Donate

Generate donations to projects you want to support according to a distribution you control.

About

The Problem

I want to donate to many (mostly software) projects which I like, use or depend on. This creates a tension between what donation strategy would suit me and what would suit those projects.

Because there are many projects, if I regularly donate a reasonable amount to each I will be spending more money than I am comfortable with. However, if I split the amount I am comfortable with between all the projects then each will receive a tiny amount and loose (proportionally) more of my contributions through payment-service and currency transactions fees. Also, I may value some projects more than others and want them to receive a greater share.

A Possible Solution

Donate lets the user set,

The total amount they want to regularly donate
How many projects this will be split between (and hence the individual donation amount)
A collection of recipients with a weighting to favour their favourite or most important projects

This ensure that the user can donate an amount they are happy with, weighted as they like and that the individual donations will be significant.

New Problems

This system is certainly not perfect. Here are some problems I can see,

Making donations requires discipline and manual intervention, unlike services like Liberapay
The amounts and regularity at which projects will receive donations is unpredictable which could make their financial planning more difficult

Usage

Configuration

Donate needs to be configured before use Donate is configured with a single YAML file. This files path should be $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/donate/config.yaml (generally ~/.config/donate/config.yaml).

The configuration file has the following top level keys

key	description	required	default
`total_donation`	Total amount to donate	yes
`split`	How many donees to split `total_donation` between	yes
`schedule`	Donation schedule, one of `ad hoc` and `monthly`	no	`ad hoc`
`currency_symbol`	Symbol of the currency of `total_donation`	no	`£`
`decimal_currency`	Whether the currency can be split into hundredths	no	`false`
`weights`	A set of user-declared, donation weights	no
`donees`	List of donees	yes

Each donee has the following keys

key	description	required	default
`name`	Name of the donee	yes
`weight`	Relative weight of donation frequency to this donee, this may be a weight declared in `weights` or any non-negative, real number	yes
`url`	Donation url of the donee	yes
`type`	Optional, free-text, category of donee for example `software`, `distribution`, or `podcast`	no	`other`

Here is a short example

---
total_donation: 40
split: 8
schedule: monthly
currency_symbol: £
decimal_currency: true

weights:
  critical: 1.0
  large: 0.5
  normal: 0.25
  small: 0.1

donees:
  - name: Arch Linux
    weight: critical
    type: distribution
    url: https://www.archlinux.org/donate/
  - name: Kodi
    weight: 0.8
    type: software
    url: https://kodi.tv/contribute/donate
  - name: Python Software Foundation
    weight: large
    type: organisation
    url: https://www.python.org/psf/donations/
...

Command Line

To generate a set of donations

$ donate generate

To see more command line options

$ donate --help

JimMadge/donate