Q4 2019 Survey Results and Call for Proposals

Thanks so much for your support and feedback in the latest survey. We value your opinions and always take suggestions into account as we make changes from quarter to quarter.

The call for proposals for new projects will close on Saturday, October 26th, 2019 at 11:59pm PST.

We’ll be funding four projects $9,000 each over three months ($3,000/mo).

Survey Responses

There were 61 respondents to the survey, down slightly from 65 in the last survey. The highlights are presented below.

What areas of Clojure would you like to see improvement in?

The main things people were interested in:

• developer experience tools
• IDE support
• build tooling
• documentation
• error messages
• test tooling
• linters

Error messages stood out for our company members in particular with 75% of respondents across a broad range of companies highlighting improvements to error messages.

If you work on any of these kinds of projects, please look at applying for funding.

Are there any particular libraries, tools, or projects that are important to you that you would like to see supported?

ClojureScript, Cloverage, Duct/Integrant, Neanderthal, Reagent, clj-kondo, cljsjs, expound, leiningen, orchestra, re-frame, shadow-cljs, spec, test.chuck/test.check.

If you’re a maintainer of any of these projects, please consider applying.

Have you seen any direct benefits from improvements to the projects we have funded?

A sampling of comments:

• “I use Fireplace and Shadow CLJS every day, so having those funded was awesome.”
• “CIDER is getting better and is more sustainable.”
• “no, because i am mostly a back end dev”
• “No, but that’s all right”
• “Yes, the new Figwheel and Shadow CLJS are much better”

How would you like us to allocate our funding?

3/4 of company members wanted us to fund a mix of established and speculative projects, with the remainder wanting to focus on established projects. 83% of developer members wanted us to fund a mix, with 15% wanting us to fund established projects and one person wanting us to only fund speculative projects.

What are we doing well, what could we be doing better?

Doing well:

• Very good communication
• Transparency
• Providing significant funding to important or young high potential projects
• Asking for feedback. Making choices transparent
• Being so transparent on how you are selecting the projects and allocating the funds, and the whole transparent operation of Clojurists Together.
• It exists and is being worked on!
• Surveys about more than who to fund
• Funding great projects, keeping the donors informed, fostering a community.

Could do better:

• communicate the importance of the work, doubling down on some important projects
• Recurring, monthly sponsorship of certain “essential” projects (e.g. leiningen and cider come to mind)
• The developments on Fireplace and CIDER were of no use for us, because we use Cursive. I hope the next projects won’t only benefit VIM/Emacs users.
• Larger support for Clojure/Script open source: collect “help wanted” issues, put one money bin as bounties for anyone to fix those. There are tens/hundreds of repos & maintainers that need some help, but don’t apply as the needs are small.
• Highlight community contributions outside the funded projects, potentially reward with a one-time “gift”. Potentially do this monthly.
• Keep a shortlist of “maybe one day” projects. Others can suggest things from there or add to it.
• Make it easier to modify pledges, provide a way to pay once a year with a services invoice (EU), so that we can deduct the expense.
• Work with larger Patreon, GitHub donations community

We are currently working on a number of changes to how Clojurists Together runs. Once these are complete, this will open up a bunch of new possibilities for us which we haven’t been able to do yet. We don’t have an exact date for when this is going to be ready, but it is coming soon. For members interested in learning more, please reach out and we’re happy to give you a preview.

Thanks!