Follow the Creation Process of Kirby 3
Bastian Allgeier announced, that he and his team started working on Kirby 3. Similar to what Kai Brach did for his Offscreen Magazine, Kirby started the Kirby Next project and website. The idea of a move like this is to fund the time, where you focus on the work you are diving into for the next couple of months. So in a way it is a bit like running a Kickstarter, but without a goal that has to be reached to have this project become reality.
Kai, back then, answered the question of ”What if the funding goal is not reached or exceeded?” with
[…] If we fall short, we will have to limit the feature set of our website and the scope of the rebrand. If we exceed our goal, we can even include some of our 'nice-to-have' features.
So the benefit is, that you are not dependent on the goal to be reached and you have money you can work with. Often products like his, my event, or – and that is what I am writing about here actually – Kirby, only exist, because the support that people using, reading or attending is massive and they also do a huge part of the marketing for people like Kai, Bastian or me.
Next to the monetary support and benefit for the product owner there is a benefit for the people supporting things like this. If done nicely, you get insights in to the process of something like rebranding Offscreen or the development of Kirby 3. This is valuable information, a nice read and – at least for me – inspiration to see how other people running a business on their own do this. As you know I am a big fan of Kirby (and Offscreen) and I am excited already to follow Bastian, Sonja, Lukas, Nils, Fabian and Nico what they will come up with and – even more exciting – what happens on the way to Kirby 3, how is the decision process for certain task and so forth.
So, if you are generally interested in …
- … supporting a software like Kirby (and maybe even planning to use or using it already) …
- … supporting an independent system like Kirby and its development …
- … how a product development process looks behind the scenes …
- … how decisions for or against a feature/way of developing software are made …
- … testing the new features and the new UI Kit for the Panel of Kirby 3 first …
- … help the Kirby team financially …
… then you should check Kirby Next. Bastian describes in detail what you get and what the money is used for, when states, for example:
[…] Kirby has become a sustainable full-time job for Bastian, but there's still a very limited budget for the other team members. With your help, we can spend more time on Kirby together and release Kirby 3 faster.
On a side note: Bastian is running a Kirby workshop during beyond tellerrand in Berlin as well, which is targeting beginners and experts in the same way. For this workshop we make sure to keep the number of attendees to a reasonable amount of people, so that everybody is able to not only enjoy the hands-on experience, but also ask the questions she/he always wanted to ask Bastian.