Chris Waldon
@whereswaldon

Hey everyone! I'm Chris, and I hail from central North Carolina in the USA! I spend most of my free time working on {free,libre,open source} software, and I love doing it. Most of my time goes to Gio and to the Arbor Chat Project, though I also contribute to a number of other projects.

Gio provides the painless, cross-platform foundation that GUI development needs. I co-maintain Gio's examples repository, website, and CI systems. I am also the primary maintainer of Gio-x, the experimental or platform-specific extensions to the core libraries. Additionally, I manage the month community calls, office hours, and newsletters.

Arbor is an attempt to make instant messaging clearer, easier, and fairer by restructuring conversation into a tree. You can read all about it on our website. I created the project in 2018, and have been leading its development ever since.

My goal in asking for funds is threefold:

• To cover the operating expenses of the Arbor Chat Project:
  • Infrastructure like domain names, servers, and bandwidth
  • Fees to distribute applications for iOS, macOS, Windows, and in the Play Store
  • Expert consultation like security audits or legal advice when composing Terms of Service
• To have money to use for contributor appreciation and small-scale promotion (stickers to hand out at events),
• And to be able to fund part- or full-time work on Gio, Arbor, and related open source projects, such as:
  • technical writers
  • designers (UX, graphical, etc...)
  • developers (including myself)

My other work includes:

• Bug reports and fixes for sourcehut, particularly around source code annotations and artifact hosting
• kfreestyle2d, the unofficial userspace Linux driver for the Kinesis Freestyle 2 keyboard