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Hello world!
🕑 Added 2017-07-11 00:07:55 +0000 UTC Hi folks - this is just a quick note to say THANK YOU to everyone who has signed up to support us so generously so far. We hit $1000/month within only 24 hours of launching our SOS, and meanwhile more supporters are still signing up! As of right now we have $1300/month on Patreon, $140/month on Liberarpay, and $215 on bitcoin - thank you!!For context: $1000/month is already making an impact on the project: roughly speaking it helps pay the base salary for 1 day of Matrix work a week from a junior dev in London. Therefore we're going to set our initial goal to be $2500/month - to help fund one person working half-time on Matrix; with the 'real' goal to be to get to $5000/month as soon as possible.
The blog mentioned that the core Matrix team (ignoring folks working on Riot) is around 11 people, so we have a long way to go before we can support the whole team via Patreon (up at the $50-$75K(!) mark, ignoring all the other overheads which go into keeping folks gainfully employed) - but the good news is that we've also had a few interesting offers of support from companies who have adopted Matrix, which should hopefully help keep the team together and in place in the medium term. It's going to be tight, though, so every $ really does count to keep everything moving forwards.
In terms of what's next:
* We're currently setting up the Matrix.org Foundation as a formal non-profit legal entity in the UK in order to receive the donations and distribute them fairly to the core team. (Liberapay is warning donors about missing identity details, which we'll fill in as soon as the Foundation is set up).
* We're busy implementing Groups in Synapse, Riot and the Matrix spec itself, so that we can create the +supporters:matrix.org group (and +linear.supporters:matrix.org etc ;) and then everyone can get a badge to recognise their support and access to the #matrix-supporters:matrix.org room! This should be ready in the next few weeks - we're sorry that it's not there from the outset, but we were a little overtaken by events...
* We'll be doing our first podcast as of Friday. These are going to be 10-15 minute clips of Matthew & Amandine & whoever else is around chatting into a camera/mic to freestyle about whatever happened that week. I can't guarantee the production values, as obviously we want to be focusing on building Matrix rather than chatting about it - but given how much time we spend chatting about it anyway, it makes sense to record some of that chat for you lucky listeners ;)
* We'll also be catching up publishing the supporter details in the various places we've promised it!
* Our weekly team meetings are on Mondays mornings at 10:30 London Time (sorry for those in other timezones...) - we'll share the details for next week for those Polynomial or Elliptic supporters who wish to tune in or lurk!
* Finally, we'll be shipping out T-Shirts and stickers to the Elliptic supporters shortly (we'll do it in a batch once donations have stabilised a bit).
Hopefully this summarises most of the questions we've been hit with since Friday. Thanks once again to everyone who has donated - it is absolutely wonderful to see so many folks answering our Mayday, and in return, we promise that we will do everything we can to keep improving Matrix as quickly and amazingly as we can :)
--Matthew, Amandine & the team.
