FreeCAD News

Since its incep­tion in late 2021, the FreeCAD Project Asso­ci­a­tion (FPA) has been col­lect­ing the community’s dona­tions with the inten­tion of spend­ing them on improv­ing FreeCAD and its ecosys­tem. In 2024, the FPA launched its first annu­al grant pro­gram. Here is a recap of how this went.

Program and out-of-program participation

The idea behind the annu­al pro­gram was to batch the review of grant appli­ca­tions, sim­i­lar to what the team does for Google Sum­mer of Code (GSoC). How­ev­er, we received only four appli­ca­tions by the ini­tial deadline:

• Sketch­er refac­tor­ing, by Ajinkya Dahale;
• Code trans­fer com­ple­tion in the topon­am­ing project, by Bradley McLean;
• Design­ing fur­ni­ture and para­met­ric com­po­nents for the FreeCAD library, by Fran­cis­co de Assis Rosa;
• C++ API Doc­u­men­ta­tion, by Pieter Hijma.

The first three projects have been suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed, the last one is an ongo­ing project.

After this ini­tial batch of grants, we start­ed receiv­ing more out-of-pro­gram appli­ca­tions: more topon­am­ing fix­es, API doc­u­men­ta­tion improve­ments, user guide updates, UX/UI improve­ments, etc.

The total num­ber of approved grants since the annu­al pro­gram launch in 2024 was 17. Three addi­tion­al grants were giv­en pri­or to the launch, in Jan­u­ary and Feb­ru­ary 2024.

Budget allocation

The over­all mon­e­tary allo­ca­tion for all 20 projects in 2024 was $82,350—significantly above the orig­i­nal $50,000 bud­get. Despite this over­run, the FPA is still receiv­ing mon­ey faster than it is spend­ing it.

This is how the expense allo­ca­tion for the approved grants breaks down by type of work:

Here is a break­down of the allo­ca­tion for code contributions:

Please note that all this is allo­ca­tion, not actu­al spend­ing. The dis­tinc­tion is impor­tant because not all projects have been com­plet­ed yet. Some of the funds allo­cat­ed in 2024 will only be dis­bursed in 2025.

More infor­ma­tion about the 2024 spend­ing will be pub­lished in FPA’s annu­al report lat­er this month.

Aftermath

Over­all, we think we are on the right track with the grant pro­gram. The FPA went from spend­ing $4K in 2023 to allo­cat­ing over $80K in 2024. The idea of pay­ing con­trib­u­tors to do focused work that ben­e­fits the com­mu­ni­ty is get­ting nor­mal­ized, and that’s a good thing.

There are cer­tain things we think we need to improve.

• The annu­al pro­gram didn’t get as many grant appli­ca­tions as we hoped for. The idea of batch­ing reviews is still sound, so for 2025, we are mak­ing changes in how we run the pro­gram (see below).
• Cur­rent­ly, we have a minor over­lap between the grant review com­mit­tee and the FPA gen­er­al assem­bly. So, some of the peo­ple who make tech­ni­cal rec­om­men­da­tions also have vot­ing pow­er. We think this needs to be cor­rect­ed by get­ting more peo­ple involved with tech­ni­cal reviews, even­tu­al­ly elim­i­nat­ing vot­ing FPA mem­bers from the ini­tial review process.
• The vot­ing process was high­ly vari­able in how much time it took to achieve a quo­rum. That’s why the work on one of the first grants (by the late Bradley McLean) was com­plet­ed before we even announced the first approved grants. The FPA will con­tin­ue to work to ensure that all mem­bers vote in a time­ly man­ner so that grants aren’t delayed due to lack of mem­ber participation.

Going forward

For 2025, we are replac­ing the annu­al pro­gram with four waves of grant reviews, on a quar­ter­ly basis. We are also rais­ing the over­all allo­ca­tion cap to $80,000 for the entire year. This does not affect or include either 2024 projects or the only grant appli­ca­tion that was sub­mit­ted in 2024 and approved in 2025 (Ajinkya’s sec­ond Sketch­er refac­tor­ing project). Stay tuned for a sep­a­rate announcement.