For me, personally, seeing gittip's come in is both a form of validation, and also at a certain point it can "free" me from the choice some of us who are full time employees, and then over-full time OSS/Community workers from having to decide between:
1> Do community/OSS work - the former being, well, highly political, painful, slow and yeah.
2> Drop the community work and just pick up paid contracts on the side to help my family.
I'll always be part of OSS, no matter what - but there's a point at which the time/benefit ratio (depending on what you're working on) becomes on of "how much time can I rationalize working on this when I have other things to deal with".
In my case, albeit a fairly unique set of circumstances, it's a choice between time with my girls, medical bills, etc, etc and the choice to dedicate a lot of time working on things a lot less sexy than code.
Sure, as others point out, I get paid a salary, I have a full time job. But as I also point out in https://www.gittip.com/jnoller/ - I've got a lot of other "full time jobs" not including family time.
Just some thoughts - for you, using the funds to go to conferences, teach and do things your current funds would not cover or allow you to (say, taking unpaid leave to do a workshop someplace) would be a fantastic use of it.
1> Do community/OSS work - the former being, well, highly political, painful, slow and yeah.
2> Drop the community work and just pick up paid contracts on the side to help my family.
I'll always be part of OSS, no matter what - but there's a point at which the time/benefit ratio (depending on what you're working on) becomes on of "how much time can I rationalize working on this when I have other things to deal with".
In my case, albeit a fairly unique set of circumstances, it's a choice between time with my girls, medical bills, etc, etc and the choice to dedicate a lot of time working on things a lot less sexy than code.
Sure, as others point out, I get paid a salary, I have a full time job. But as I also point out in https://www.gittip.com/jnoller/ - I've got a lot of other "full time jobs" not including family time.
Just some thoughts - for you, using the funds to go to conferences, teach and do things your current funds would not cover or allow you to (say, taking unpaid leave to do a workshop someplace) would be a fantastic use of it.