UPDATE: The kickstarter has gone very, very well. I'll be writing a long post as it draws to a close about the whole experience.
I've had the idea of crowdfunding an open source project for a while now, but it wasn't until a few weeks ago that it occurred to me that I could combine my one free day a week (which I used to use for flying lessons) and my pet Django feature into one crowdfundable whole.
Thus, today I'm launching the Schema Migrations for Django project on Kickstarter. I've set a goal which would pay for a decent amount of my free days, and I'm hopeful that it will be reached.
I'll do a post-mortem blog post on the project and what running a Kickstarter project of this type is like once it's over in two weeks' time - I can say, however, that I've had invaluable feedback from friends and members of the Django community to help me polish the descriptions, tweak the rewards, and generally get it feeling like a solid whole.
The Django core team and the DSF have also been very supportive, so I'd like to thank them both. I'm hoping that if this works, it'll help set a trend that we can use to encourage and accelerate feature development in Django in the future - I'm certainly going to be making notes about what works and (hopefully fewer) about what doesn't.
That said, if you use Django or South and want to wrangle with your database even less, please head over to the Kickstarter page and throw some money into the pot.