Hi folks,
So far, the Ruby Mendicant (rubymendicant.wikidot.com) fundraising
campaign has been going great.
== News About Donations ==
Over the last couple weeks, I’ve received contributions from 53
people, running the gambit from close friends to people I’ve never
even spoke with before.
With the help of RubyCentral’s donation matching, I’ve raised enough
funds to work on open source Ruby as my primary responsibility for at
least 12 weeks, which is a decent chunk of time!
== The Projects ==
It’s now time to figure out how to best spend this community funded
time. To simplify things, I’ve limited my project ideas list to the
three that have received the most community support:
- A clean, fast, light-weight rewrite of PDF::Writer.
- Ruby 1.9 compatibility work for a number of RubyGems
- ‘Uncovering Hidden Gems’ documentation project, writing tutorials
and quick references for lesser known Ruby libraries.
You can see more details of these projects here:
Projects - Ruby Mendicant
I need your help selecting a project, but the way the projects will
be
selected has changed, so please read on.
== What About Voting? ==
When I started this project, I considered doing proportional voting
based on donation amounts. Unfortunately, I’ve been getting some
(mostly private) negative feedback about this.
The general suggestion is that if Ruby Mendicant is meant to serve
the
whole Ruby community, decision making shouldn’t be tied directly to
donations.
For this reason, I am going to try to select a project based on
consensus, rather than doing an official ‘vote’. Because of this, we
need to start the discussion much earlier,
rather than just opening up votes for a week or so after April 1st.
Starting now, I encourage folks to go over these three projects and
see if you have any strong opinions (good or bad) about them.
Then, please get involved by discussing your thoughts on the Ruby
Mendicant mailing list.
http://groups.google.com/group/rubymendicant
If there is a clear winner from the above ideas, we’ll easily go with
that.
If the consensus becomes something to the effect of “any of these
projects are good”, I’ll select the project I like best.
If people have a hard time agreeing on a project, I’ll need to do
some
sort of voting, but I hope it doesn’t result in that.
Right now, we have some time to discuss this as much as necessary.
I
won’t be selecting a project until after the 1st, and possibly not
until April 10th or so.
However, the quicker we can come to an agreement about this, the
faster I’ll be able to start planning out my work for the coming
months.
I hope that people can appreciate the community-centric approach
here,
but please get in touch with me if you donated and this deeply
concerns you.
If you haven’t donated yet and this concerns you, please contact me
before donating. 
== Show Your Support ==
This pretty much sums up all the news on Ruby Mendicant. Though
planning will surely be underway soon, we’re still in the fund
raising
stage for now.
There are still 7 more days where you can make a contribution, any
amount is welcome!
http://pledgie.com/campaigns/571
You can also link back to the campaign or tell your friends. So far,
this has been enormously effective in spreading the word, and I thank
anyone who’s stuck a badge or did
a quick post on their blogs, I see a ton of people coming in from
your sites!