HowTo: Software Development Budget (for Art)

Hi Jason,

The way I've done it in the past is prepare two budgets:

1) the right way
2) the shoe-string way

First you determine what professional services, hardware, and/or
software you may need to purchase as opposed to what you can do
yourself.

This all goes in the 'right way' budget.

Then you figure out how to do the same thing without the pro services,
hardware, and/or software. You can perhaps barter services, buy cheap
ebay hardware and acquire demo software or acquire by other means…

If it's simply a straight-up software project and you have all the
tools you need in hand and it's just little ole you typing away on a
keyboard, then you just need to get real… if there's no 'market' for
the output then you won't be getting industry standard wages for
developing the thing. You need to budget with real-world commissions
and grants in mind. These range from 2 - 15 or 20K, but the higher the
prize the more competition of course.

good luck

On Nov 23, 2004, at 11:14 AM, Jason Van Anden wrote:

> How do you determine a budget for developing software related art? I
> am trying to balance "labor-of-love" with "senior level software
> architect". Is there a rule of thumb? Should there be?
>
>
>
>

===
<twhid>http://www.mteww.com</twhid>
===

OOOOG! Don't get me started with this one!

OK, here's the unpopular version at both www.culturekitchen.com and
www.potatoland.org : "Labor of love is still labor".

So you have to accurately calculate any loss of income you may incur if
you have to work during your business hours in order to finish an art
project. A project at www.potatoland.org will cost a minimum of 2K to
20K to produce, just accounting for cost of labor. Why? Because, again,
given what Napier gets paid for his labor time, if he has to use any of
that time for an art project, the art project has to be translated into
a loss of income that needs to be recuperated through sales or
commissions.

So in these here sites, labors of love are true labors of love :
projects that can be developed and finished during non-business hours.

So the equation would be

TOTAL ESTIMATED HOURS LABOR
- TOTAL ESTIMATED HOURS LABOR DURING NON-BUSINESS HOURS
= TOTAL HOURS LABOR DURING BUSINESS HOURS
X HOURLY RATE FOR BUSINESS HOURS
= Subtotal for SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT LABOR COSTS
X 30% unknowns
= Total Labor Costs.

Then you add to that, any costs for hosting, domains, hardware, travel
involved (if you have to go somewhere to install it) + another 30%
overhead for any technical issues that might arise in the future and
that's your budget.

This is a real-life budget that most granting institutions or
commission dealers don't want to look at. If you are making art anyway,
why not just take what you can get? Right?

Wrong!

Rule # 1 of Artware :
AN ARTWARE PROJECT IS STILL A SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROJECT AND SHOULD
BE TREATED ACCORDINGLY.

Anybody involved in any kind of technological development project in
the real world knows how things can go awfully wrong in a second. A
project that cranks on smoothly for months can crash and burn with the
hiccup of a bug the night before it's release date. I've seen this
happen so many times with commercial and art projects that there is no
need to differentiate one from the other.

This is why I feel the net / software / digital artworld needs a
Cluetrain Manifesto of its own.

Best,
liza


On Tuesday, Nov 23, 2004, at 11:14 America/New_York, Jason Van Anden
wrote:

> How do you determine a budget for developing software related art? I
> am trying to balance "labor-of-love" with "senior level software
> architect". Is there a rule of thumb? Should there be?
> +
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Thanks for the feedback…

It's not the first time I have confronted this dilemma - as Liza points out, budgeting for art/software and all of it's possible miscalculation is not all that different from budgeting for a professional project.

Jason