Patreon and transparency

I like independent content creators and I like to support them when I can. I only have a meager income so regular small donations are best for me. As such the Patreon model works really well. However Patreon is not without it's problems. So there are three projects currently receiving beer tokens from me. One of them is Martin Wimpress the maintainer of Ubuntu-Mate. It is his Patreon I would like to bring to the fore as an example of excellent transparency.

One of these posts is published every month, going into detail on where the money is going and who is donating. I think this is currently "best practice" when communicating with the patreons.

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And the product is great, Ubuntu-Mate is the most polished Ubuntu spin, I feel that needs to be said also.

The open source world does transparency pretty well. Most non open source people think that open source is some kind of hippie communist club, but that's not the case. Open source is very capitalist, it's all about getting the most out of available assets with minimal overhead. Transparency, recycling, sharing ressources and value are very important factors in optimizing efficiency. Whereas Canonical doesn't always check those marks, Ubuntu-Mate certainly does.

By the way, it is the mission statement of Level1Techs to offer full patreon efficiency too, including full spending reports. It also needs to be said that L1T is only possible because the platform for it was bought by Wendell, who has also invested the most in creating the whole infrastructure. Everything that exists is not bought with Patreon money. Because of the circumstances that everybody knows, the whole platform has turned out more expensive to Wendell than could be envisaged. All mainly for a community platform... pretty amazing right...

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