It's been a month now that we have started the OpenCollective for CryptPad and started our campaign for funding CryptPad and insuring it's future in 2019, so I wanted to give a status on this funding initiative.

First we are highly grateful to all that have responded positively and also that have relayed our campaign. We do feel stronger with the help of our community and it motivates us more.

In particular we have received a commitment from the C3Wien Community in Austria, to contribute 360 Euros / year as well as some of their members to whom our communication was relayed. We have also received a few donations for more than 50 Euros coming from the USA and Austria (thanks Michael Goelzer, KimoNine, shibayashi) and also monthly donations (thanks Daniele Gagliardi and an anonymous backer !) and one time donations reaching now more than 10 donators through OpenCollective.

We also had new subscribers to the CryptPad subscriptions and in total now we can count on 30 participants to CryptPad funding for a total now of 750 Euros for the month of July and 2000 Euros since subscriptions started last year. This funding originates from 11 different countries around the world and actually not yet from France our home country who has funded the beginning of CryptPad with the OpenPAAS project.

This amount is of course still low and not enough to guarantee funding next year for CryptPad, but it's a start without much communication about the funding of CryptPad and about the long term objectives of this project.

Now we need more help ! First we need to be able to sustain our team, but also we need to be able to expand, especially if we want to have Open Source software in the Zero-Knowledge space. Proprietary closed source software providing some way of Zero-Knowledge will probably start growing with extensive funding. If we want independent free-software alternatives for this type of software, then we need to group our effort and fund open source solutions like CryptPad.

Since the launch of the campaign we have also published a roadmap for CryptPad of what we would like to achieve with the funding. It's also available on the OpenCollective web site. Come check it out and see our ambitious objectives for this project. Aaron and Yann, our CryptPad developers, are already hard at work and the shared folders feature, one of the most demanded features, is already advancing very fast.

We want also to take the opportunity to thank Caleb James De Lisle, the creator of CryptPad, who has left XWiki SAS at the end of July to pursue his own projects (CJDNS and others). Caleb has done incredible work first creating CryptPad and also on XWiki SAS managing our research projects for the last few years. CryptPad's development is in good hands with Aaron and Yann who have been the main commiters of the project in the last year. In the last few month he has helped setup the Open Collective and the roadmap to help fund CryptPad in the future. I will now relay him on this aspect and we are a looking for a new team member to join our research funding initiative and lead CryptPad on the non-technical aspects. I'm sure Caleb won't fully leave us and at least be a regular adviser to the project.

Try CryptPad, love it, take care of it, and even better come help !

Ludovic Dubost & the CryptPad Team