[Raion]

Hey there folks,

After chatting with people and talking about this for ages we are in the planning stages for a group buy and contest to improve community engagement and provide things you the people want. 

We will be creating a contest and group buy for a custom mouse pad coming in a handful of sizes. 

I'm currently looking at suppliers. If you have suggestions, I am all ears as long as I can get low volume orders for sampling purposes. 

Here's a rundown of what's planned:

1. We decide on a design. This will be a pure democracy decision, and to keep costs down there will be a singular winning design. You will need an active forum account to join the poll once we have base designs. 

We will begin with 4 to 5 and use a runoff system to allow for people to show what they want. True to our intentions, these will be IRIX/SGI related and I solemnly swear there won't be any lazy branded designs. Hell no, we want quality and you do too. 

The purpose of multiple sizes is to fit people's budgets. I know times are tough, and we will keep costs down by ordering in bulk, and keeping the scope narrow. 

After we decide on a design, phase 2 begins:

2. There will be a 60-day period where on either Shopify or woocommerce or something we will have the items for sale. You will pay for what you want up front including shipping (US and Europe, maybe AU as well as an option)

3. We order the final quantities plus a few extras of each size. They ship to someone whose a designated boxer and distributor (probably me or one of the other staff) and then we box them according to orders and mail them out over a 14-21 day period. 

4. We then hold another contest for 60 days. You sign up to silicon image, take photos posing your setup. We then go through and randomly pick 4-5 winners. Those winners will then get a free product from the next group buy. 

If anyone has any questions, suggestions etc. Drop a line here. Other future concepts included:

Bags/cases for the smaller systems (O2, Indy etc) 
Custom SGI-style keycaps
More high quality stickers ala CB_HK
High quality (including plus sizes) tees, jackets and such

I also had some less orthodox ideas. 

All of the proceeds will benefit the site and future projects, including bounties. These funds will be kept separate from Patreon which currently acts mostly as an operating and web dev expense system. If you want to see more software dev, a d potentially hardware one day, this is one way you can support it. We do have a few users who've talked about some simple hardware mods and repros. I also have a few ideas, some of which will take a lot of time and money but would probably give us a lot of benefits down the way. 

I'm also currently on a massive web dev contract from my current job, so I will be around a bit less for the next 2-3 weeks but I will be hopefully back with good news, more money, and a lot of ambitious plans for the forums in the coming months.