Funding/Donations to solving specific issues

I definitely see a benefit if such an approach is adopted, as this would allow for things to become more modular. And thereby more customizable - and valuable - to various select group of users, but without affecting anyone else, who doesn’t need such a feature/ feature-set.

Might be time for a new thread so this doesn’t get lost…

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I have come across a platform, that seems to address the funding approach of special features discussed here. https://issuehunt.io/
(More written about it here: https://itsfoss.com/issuehunt/)
Seems to be in a fairly infant stage though. Maybe someone knows of a more mature system, which also allows “crowd-funding”.

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Bountysource is the common one.

Can you split the thread at about 15 posts up?

exactly where would you suggest?

@anon67614380’s post on the “board”
New topic could be “Funding/Donations to solving specific issues”

number please

Wow, busy thread! Constructive with valuable ideas if I may add.

@camti, I can only give my personal opinion here, but I’d say the points you delineated, following my partial quote of your post above, are very much in line with the project governing principles and direction. (Transparency and communication, reliability, performance, growth, redundancy, security, innovation, expertise, guidance, collaboration).

I’d also go so far as saying that they have, to date, been generally implemented , albeit definitely incompletely in some areas for sure, and with lots of room for improvement. Yet all those characteristics you’ve eloquently listed are here to a not so incomplete extent. To summarize:

Transparency and communication can be seen right here on this forum, on multiple gitter rooms and github channels, along with FB for some but not all of us. Add to this the monthly reports to partners, and the weekly dev calls that anyone can attend, and the hundreds of pages of documentation.

Reliability and performance has been demonstrated by the widespread use of Ardupilot in professional, industrial and research environments. Likewise redundancy, with support for multiple IMUs and GPS, general failover mechanisms, and more recently battery multi use, to name a few examples.And security with mavlink 2 for instance, or the availability of all source code for scrutiny.

Innovation can be witnessed by Ardupilot’s history of continuous addition of new features with Ardupilot staying on top of the game. This be it, to summarize and again give just a few examples, through support of a wide variety of simulation environments (ROS gazebo, X-plane, RealFlight, plain yet rich build-in SITL, Flight gear, the most recent Morse, etc …), ESC protocols and features (soft serial, DShot, BLHeli, etc …), vehicle architectures (quadplanes, tail sitters, monocopters, helis, exotic rovers and balance bots, subs, etc …).

Finally expertise, guidance and collaboration (to be brief again) are characteristics constantly on display in this forum and other communication channels listed above, and also on display with partner communications and Ardupilot’s wide support for a uniquely large variety of hardware.

Are there holes in the above? Absolutely, and far from me the idea of giving the impression that everything is perfect with no need for improvement. It’s also why I think your post is so valuable. Yet I wanted to also tell “this opinion” of the story :wink: Perhaps what could be done is digging in further on those areas, and within each category identifying the larger holes, to then prioritize what the community as a whole thinks can be improved.

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Mike, can’t say I absolutely disagree, yet I find myself in this weird situation where I can’t fully agree either! :slight_smile:

This project has shown, historically and all the way to now, that there is a very large number of volunteers and contributors. Just take a look at statistics on github with wiki documentation for instance, with 182 contributors to date. Or, for that matter, the emerging ideas, propositions and volunteering in this thread.

It’s true that dev team and community members are mostly of the techie type, and as such not necessarily well prepared, or just as importantly not inclined, to freely perform work more related to administration, marketing, or strategic decision making. Yet both the dev team and general community include people who also have those skills, to varying degrees of course, and are or have been willing to volunteer. To what degree is the question, of course, and hence why I do partially agree with you. I do think, though, that divide and conquer is a successful strategy that has already proven to be successful. Also why, incidently, Ardupilot has a funding committee, a marketing committee, partners meetings, drone conference presence, an annual unconference, etc … ) even if actual performance may sometimes fall short . And there are funds available, if the end justifies the means.

In short I am not as pessisimistic as you are. :wink:

Olivier, You misunderstand me a bit. I am saying that Ardupilot is full of volunteers as well as the core developers. But unlike a corporation with staff to assign and shift around for new projects Ardupilot is not like that. The volunteers come and go working on projects they care about and moving on.

It just annoys me to hear someone say that Michael Oborne should drop what he is doing and do a makeover of Mission Planner for apparently a small group of facebook users. Now that was harsh I admit but I really would say that entry level recreational users are not the most important user base to expend resources upon. We certainly need new users but I also see that as a personal evolution from one of the Naze32 family or from a RTF camera drone where the user wants to do more.

I think it is a problem when no body wants to spend any time learning and studying about new things. Ardupilot’s 700+ parameters are a steep learning curve but with that effort comes a great panorama at the top of the climb. It probably is not worth the climb if you don’t need the advanced features that Ardupilot offers. But if you don’t need those features there are easier flight controllers to use with a more limited set of features.

As you well know resources are limited here and judgments must be made for the best return on invested resources. You also know that I don’t agree with those judgments most of the time either. As I have said previously I think Ardupilot needs a dictator. Having worked in IT for decades, a group of brilliant developers often need a strong leader with a more global vision. Otherwise they often must try and get version 9 out before version 1. Or they just can’t see how difficult it is for someone less expert than they to use their product. That is why corporations spend so much money on focus groups etc. Or they don’t see that the organization should be putting time and effort into the eco-system even tho their primary expertise is flight controllers.

I also don’t think it is bad that Nathan lets it be known what he would like to see as changes. But I do think some folks have the concept that Ardupilot is similar to DJI and will and should assign staff to jump on customers requests. There are no customers here at Ardupilot and there is no “they” just us.

It should go without saying that my opinions are just that.

Cheers

@LuisVale 105-121 should probably be split away.

3 posts were merged into an existing topic: Mission Planner “Makeover”

Moved to new topic, by request of @Naterater

So now looks like i started all this :slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

Don’t worry @anon67614380. Nobody will blame you :slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

(i am busy preparing the list of things and funds :slight_smile: )

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I would have no problem in paying somebody to fix my Wobbly Path issue with Rover on a 3.2m trimaran used for bathymetry.

Bounties are an excellent idea. @lvale Proposals aren’t really relevant to this - they look to be more a mechanism for internal funding requests.

There’s an underlying problem however that needs to be fixed first - PR reviews. There’s a huge backlog of PRs and it takes far too long for them to be reviewed and merged. Any bounty system will likely run up against this wall and quickly frustrate the process.

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Maybe the first bounties should allocated to clean the PR list …

The main issue on this list is the number of people reviewing and with merge right … there are too few. That is a part of the good amount of work done on autotest

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