[thrown37291]

Not really. Processing Foundation today is much wider than just the Processing software. A lot of people interact with Processing Foundation through workshops, teaching and p5 without ever touching the original Processing software.

[didibus]

My read is that no money went to the development of P5 as well. I think he refers to Processing as all of it's versions, so the Java and JavaScript based variants. But maybe that needs some clarification from him.

[acomjean]

I was a board member at a small arts non-profit. Honestly one of the things we really struggled with was how to handle volunteers when we were paying some people.

We decided to go all volunteer, as it seemed like it would make it easier to ask members to help out. (avoids the why are they getting paid and not us..?).

But with a very small anual budget (very low 5 figures) per year, most of which was from member fees, and almost all of which we spent on our public and free event. paying people wasn't an issue, we just couldn't.

With the spike in donations the foundation got, it becomes way more difficult to manage. Especially since it was a volunteer effort for the most part before 2021. I see some obvious overhead (maintaining p5.js online editor/ toolkit. etc..) but I also see echos of the "why is this valuable and worth paying for but not that"...

[didibus]

I can see that for some non-profit with more nebulous goals, but as a user of Processing, I'd assume all the foundation does is just further development, maintainance, bug fixes, and like managing the bug reports, the announcements on the website, and all that.

And maybe some work to market the foundation itself and try to increase the donations to it.

So really my expectations would be that it takes the money, and hires people to expand Processing, P5js, and the editor with new features, fix bugs, and maybe branch it out to new platforms. And it would maybe hire some people to manage the community issues.

And then the foundation members could discuss amongst themselves about what features are most important, if the editor needs more work this year, or if P5js needs more, or if they want to invest in a port to Rust, or whatever.

But it seems that there's a lot more money going towards things like outreach, grants to artists, events, workshops, etc.

I feel it goes against what I'd expect as a potential donor. And I feel it's also against what Ben Fey expects of the foundation.

He said himself:

> the project was always a 50-50 split between internal (software development) and external (the community, the documentation, examples, etc). The Foundation has lost all sense of balance

Implying that Software Development has almost spotted completely, and it's now all things around community building.

[whywhywhywhy]

>A lot of people interact with Processing Foundation through workshops, teaching

This work touches probably less than 1% what P5 and Processing do yet takes up the majority of the budget seemingly.

[thrown37291]

p5js is one of the most popular toolkits today for teaching creative coding and is used across schools and universities all over the world, so education and community outreach has become a huge part of the ecosystem. “Processing” as a global and worldwide community would not exist today if the only focus of the budget was on the original Java software.

[whywhywhywhy]

P5 is what I mostly use. How much of the budget did P5 get, how many developers are there?

My argument is for spending money on making software that affects millions not spending it mostly on fellowships that affect 12 people or workshops and talks that affect 40.

[15457345234]

> p5js is one of the most popular toolkits today for teaching creative coding

How much of the budget was p5js support/development assigned, how many developers are currently working on it, how many man/hours of development have gone into it over the past two years?