Pitivi crowdfunding campaign

[Thibault Saunier <saunierthibault gmail com>]

Hello all,

We are the pitivi team, and are going to launch a crowdfunding campaign
in the coming weeks.

After some discussion with Karen Sandler, Oliver Propst and other people
in the engagement channel on gimpnet, we decided a mail to that list was
necessary, then holidays came and that plan got a little delayed.

First let's present ourselves: http://54.201.130.193:8000/#about-us
contains a little summary about the three of us.

The purpose of that mail is to explain the "engagement" strategy that we
are going to follow, and the project that we offer.

The project that we propose:
What we want to offer the community is a rock solid video editor with an
ambitious design. We already have the ambitious design, and stability
has definitely improved *a lot* during last year, but we need funding to
keep going and take it to the next level. A video editor represents a
lot of work, and if we want that work to be done in a realistic
timeframe we need specialized people to work more than only in their
free time on it.

Once we have finished stabilizing the core functionnalities, and more
importantly finalized the Quality Assurance infrastructure, we will be
able to offer exciting features to the community, thanks to all the work
that people put in the gstreamer framework and its various plugins !

A detailed planning is available here :
http://54.201.130.193:8000/the-plan

That leads us to the engagement strategy that we want to follow.

We consider our potential backers as intelligent and knowledgeable
people, of course not experts in the nitty-gritty technical details of
multimedia frameworks or in the C language, but certainly aware of the
good practices of open source development, and more than willing to
have their say in the direction of the projects.

As a consequence, we want to highlight the following facts about our
project:

1) We are a community project, in that we know that we are part of a
greater ecosystem, and we always take the time to contribute and discuss
with our upstream projects, such as gstreamer, gtk, gobject,
gobject-introspection etc... The time that we take fixing bugs upstream
profits to countless other projects, primarily Gnome projects but also
projects that use some of our components, without any affiliation to a
particular platform. Also whenever possible we develop our components as
library in order for other projects to be able to use them and this way
enhance the whole ecosystem. For example, we developed the GStreamer
Editing Services which is a library to build multimedia editing
application providing high level and straight forward APIs.

2) *We are a community project*, and the opinion of our community of
users matters very much to us. As a consequence, anyone backing the
project will get a secret token, which he will be able to use to
complete surveys that we will run about the direction of our work. To
stay simple, our backers will be able to decide which features they want
us to implement, and which direction they'd rather see us take (Will
they rather see us work on cross-platform portability, or would they
much better like to see us improve our quality assurance system for
example). This will demand from us, the developers, a fair amount of
educational effort, in order to explain what decisions imply, what work
is necessary to implement a feature etc .. but we think this in itself
is a good thing for a project.

3) We want to make sure that the companies around the post production
industry and the open source ecosystem are interested in and aware of
our campaign, so we made a list of those and plan to send specific mails
to each of them.

At the time of our last discussion on IRC, the possibility that this
campaign be designated as an official GNOME campaign was raised by
Oliver. As much as we think that could be profitable to us, we know that
it would not be an easy choice to make, because GNOME campaigns as of
now have never been about one application in particular. We completely
understand that concern, and I certainly don't want to force that upon
the engagement team. That being said, as mentioned earlier us working on
pitivi would mean benefits for the whole ecosystem, so this has to be
taken into account I suppose.

Anyway, I think we've outlined the project a little better, and I would
love to read remarks, answer questions and get new ideas in there !

Best Regards,

Thibault Saunier

PS: Please keep us in the loop when answering as we are not subscribed
to the Mailing List.