# Help choose my project for Ruby Mendicant **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [March 24, 2008, 5:55pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/help-choose-my-project-for-ruby-mendicant/197062 "2008-03-24T17:55:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![naething](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/e47774/32.png) [@naething](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/naething)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2008, 5:55pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/help-choose-my-project-for-ruby-mendicant/197062/1 "2008-03-24T17:55:40Z")
Hi folks, So far, the Ruby Mendicant ([rubymendicant.wikidot.com](http://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](http://rubymendicant.wikidot.com/projects) 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](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](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!