> Every year, we support and sponsor programs that nurture diverse communities and their projects. Our programs include:
* A Fellowship and Teaching Fellowship Program that funds exploratory, creative, and technical research
* An Advocacy Program that partners with organizations for projects
* Public events that provide platforms for collaboration between our contributors, such as panels and talks that spread the word about the need for equity in these fields
* Summer programs to support emerging coders throughout the world
[1] https://processingfoundation.org/
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"We invite you to meditate on digital fragmentation and infrastructure that lays its foundation through the global white capitalist, colonialist, and imperialist framework we live in today through our Land and Digital Acknowledgements."
tl;dr: divisive nonsense
Yeah but then nobody will give you $10M in crypto
That's a feature, not a bug.
This work touches probably less than 1% what P5 and Processing do yet takes up the majority of the budget seemingly.
My argument is for spending money on making software that affects millions not spending it mostly on fellowships that affect 12 people or workshops and talks that affect 40.
How much of the budget was p5js support/development assigned, how many developers are currently working on it, how many man/hours of development have gone into it over the past two years?
We decided to go all volunteer, as it seemed like it would make it easier to ask members to help out. (avoids the why are they getting paid and not us..?).
But with a very small anual budget (very low 5 figures) per year, most of which was from member fees, and almost all of which we spent on our public and free event. paying people wasn't an issue, we just couldn't.
With the spike in donations the foundation got, it becomes way more difficult to manage. Especially since it was a volunteer effort for the most part before 2021. I see some obvious overhead (maintaining p5.js online editor/ toolkit. etc..) but I also see echos of the "why is this valuable and worth paying for but not that"...
And maybe some work to market the foundation itself and try to increase the donations to it.
So really my expectations would be that it takes the money, and hires people to expand Processing, P5js, and the editor with new features, fix bugs, and maybe branch it out to new platforms. And it would maybe hire some people to manage the community issues.
And then the foundation members could discuss amongst themselves about what features are most important, if the editor needs more work this year, or if P5js needs more, or if they want to invest in a port to Rust, or whatever.
But it seems that there's a lot more money going towards things like outreach, grants to artists, events, workshops, etc.
I feel it goes against what I'd expect as a potential donor. And I feel it's also against what Ben Fey expects of the foundation.
He said himself:
> the project was always a 50-50 split between internal (software development) and external (the community, the documentation, examples, etc). The Foundation has lost all sense of balance
Implying that Software Development has almost spotted completely, and it's now all things around community building.
> I was soon shocked to learn that the Foundation spent nearly $800,000 last year. $0 of that went to Processing 4. [...] This year, the proposed Foundation budget is around $1.2 million. But for Processing, there is budget for just two people: one developer, one community lead.
Basically he feels like the donation money should go towards further development of Processing itself, but the foundation seems to be spending it on other stuff, and not on continuing or accelerating the development of Processing itself.