponsor individual devs
This developers accepting donations often have this info on their website. It’s also possible to find KDE related people on liberapay liberapay.com/search?q=kde
My search query was “financial report” and I stopped scrolling after after a few seconds on the page. Maybe working with tabs on that page or having a table of contents would help. I was honestly expecting a PDF 🤔 I find the way wikipedia does it really good wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/ . A simple “wikipedia financial report” query brings me to their page.
this is because giving money individually to a KDE subproject is a lot of logistic and unless the project is big and receive a lot of money, the amount collected for the individual project won’t be enough to do anything meaningful for the project. But we had a trial with Kdenlive specific fundraising, which worked reasonably well last year so maybe we will see more subprojects specific fundraising in the future.
I kinda understand. As said before, I do trust KDE more than I do Mozilla, who uses the exact same response to say “you can’t donate towards Firefox” and then you see what they do with the money - it doesn’t go to firefox.
Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but seeing a moneyflow graph, diagram or just simple table of how the pot is split by project would be amazing. The current table doesn’t mention a single project. Maybe personnel just jumps between projects as they see fit and don’t contribute to a single project, which would make tracking difficult? I assume that’s the case.
At the very least adding the option for people donating to say “my money is for all of KDE, but I’m donating because of project XYZ” would give you data on which projects people really value and a bit of a reason why they use KDE.
This developers accepting donations often have this info on their website
I would very much appreciate a section on the donation page or even a separate page of “Contributors”, projects they are involved in / function / what they do, and official links to their donation options (liberapay, github account, paypal, website with payment information, crypto address, whatever).
Because liberapay is a third-party website and I’d have to first verify that the in the search query actually does contribute to KDE.