CMI funding update and an announcement

When I first started my funding drive, my plan was to get funded through feature freeze and then evaluate where things stand. Of course, back then, feature freeze was in December of 2012. When we decided to extend feature freeze, I was somewhat concerned about my ability to keep working on core until March, but a combination of careful planning and a large contribution late in the game made everything come together well. So feature freeze has come and gone, and with CMI in pretty good shape I figured this was a good opportunity to take a look at things from the funding perspective and talk about what comes next for my funded development.

Up until now, I've been reluctant to discuss actual monetary figures, but as things are winding down I decided this is good data to get out there. It's interesting to see and the community should get some transparency into the money it contributed.

Money

All totaled I raised approximately $47,000 USD for CMI. The contributions broke down as follows:

Six corporate sponsors: $42,000
Four smaller companies: $3,800
Community Chipin: $1,500

Note that some of these are rounded, because there were several international contributions of round numbers of Euros that end up with random dollars and cents after conversion. On top of this funding, Acquia funded an essential trip for to Barcelona for Drupal Dev Days last year, the Drupal Association sponsored my attendance at DrupalCon Munich, and the BADCamp team sponsored my hotel and some travel costs for BADCamp 2011 and 2012.

This fundraising began in August of 2012, and funded my time from August 1 until mid-March, a total of 33 weeks. If we use a 40-hour workweek as a baseline, that is 1320 hours. Even though my take-home pay was not 100% (taxes, travel costs, etc), my base 'rate' for this period was $47,000 / 1320 = $35.60 an hour. I had originally planned on targeting a base rate of $50/hour, but as said above I ended up stretching things out to make the new extended feature completion date.

So what now?

As the funding was coming to an end, I debated whether I wanted to try and raise more funds or return to the world of gainful employment. As described earlier this week, CMI is in a really good place right now. We have a solid base of contributors (sun, alexpott, yched, swentel, berdir, josereyero, timplunkett, and more) and we are making great progress towards our goals for Drupal 8.

Therefore, I am humbled to announce that on March 18th I will join Lullabot as a Senior Drupal Architect. In many ways this is full circle for me - it was hanging out with Jeff Eaton and Matt Westgate almost six years ago that really got me going on Drupal. I'm so happy to be joining such an amazing team containing some of my very favorite people.

What does this mean for CMI?

Even though I will obviously be spending less of my own time than during the CMI-funded period, you won't be rid of me. I'll still be in the queues working issues and spreading the word about CMI. I'm confident that we will ship with a fantastic system that will live up to the promise we've been building for the last two years.