How about it? It worked fairly well for Synfig, so it should work good for GD too.
AFAIK the only person coding GD in somewhat regular manner (aside of Florian) is Victor so hiring an outside coder or coders would help. How organize such thing? Just put a donation service (or thing like Patreon) that would help people donate (paypal donations become less and less of an option nowadays unless you’re big player).
Then figure out how much you’d need to hire a coder to work on GD for say, 1 month and put it up as a target goal. Then use some service to count how much you’ve already got and display some progress bar towards a goal.
From PR/marketing perspective I think it would also increase amount people donate if they see it goes towards a concrete goal and not into some black hole. Not saying it goes into a black hole, but it does seem like it is for potential donators.
before anyone puts nay money on the table you need:
A coder willing to work full time or put enough hours to justify the money
A clear feature proposal of the goals that the coder will achieve,a set of realistic goals with deadlines
a kickstarter or indie go go campaign… or some sort of a bounty system where people fund specific features they want implemented and each has a goal sum.
-Patreon or some similar service looks the best way to achieve this when it comes to have regular donators to hire people (even if it is not full time).
-Goals can be set up using the roadmap.
This would require much investigations, could you get more information about Patreon and other services like this one?
If it’s feasible, it could even be integrated into the new website
