Questions and Answers
As often requested and announced at T3CON12, here we go with the new questions and answers regarding our crowd funding campaign.
Question:
How did you calculate the budget and why is it 30.000,- €?
Answer:
The budget is the minimum amount we will need, to be able to deliver Grid Elements 2.0 at all. It has been calculated based on an estimated amount of work between 450 and 500 hours, we will need to finish the most important tasks.
Currently we assume, that crowd funding means long prices inlcuding VAT. So the amount after tax will be about 25.000,- €.
Only after reaching this minimum amount, we will get the money from startnext. So with a lower budget there will initially be no paid development and the sponsors will get back their money.
Question:
How did you calculate the amounts for the features of the rewards?
Answer:
We did a rough estimate there too, how long it will take at least to implement the particular working feature. A long price of 2000,- € is about 25-30 hours of work.
Question:
What about additional costs for lodging, travel and catering?
Answer:
Therefor we applied for a supplemental budget of the TYPO3 Association in the amount of 7.785,- €. In case we manage to get more than the necessary minimum of 30.000,- € with our campaign, we will offset the overfunding with the T3A budget application and apply for the necessary balance only.
The budget application will be decided on shortly before the general assembly of the TYPO3 association though, which will be happening after our code sprint. As the organizers of the code sprint we will take the resulting risk.
So our goal for the campaign actually is an overall amount of 37.785,- €, since in this case we would not need any money by the association. The amount we applied for could be used for other projects then.
Question:
Will I get an official invoice for my sponsoring?
Answer:
Since we are no non profit organisation, but a registered company, every sponsor will of course get an official invoice. We just need the full adress of the invoice recipient.
Additionally this means, any sponsored amounts are pre-tax including VAT, since the bill might be sent to private individuals as well.
Question:
Why can rewards be purchased multiple times, even though the feature has been paid by another sponsor already?
Answer:
Since we did our estimates based on minimum amounts, every feature can of course be implemented in a nicer, better or extended way. The number of purchases per reward sets a trend for us, so that we can find out, which features the sponsors consider to be more important.
Should there i. e. be 3 sponsors for the feature "Grid Elements & TYPO3 list module", we will be able to put more efforts into the development of this feature.
Question:
What about those features, that have not been supported by any sponsor?
Answer:
For these features we want to use those amounts that have not been connected to a particular feature. Additionally it depends on the importance of the respective features, if we will still implement them or not. To have Grid Elements working with workspaces or multi lingual settings, surely is more important than creating a drag & drop via the page tree.
Should there be no trends set by the rewards, because nobody sponsored a particular feature, we will have a poll before we start the code sprint. Additionally we are in close contact with the TYPO3 core team, to make sure, that the compatibility to the TYPO3 6.x core can be achieved.
Question:
Will Grid Elements be part of the TYPO3 core and how can you make sure it is?
Answer:
Therefor we are in close contact with the team leaders of the TYPO3 core team. The core team itself still is a democratic committee, so we can not guarantee, if features will make it to the core, or which features this might be.
Currently our approach is to have important features like i. e. drag & drop will be implemented into the core, while others will stay within the Grid Elements extension. As a so called sysext this extension can then become part of the core too, or stay a separate extension in the TER. In any case it's functionality can be activated on demand.
Question:
Who exactly are the developers participating in the project?
Answer:
This will be evaluated during the campaign. Currently we are wating for offers by designers and developers, who are able and willing to create on of the necessary features for a fixed price, and are available in January. Then we will decide based on price-performance ratio, who will be joining the project.
Question:
May sponsors even send developers or designers to join the project?
Answer:
Of course sponsors can send designers and developers. But we have to make sure that we will reach the 30.000,- € goal of our campaign, sponsors should still donate the necessary money to the campaign. They will get back their payment after completing the job end of January, as soon as they will have sent us their invoice.
In case we already reached the funding goal, this bureaucratic detour will not be necessary. Still it would be nice if sponsors would use the Startnext platform, because Startnext does not ask us for any kind of commission and is depending on donations instead.
Question:
What happens, when there will be less than 9 developers and designers available for the project?
Answer:
In this case nothing will change fore the sponsors initially. It just means more work for the respective designers and developers, to get the sponsored features up and running. This is why we did not limit the contract period to the code sprint only. Each of the participants will have a reasonable time frame until end of January, to finish the tasks he or she applied for.
If against our expectations we should not manage to get enough participants to finish all sponsored tasks, we might drop particular features. The sponsored amounts for these features will be returned to the sponsors then.
