Detailed Information

Here some other detailed informations about the project, its organisation, workflow and conditions.

Feedback

We would love to have lots of feedback on every step we do from the community. This may not be an active participation, but still a very important one.

Communication

In order to get the latest information about muffin, follow us on twitter and/or subscribe to the blog via RSS feed.

The central place for discussion and contribution is the forum. The registration is short and easy and you will get the fastest response there. Anonymous users can post comments on the blog as well.

Once we feel there is a demand for it, we will provide a live chat channel in near future to provide a real time communication tool (like an IRC channel). We can also arrange frequently chat meetings if the project benefits from it.

Decision making

At some points we will have to make decisions, like choosing between different character designs or the look etc.

Decisions will be made on a democratic basis. The people that are actively working on the project will consider all opinions plus the feedback and will decide together.
The forum provides us with the needed rating and discussion functionality.

So my role (atti) is to moderate the discussions and in case there is really no way of finding a solution/compromise together, I will make the decision. It may sound harsh, but this way of organisation has been approved to work in many open source software projects. Plus I want to remind you of the creative commons licence we are using. Everybody has the freedom and right to take the whole project and continue it the way he/she thinks it is better.

For now I’m staying positive by forecasting that we won’t have decision making troubles . I think we will get the best result if we team up and work together.

Budget

At the moment I do not plan to establish a financial plan since there is (almost) no money involved. However, at some point I may set up a donation system or sell DVDs/blue rays in order to pay the server expenses, support development of used open source tools or pay for application fees for animation festivals etc. Let me asure you: I’m not goint to make personal benefit from community work.

But for now, if you want to help financially: donate to the used open source software projects.

Open source tools

The production pipeline is mainly built around open source tools in order to ensure that everybody can access them. We don’t want people to be forced to aquire an expensive piece of software to be able to participate.

All listet software was already successfully used on projects and is classified for having sufficient functionality/stability.

Further on, open source software and this project share the same idea of a community creating goods for everyone. This project may also become a test scenario which may help the used open source tools to improve upon bug-reporting. So it’s a win-win-win situation.

Anyway, this does NOT mean you aren’t allowed to use your favourite software. In the end it is just a tool and shouldn’t get in the way of creativity. So if you prefer to do storyboard drawings in corel painter or you prefer mesh-modelling in 3ds max, go for it as long as it fits into the production pipeline and you share the sources in the given file formats.