funding campaign 2018

The CERN and Society Foundation (the entity providing the KiCad projects donation service) does not give out this kind of detailed information to the public. There are perfectly valid reasons for this policy. I can tell you that the only thing the C&S Foundation pays for with KiCad software donations is KiCad software development. They provide this service free of charge which cannot be said for other entities providing similar services to open source projects. That being said, some V6 work has already been completed and developers have been paid. Most of the lead development team have multiple V6 road map features in progress. Just because the work being done hasn't made it into the master branch doesn't mean that work is not being done.

So it is just a hold-up. Too much opacity.

From the Cern video, my feeling was "teams leaders met and decided on a campaign to achieve some goals"

Expectation was some week after fund raising end a communiqué saying what the money will be used for.

It was also evident that the funding was done to hire someone for some time & full time. Boost dev...

And one year latter, nothing solid. Probably a waste of money if the model is buying some dev time here and here.

So,
There is more than enough money to hire a dev for a year. Why aren't you already 100% on Kicad for some time ?

The problem is the availability of the manpower not the lack of funds. None the members of the lead development team write code for KiCad full time. Most them have full time day jobs. I spend over half of my time running the project rather than writing code. As the project continues to grow, this only gets worse. I wish we could move things along faster but it is what it is.

If you wait for a developer to come in, I might take a very long time ;)

There is many freelance dev and SSII (french acronym) having the manpower. Even India provides skilled dev. Lot of small business use them. No shame.
But to do that, at least a job description must be online somewhere, IMHO.

It's a steep learning curve to get into Kicad but a generalist dev can handle a lot of stuff without knowing ohm's law.

No idea of the accuracy of this: https://www.payscale.com/research/IN/Job=C%2B%2B_Developer/Salary
I understand you got a c++ dev for a year for $7000

Use the money to go to India for a holidays week, train them* on the project (wxwidgets and things like that).
Nobody will tell you you misused the money.

*pretty sure there is enough fund to hire a team of 3 or 4 person!

This is not how the KiCad project works. Becoming a member of the development team is a process based on the ability to display that you have the skill set and a willingness to work with the development team to continue to help improve KiCad. Paying people outside the project for development just because we can does not foster a sense of community that I have spent my time as the project leader trying to build. I'm not going to jeopardize that. I have too much respect and appreciation for all of the people who have committed their valuable time to the project. Generalist C++ programmers are not very helpful to the project. If you don' t understand the problem domain of what is required to design electronics, the possibility of you contributing in a meaningful way to KiCad is highly unlikely no matter how good of a C++ programmer you are. All I can say is that most if not all of our donors understand how the project is run. If you disagree with this philosophy, than you have to decide if donating to the KiCad project is right for you.