Godot Patreon voting system explained

This post explains how the voting system works, so we can make sure to clear all doubts and link to it on future polls.

Legal

This system has been proposed by the lawyers from Software Freedom Conservancy, so the way voting works is compatible with their status as non profit charity. It must be understood from the start that voting is not a "pay for features" system, but an attempt made by the core developers to generously give back something to our Patrons who have made larger pledges.

As such, we can refuse proposals and votes that we don't feel are aligned to the goals of the project, or that require too much work too implement. (such as "Add Unity project import support" or "Make a detailed tutorial on how to make a Final Fantasy game" ) although we do our best to honor them, as most are reasonable.

The main idea here is that Patrons who got voting points from pledges can ask for better documentation and examples or alter roadmap priorities on small items they would find useful to their projects, but not the project roadmap as a whole, since this is mostly dictated by what our contributors want to work on.

Proposal Form

This is an user-submitted list of proposals. Conservancy as asked us to make this process open for everyone, not only Patrons. Because of this, everyone in the community can submit ideas and proposals.

Voting Form

We do a pre-selection of the proposals (which need to comply with what was mentioned before) and put them up for voting.

While everyone can vote, we keep a list of who pledged each month and how many voting points this person has. For the final tally, only those Patrons with voting points are considered (everyone else has 0 points).

For those with voting points, you can vote as many times as you want. Each time you vote, your voting points are split between the different items you voted. 

As an example, if you have 3 voting points and voted 1 item, this item gets 3 points. If you vote 3 different items instead, each gets 1 point. If you vote 6 different items, each gets 0.5 points.

As for where votes come from, Patreon give us a downloadable list of which users pledged and how much by the time they were charged at the end of the month.

Results

At the end of the month, we publish the results. The winning Tutorial, Demo and Feature are those who got the most points.

We will also publish the popular vote results, which is a tally where each voter, no matter who he or she is, gets 1 point.  

This voting result is only for everyone to know which are the most popularly requested item and is done so we core developers (and contributors) have a better idea of what the needs, of the community as a whole, are. This, of course, also gives us an idea of what we should prioritize in the roadmap as a whole, but it's not a direct promise.

Implementation

We will do our best so the items voted by Patrons get more priority in our schedule. Ideally we will try to implement them before the next Feature Freeze.  If the voted item requires a feature that is not implemented yet, then this feature gets more priority too.

If a voted item is added by another contributor (not being paid by Conservancy), this is considered saving time to those of us who are and will just allow us to work in other areas instead. Remember that paid developers are paid to work full or part time for the project.

Since there were complaints that "we only implement features voted by Patrons", rest assured that this is not the case. There are dozens of contributors working in Godot, and only me (Juan) and others eventually paid by Conservancy will make an effort to implement those features. The rest of the developer community is free to do whatever it wants.