Support Avogadro through Open Collective

A while ago, I circulated a survey about financial support for Avogadro. The results were very positive - lots of people were willing and interested in financial contributions to sustain Avogadro development and promotion.

We investigated several options. My biggest concern is that Avogadro has always been about an open community. So I’m pleased to announce that Avogadro is now part of an Open Collective:

https://opencollective.com/avogadro

Open Collective provides a transparent, sustainable, and secure way for people to support and sponsor open source projects, including webpack, Yeoman, and hundreds of others. What makes it different, is that anyone can request reimbursement - and both budget and all expenses will be transparent.

• Open involvement for anyone
• Both individuals and companies can sponsor, fund, or back us (with potential tax benefits).
• Following the money is easy and open
• You help decide the future of Avogadro through your support
• Anyone can collect funds by contributing to Avogadro

While the default is for a monthly contribution, you can contribute yearly or one-time.

What are we going to do with the funds?

• Documentation and tutorials - the University of Pittsburgh has funded our manual (https://avogadro.cc/docs/) but we’d like to add more educational materials and tutorials
• Bounties - I recently funded a “bounty” to enable Avogadro 1.3 to use the Eigen 3.x matrix library and we’d like to fund other bug fixes and feature requests
• Publicity - I have ordered Avogadro stickers to distribute at the upcoming ACS meeting in San Francisco. We want to “get the word out” for both users and contributors
• Your idea here - we’d like new ideas and input - what does Avogadro need most?

This will never become a for-profit project, but we believe that using Open Collective and your support, we can attract new contributions and sustain all levels of Avogadro development and support.

Thoughts? Suggestions?