$500 donation from Tyler Dow

Last week we’ve got a donation of $500 to our OpenCollective account, contributed by Tyler Dow. The donation of such amount is quite unusual for our project, so I would like to give some clarifications about it.

You can visit our OpenCollective page and see that the donation came in two parts.

The first part of $300 came as “General Purpose Donation”, see it in Budget section of the main collective’s page –

The second part of $300 was contributed to “Software Development” Project of our collective – you can see it by clicking on Software Development project at the top of our main collective’s page –

…and then, on the project’s page you can navigate to it’s Budget section and see the transaction –

In our OpenCollective account we use Projects to separate finances coming for different purposes and this donation is a great example demonstrating how this concept works.

With Projects we can be sure that finances coming for one particular purpose won’t mix with other funds, which came to another purpose – every Project has separate budget and isolated from all other Projects. For example, you can see all funds, which we have allocated for production of Pepper&Carrot Motion Comic in its dedicated Project and it is transparently visible how much funds remaining for that particular purpose and how much we’ve already used. You can read more about Projects in OpenCollective here.

As I’ve already mentioned above, the first donation came as “General Purpose” to our main collective page. That means we can use it for any purpose within the scope of Morevna Project’s activities – i.e. we can transfer the money to some of our Projects (and then use them within the scope of the Project) or use it for our infrastructure expenses (like paying rent for servers and other services that we use). I am so happy that we now have some budget allocated for infrastructure, as those expenses are often invisible and neglected, but they are essential to keep our project running. Also, I’ve had in mind to slightly expand our infrastructure by adding a few servers, but wasn’t sure if we will be able to afford this. Now we have possibility to do that, much thanks to donation arrived as General Purpose – this is so much appreciated!

For second part of donation, which came to Software Development project I still have to decide how exactly we will use it. There are several options here – we still have no MacOS packages for Papagayo-NG and RenderChan; writing proper documentation for RenderChan might be a good option too; there is also a mysterious “Morevna Studio” project, which hasn’t even been announced, but already tested internally in our studio for a few months; finally, it might be even better to release version 1.5.0 of OpenToonz Morevna Edition. What do you think would be the best? ^__^