Some TODO's You CANDO

Improving Donation Tools

As proven in 2010, financial donations can directly improve Haiku through development contracts. While Haiku, Inc.'s mechanisms to process and accept donations has vastly grown, there is still room for improvement. All of the donation processors support some type advanced API. There are two features that immediately come to mind as "want-to-have"

1. Automatic Recurring payments with AmazonPayments and GoogleCheckout.
2. The ability for people to authorize payments, which at a later date either be accepted or voided by Haiku, Inc. -- basically, the "All-or-Nothing" fundraising style of Kickstarter.com.

Recurring payments are a fantastic way to establish a steady stream of income. Often, it's usually $5-$20 a month. Pile enough of those together and it's a nice bag of money. While this is already supported on the donation page with PayPal, it would be great to provide people with alternative payment processors.

The second feature opens up several doors. It would allow us to organize really big fundraiser ideas. Both of raising very large amounts of money for a specific project and to provide additional flexibility with funding items that were not expected. Imagine there's one or more project members that want do something. Maybe it's porting a driver for hardware they don't have. Maybe its a mini-contract. Maybe it's to purchase haiku (dot) org. Whatever it is, people would have the confidence of knowing "Either my money will go to help pay for this specific thing or my payment will be canceled." It is giving people the confidence that their money goes to exactly where they want it to. And that my friends is pure gold.

Selling Haiku Swag

This is something that many people will be grateful for and may help to raise additional funds for the Project. As you know, CafePress is our only way of getting Haiku branded items to people. For the most part, it's OK. Within North America, the UK, and Australia the shipping costs are reasonable. Elsewhere though, the shipping costs (and import taxes) get a bit out of hand and can be discouraging. So, this task is all about doing the leg work of finding alternatives and helping to spread the love.

Basically, you would need to scour the websites of various F/OSS projects, to see what their setup is. Take notes for some of them

• Which projects sell their goods (that bear their trademarks) through other companies?
• If they allow companies to sell goods, what websites do they use?

Then take notes about some of those companies

• What types products can they sell? (clothing, stickers, CD/DVD/USB, ...?)
• Which of those companies send some money back to the trademark owners?
• Is it a flat rate or can the customers set their own higher price?
• contact information: name, email, URL.

To help you get started, Debian has a nice list of CD Vendors and Merchants.

When you have something, send that information to the [haiku-inc] mailing list.