I wish I could make small monthly donations to TPF. I don't know about others but I'd rather pay 20 USD/month than 200 USD/year even thought the former will cost me more. I am also quite sure I'd forget to pay another 200 USD next year.
Am I so much alone with this that its not worth for TPF to improve their payment system to include recurring payments? PayPal already supports this and one of the options in the donation form of TPF is Paypal.
So why is that TPF does not support this?
Re:Ya, it annoys me too
cbrandtbuffalo on 2008-03-26T13:51:57
We would love to accept monthly donations and we're working on making that easier. I'm currently working on a project to revamp TPF's donation system and it started with my request for a perl CRM. This will help us (TPF) better manage our relationship with you (our customer, in this case our supporters). I'm still working on the plan for this and should have updates soon. Watch TPF's blog.
With regard to memberships, we've discussed this too. There are various questions that need to be sorted out to offer memberships. But those issues aside, what would memberships have to offer the average perl coder to make it worthwhile? (I'm really asking.)
Most Perl stuff is already out there and free. We could try things like discounts for The Perl Review, books, etc., but the question is would managing all of this really add enough value to be worth it? I'm skeptical that a TPF membership could offer something to someone like Adam (to pick on him since he commented above) that he can't already get on his own.Re:Ya, it annoys me too
gabor on 2008-03-26T14:09:30
I have a CRM I am using in-house to manage info about my customers that I plan to release as open source. It is web based and is written in Perl. If this is interesting to you we should discuss the requirements and I could setup a trial version for you to play with. It needs many improvements but if TPF is interested in using it I'd be glad to add them.IMHO membership would be just a simple way to set several levels of monthly donations. The little extra benefits would be to get a T-shirt with onion or a stock of round wooden tuits.
Re:Ya, it annoys me too
cbrandtbuffalo on 2008-03-27T12:14:44
I saw you posted over at the TPF blog too, so I replied there.Re:Ya, it annoys me too
Alias on 2008-03-26T16:03:36
Oh, maybe things like...
- A vote in notional executive elections, if we ever had enough people to take it that way.
- Points to spend on helping choose which grants to fund?
- A complementary (and possibly exclusive?) DVD of talks from, say, YAPC::NA turning up at my door unexpectedly.
But in general, the same things as you get from any membership.
1. Community
2. Exclusivity
3. Respect
4. Influence
5. Altruism
Don't treat this as a pure dollars and cents exercise, I don't want membership because I get $x dollars CASH BACK AS BOOK DISCOUNTS!
The math on that is a complete failure.
And scale it with dollars...
Student Membership, 2 figure cost and 1 point of influence.
Professional Membership, 3 figure cost, 5 points of influence.
Company Membership, 4 figure cost, 20 points of influence, invitation to annual invitation-only "Perl Corporate Summit".
Enterprise Membership, 5 figure cost, 100 points of influence, invitation to annual "Perl Corporate Summit" and other perks you get not just cause of the dollars, but also because these guys are likely to be big employers of Perl people...
I've told various people this a few times and gotten mostly shrugs.
But it would only take 5 Enterprise Members and a scattering of smaller ones and you could basically hire a Perl coder at normal rates permanently to work on Perl 5, or Perl 6, or special projects (like, say, hiring me or DAGOLDEN or whatever for 6 months to work on Strawberry and related areas).
Re:Ya, it annoys me too
cbrandtbuffalo on 2008-03-27T12:29:17
I copied your response to the perl 5 wiki so we can better capture the discussion. I hope you don't mind. I put a few questions there as well.
