Hours for hire, a sponsor experiment, Reverse Job Offers,

Yesterday I received two cancellation for projects in the next months, good for a total of over 200 reserved hours. So I am free (as in beer). This leaves a fabulous chance for an experiment I have been wanting to do for a long while: Reverse Job Offers.

In short: I offer a job, as soon as it will get payed, i will finish it.

I am currently collecting Drupal tasks, all rather large tasks that no-one stood up for, because no ones itch was large enough to cover the costs of the scratching. But maybe a combined investment, will cover the costs. I am looking for sponsors to cover the costs of one or two tasks. Obviously all work will flow back into Drupal in one way or another.

Because this gives you a chance to help finish some highly needed tasks in the current Drupal ecosphere. If you think there are gaps that need to be filled, then this is your chance to add your weight and to make sure they will actually be done. Obviously it is best if it actually is an itch for you, that needs scratching

Tasks

Flexinode and CCK:

Pave, finish, test and fine-tune the complete upgrade path for flexinode -> CCK in Drupal 4.7.
Create all the fields for CCK that are available in flexinode, but not in CCK.
A great interface and usability overhaul of the screens, and other areas in CCK.
Enhance the ease of CCK field development a lot.
Introduce per-field Create, Read, Update and Delete permissions for CCK.

Theme:

Design and develop a proper admin theme.
Finish development of my WhatsInItsName base theme, and develop a few (2, 3 col, fixed and fluid) CSS example styles with that.
Design and develop a good looking new theme for Drupal.

Distro/Profiles:

Finish and fine-tune Sympal (drupalCOM): Drupal for brochure-ware sites.
Start, develop and fine-tune a DrupalBLOG: Drupal for bloggers profile.
Start, develop and fine-tune a DrupalPROJ: Drupal for (software) project management.

Inline images:

Integrate and finetune image module, inline module, upload module (or possibly more flexible alternatives) and quicktags. In addition, write a set of well-written recipes for “how to add images to your site” with these range of solutions.

Obviously I am looking for sponsorship on one, at very most two of these jobs, not all of them!
Also, please note that this is not an all inclusive list. I am very open for suggestions.

In the coming week I will collect more options and I will look at feedback to see what tasks seem most popular.
Please mail feedback or alternative tasks to ber @ webschuur com.

Costs

If a few of the above mentioned tasks appear interesting enough, I will write a detailed program of demand for them, as well as a fine-grained quotation, so that we can see what sponsorship should bring.
I have chosen the tasks at hand to cost no more then a certain amount of development hours. This gives a very rough indicative maximum price for the tasks of €3000 and a minimum of €1000. Obviously this is only an indication, but when I have a clearer view of the task that people would like see finished, then I will come up with better estimations.

Sponsors

Only if I have enough sponsors to cover the total costs of a job, can I finish it. So first step is to agree on one task. As soon as I have found sponsors to cover 75% of the total costs, and these look serious enough to me, I will start development. If, after 75% of the time estimated to finish the project, I have not received 75% of the sponsor money, I will immediately refund that payed amount and call the project to a halt. After all: none of us want to have an unfinished, unpaid product.
Sponsors who pay 10% or more of the total budget will receive an invoice, with VAT information (most interesting for .nl). Those 10% sponsors will also have a voice in the development process, the deliverables and so on. They are considered “normal clients” by me. I cannot afford to do this for every €5 euro I receive, unfortunately. All sponsors will be listed with name, website url and a logo if they agree to this, on a special project website, for this project.

Interested parties can email me at ber @ webschuur com if they want personal contact or more details

I will maintain a regular special blog, in my best Engrish, and all work will flow back into Drupal, but will be available from that site too. I will do my very best to credit all the sponsors. (suggestions on how to do this, without spamming/abusing Drupal.org are welcome ber @ webschuur com)

Additional work

Any sponsor, no matter what budget, will get a special 10% discount if he/she wants me to deploy the work done, on his/her server or website. Let’s say John donated €5 on the development of a theme, then he will get a 10% discount on the quotation for installation, configuration and fine-tuning of the theme on Johns site.

Rules/Legal

All money will be refunded when the task is not finished by the beginning of October. The project will be halted, if after 75% of the estimated time, I have not received 75% of the total budget. All funds will then be wired back.
Costs for paypal, or bank transfers are not part of the donation, they are for the donator. Donations can be done over paypal, (inter)national bank transfers.
These are not written in stone, and these need a lot more work, I will write a proper T&C to cover more legal issues before we agree upon a single task.
I am, in no way, affiliated with Drupal! This is my own project, the company involved is webschuur.com. Webschuur.com is a legal entity, registered in the Netherlands. Drupal.org may benefit from this, but has nothing to do with this project!
All work will be available as patch / and/or contributed module. I will be maintainer of such contributed modules. I cannot guarantee that patches will actually flow into the projects (because that is the responsibility of the maintainers), but I will do my very best to get them in there.
In addition, I will spend another 10% of the quoted time, on maintenance of a patch, if that patch is not committed by the end of the duration of the project.

At the bottom of the page:

This is a rather big “wild guess” for me too, because if it fails, I have lost half a month of my income, but if it works I think we have a very interesting concept for future work on Drupal, or any other open source system, for that matter.

About the author: Bèr Kessels is an experienced webdeveloper with a great passion for technology and Open Source. A golden combination to implement that technology in a good and efficient way. Follow @berkes on Mastodon. Or read more about Bèr.