Over the last few years, I’ve been very grateful for the support of my Patreon subscribers. Financially, their contributions have helped me cover a substantial proportion of the cloud hosting costs associated with projects like Historic Hansard and The Real Face of White Australia. But, more importantly, just knowing that they thought my work was of value has helped keep me going, and inspired me to develop a range of new resources.

However, while I’ve been grateful for the platform provided by Patreon, I’ve increasingly felt that it’s not a good fit for the sort of work I do. Patreon is geared towards providing special content to supporters, but, as you know, all my work is open. And that’s really important to me.

Recently GitHub opened up its own sponsorship program for the development of open source software. This program seems to align more closely with what I do. I already share and manage my code through GitHub, so integrating sponsorship seems to make a lot of sense. It’s worth noting too, that, unlike Patreon, GitHub charges no fees and takes no cut of your contributions. As a result I’ve decided to close my Patreon account by the end of April, and create a GitHub sponsors page.

What does this mean for you?

If you’re a Patreon subscriber and you’d like to keep supporting me, you should cancel your Patreon contribution, then head over to my brand new GitHub sponsors page and sign up! Thanks for your continued support!

If you’d prefer to let your contributions lapse, just do nothing. Your payments will stop when I close the account at the end of April. I understand that circumstances change – thank you so much for your support over the years, and I hope you will continue to make use of the things I create.

If you make use of any of my tools or resources and would like to support their continued development, please think about becoming a sponsor. For a sample of the sorts of things I’ve been working on lately, see my updates feed.

The future!

I’m very excited about the possibilities ahead. The GLAM Workbench has received a lot of attention around the world (including a Research Award from the British Library Labs), and I’m planning some major developments over coming months. And, of course, I won’t forget all my other resources – I spent a lot of time in 2020 migrating databases and platforms to keep everything chugging along.

On my GitHub sponsors page, I’ve set an initial target of 50 sponsors. That might be ambitious, but as I said above, it’s not just about money. Being able to point to a group of people who use and value this work will help me argue for new ways of enabling digital research in the humanities. So please help me spread the word – let’s make things together!