Generate donations to projects you want to support according to a distribution you control.
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.
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.
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
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/
...To generate a set of donations
$ donate generate
To see more command line options
$ donate --help