I was a board member at a small arts non-profit. Honestly one of the things we really struggled with was how to handle volunteers when we were paying some people.
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"...
I can see that for some non-profit with more nebulous goals, but as a user of Processing, I'd assume all the foundation does is just further development, maintainance, bug fixes, and like managing the bug reports, the announcements on the website, and all 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.
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"...