Q2 2020 Survey Results

Thanks so much for your support and feedback in the latest survey.

Our call for proposals for new projects will close on Thursday, April 9th, 2020 at 11:59pm PST.

This time around, we’re adding two new questions to our application to help us pick projects:

• “Have you been personally impacted by the COVID-19 crisis? How?”
• “Are you part of a group that is affected by systemic bias, particularly in technology? If so, can you elaborate?”

Note that if you haven’t been impacted by either of these, you are still eligible to receive Clojurists Together funding.

We’ll be funding four projects $9,000 each over three months ($3,000/mo). This is ideally May-July, but we’re able to be a little bit flexible on the start timing.

Survey Responses

There were 60 respondents to the survey, down from 77 in the last survey. The highlights are presented below.

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

The main things our members were interested in:

• Error messages
• Documentation
• Developer experience tools
• Build tooling
• IDE support
• Test tooling
• Linters
• Profilers
• Data analysis/processing frameworks

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?

• Figwheel
• clj-kondo
• Kaocha
• Reitit
• Shadow CLJS
• re-frame
• Aleph
• Manifold
• Calva
• Cloverage
• Chlorine
• Conjure
• Malli
• clj-goes-fast.*

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

Our members also mentioned GraalVM support as something they’d like to see improved.

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

A sampling of comments:

• Yes I use Kaocha and shadow-cljs daily and they bring joy to me and my team.
• Figwheel Main. I was happy to see James Reeves was supported.
• For sure, the new Ring spec looks solid and kickstart a new era for Ring. Calva has had many good additions especially debugger support, same with reagent. Expound is more ready than ever to support spec2.

How would you like us to allocate our funding?

For company members:

• 15% wanted us to fund 25% mature, 75% speculative
• 62% wanted us to fund 50% mature, 50% speculative
• 23% wanted us to fund 75% mature, 25% speculative

For developer members:

• 11% wanted us to fund 25% mature, 75% speculative
• 47% wanted us to fund 50% mature, 50% speculative
• 38% wanted us to fund 75% mature, 25% speculative
• 4% wanted us to fund 100% mature, 0% speculative

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

Doing well:

• Gathering community, and focusing efforts on most requested things. But not forgetting about upcoming stuff.
• Making a real contribution to the Clojure community and various ecosystems more robust and sustainable.
• Transparency
• Communication with donors

Could do better:

• Get more aggressive about recruiting paying members.
• More projects, partial funding, e.g. “1 month funding for creating docs & guides”
• Another marketing round to recruit more funding?
• Doing more stuff in the open

Thanks!