That local brewery doesn’t give you free beers and doesn’t accepts that if you want you can pay or not, that’s why it’s not a donation. On twitch you don’t have to pay, you do it if you want to. That’s what all platforms that accept one-time contributions call it, for example, OpenCollective, and it’s for open software projects. But I understand that it sounds strange to you if you are not used to seeing that term in non-charity contexts, I just hope it doesn’t stop people…
Agree
Read what I’ve written! I’ve explicitly stated that there’s a difference between supporting someone with a donation and actively buying a software. I haven’t stated that there is no transaction of money going on!
The main difference is that a donation is an act of kindness, a token of appreciation. Seeing it as the creator(s) “begging” for money is frankly laughable. You are given the opportunity to support someone, if you can. If your finances don’t allow it, you can still consume the content, use the software, or whatever.
The learning curve is certainly steep, but nowadays the internet is flooded with free learning content that can easily get you started. When I embarked on the journey of learning Grasshopper many years ago, apart from the old forum, there really wasn’t much learning material out there that I was aware of. I still managed.
In my experience, mainly in architecture, Rhino and Grasshopper are not even that popular. Many of the more traditionally working firms went straight from AutoCAD to BIM solutions.
A big factor in my opinion is that Grasshopper is oftentimes seen as an academic tool with a toy-ish character to produce extroverted designs that don’t really seem to fit reality. I guess many people misunderstand the tool, because all they see on the internet are flashy design experiments, whereas not many people show “real-world applications” that can really improve and speed up your process in practice.
LOL, computational designer! Who even invented that term.
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OK so I have had a conversation with someone from the ICO. Here is the gist of it:
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Patreon and Ko-fi’s different interpretations are considered to both be correct, because their business models are slightly different. Patreon are running the show and are in sole control of the data and if a Creator leaves Patreon they have to relinquish any data they have. Ko-fi are seen as being more an introducer, so the Creator is in control of their data and can retain it if they depart from Ko-fi.
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The upshot is that a Ko-fi Creator is technically required to register with the ICO and pay the annual fee. However (and there may be some reading between the lines in the following)…
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Someone unregistered receiving occasional beer money (sorry, coffee) in thanks for cogent pieces of advice is going to be so far down the priority list for enforcement that they would likely be invisible to the ICO. In the extremely unlikely event that the ICO did decide to do something about it they would start with a conversation about the need to register and would not leap straight in with a penalty. I would think that the Creator could opt to quietly leave Ko-fi and delete the data and that would suffice.
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Someone seeking a larger sum of money, for instance crowdfunding a plugin, would be further up the enforcement chain. I suspect they would still be under the radar, but if approached would have to register rather than shut down - but that’s just a guess.
HTH
Jeremy
1 Like
I will ask them too, I don’t know the conditions or use or user profile that you have shown, it is strange that if you do not process personal data you have to pay for it the same as a company that uses it. Kofi’s people told me to take the self-assessment, they didn’t say yes directly, so this does not fit.
There is no difference in the definition of personal data that excludes who upload a plugin in food4rhino from paying this fee in that case, as food4rhino gives you the email address of the users who download it and the email address is considered personal data.
Anyway, if you receive enough donations to get their attention, you shouldn’t mind paying for it.
Hi @Dani_Abalde,
It is the Data Controller, not the Data Processor who has to pay the fee. There in black and white on the ICO website:
Under the 2018 Regulations, organisations that determine the purpose for which personal data is processed (controllers) must pay a data protection fee unless they are exempt.
Data protection fee | ICO.
And Ko-fi’s T&Cs which you agree to on signing up state that you agree to be a Data Controller.
But people ignoring this in the beer money context will not be the ICO’s priority for enforcement. And of course, if you are running a small business you will have registered already so you can probably put Ko-fi under that umbrella.
Regards
Jeremy
1 Like
i ask myself the same about Architect. there are a few approaches trying to derive the origin, with different meanings, none seem properly researched. nowadays an Architect also seems to be a person developing Software having nothing or little to do with its initial term making it already difficult to find jobs online for Architecture in the initial sense.
it seems that nowadays Architects have to call them selves Computational Designer, because the original term has been taken over. Soon we all will be pushing free electrons instead of those bound to atoms, dissolving the world as we know it.
how might Morpheus from Matrix call it? Welcome to the real World.
True, but most architects that I know, including myself, still work on real buildings in one form or the other. Again what is portrayed on the internet through social media is oftentimes only fiction, a facade, and/or a fragment of a much bigger reality.
I would not call myself a “digital designer” and don’t feel any pressure whatsoever to do so, even though I currently co-develop a Grasshopper plug-in and frequently dabble in experimental architecture, in my free time.
I consider the term “digital designer” vain, vague, limiting, and empty! It simply stands for nothing and I guess that’s why architects who don’t really work in the field like it. Why not call yourself “digital architect”, which by the way most architects are nowadays! Sure I like sketching, but most of the work is done on the computer.
There’s no reason to give up on the term “architect” now, and adopt some vague job description. Even in the past, Le Corbusier, Gropius, and many before and after them were architects that did some architecture, some design, some art, some engineering, some writing, etc.
I think that architects who branch out into interdisciplinary fields to investigate new possibilities for architecture itself are closer to the prototypical architect, than everybody else. You should proudly call yourself architect!
However, “digital designer” already gives a false premise and alleges that the person in question is some sort of general designer - which by the way isn’t really a thing -, although your academical pedigree says otherwise.
But i guess that many people like the idea of not being frank, of being vague, of not making a choice, of being fluid, and of being “something else”, “something new”, part of a counter-culture?
You see, I don’t think that “digital designer” is symptomatic for post-modernistic thinking, in that everything needs to fit into a certain box within a box within a box. After all what categorisation is “digital designer”, if in the end it doesn’t really describe anything?
Damn, has it really been 22 years? Excited about Matrix 4? I’ve read somewhere that Fishburne will not return though.
@Dani_Abalde, sorry for hijacking the thread.
A new feature of Ko-fi is that it can be connected with other apps via Zapier. This allows you to automate actions that are triggered when you receive a donation (or any other contribution) and respond with other applications by handling the parameters that ko-fi gives you about the contribution.
A very simple would be to notify in your Discord who has donated you and how many coffees, to share that good news with your community. Or to give access to private cloud folders. Let me know what other uses you have for it.
hey,
lately (mostly yesterday) I’ve been testing ko-fi with the definitions I post here:
threads
Brep or surface as non planar projection
Waves from straight lines
Gradient visualization for surface according to values that I have calculated
Impact point of an arc based on trajectory angle
Slider - get initial value from txt file
Create a surface that wraps a wall made of tires
Solid Transforms from a box to a cone
What I found problematic is, that at the point when posting a “solution” it is not entirely clear if this solution is the one the op was looking for. Including a ko-fi button in a definition that was not helpful feels a bit on the nose / desperate. In my mind some kind of thank-you donation would be best presented after the solution is accepted but this is of course difficult to do within grasshopper.
[edit]: I just got my first coffee, thanks 
3 Likes
I don’t think so. The one who asks for help may want to thank someone even without being the solution, because it may have been useful as a learning experience or simply wants to thank for the effort or time.
People are not so zombie-like that they feel forced to donate just because they have a button to do so. And if the person offering help doesn’t contribute anything and still includes this component, it’s only their reputation that is damaged. One has to be at the height of what is asks for.
It does not depend on the final result but on the time you put into it in my opinion. I only include this component when I spend more than 5 minutes to help or if it includes a script that takes a long time to develop.
Yes I agree, in the post I say that a better solution would be for something like this to be integrated into Discourse, along with the solution or like button. So that could see the users who give coffee and that way they would be more helped in the future.
First of many I hope!
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I think this contradicts a bit the point you’ve made earlier:
I think “responders” should feel free to include this, irrespective of their skill level or the time they put into. What an expert can do in a few minutes may be extremely helpful for a beginner and he or she might want to thank him/her despite the lack of time investment. On the other side on the spectrum a beginner might struggle to come up with something with is truly useful to the op but he/she invested a lot of time. As you pointed out this can be equally noble. What I am trying to say is ideally the gesture should be
“hey this is so cool! Can I buy you a coffee in return?”
not: “I made this, Could you buy me a coffee, please?”
How to communicate this while giving users an option to donate is tricky (for me at least) 
I’ve been on the old GH forum and this one for 10 years, and I’ve never seen anyone offering to pay for a coffee or anything like that. You wouldn’t believe how many times I haven’t even been thanked. 
By it is a question of time, I mean that if you take ten seconds to help because it only need to make a graft and you include this component, for me that someone hurts their image or is being out of context. If someone with a low level dedicates a lot of time to offer a bad solution, he/she has all the legitimacy to put this component, of course, to me this shows that time is the most relevant parameter here. Time is the most valuable resource for human beings, so I think that’s what it boils down to. The context here is a community that shares knowledge without pretensions, I maintain that philosophy, so when I include this component I do it based on my time, not on the quality of the help or if it is the solution. This can be applied to anyone. But well, it is just my opinion.
I don’t think you need to explain anything. The component is there and does not compromise anything, the user can double click and nothing is compromised. They understands that they has the option to donate and that’s all. I think it is self-explanatory. If you verbalize that they can donate, in a way you are reinforcing that they do. I made this component so that nothing else is needed but to leave it there and it can be ignored without any problem.
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well, until now there wasn’t really the possibility to do so in a convenient way. 
the reason in my mind why it is justified for an expert to include this even though he/she only spent a few minutes fixing a graft problem is that he or she will have spent probably years learning grasshopper to become an expert
yeah, that’s probably true and a good way to do it
1 Like