Open Collective just relaunched their bounty program. This is the basic way it works -
- Bounty contributors first comment on the issue they’re interested in, to ask a core contributor to assign them to it. This ensures that multiple people aren’t unknowingly working on the same bounty simultaneously, and gives our core team the chance to check everything’s in order.
- Set a time limit based on the complexity of the issue, so that if an initial bounty contributor doesn’t deliver it can be opened up to others
- Contributors must complete a simple issue before moving on to one more complex. This helps assess skill level and avoid frustration and lost time.
- Complex issues don’t really work as bounties, because they usually require a lot of back and forth and are hard to scope accurately in advance. drop them in favor of larger issues split into small bounties.
- Use a “bounty candidate” label so other team members could bring potential bounty issues to the attention of the core dev team and they could be assessed for suitability.
- Make sure bounty issues are fully specced out and don’t require more design before starting implementation.
Bounty levels -
- $100 for “minimal complexity issues” (<1 hour average estimated completion time)
- $200 for “simple complexity issues” (~1 or 2 hours average estimated completion time)
- $500 for “medium complexity issues” (~1 day average estimated completion time)
To facilitate this, they came up with the Contributor Ladder:
First Time Contributors
- Have access to minimal or simple complexity issues
- Contributors are not part of the Open Collective GitHub organization
- Fork our projects on GitHub and push changes on their forks
- Should comment on bounty issues to get assigned (limited to one at a time)
Contributors (at least 1 completed issue)
- They get added to the Open Collective GitHub organization
- Can assign themselves bounty issues (limited to one at a time)
- Have access to minimal, simple or medium complexity issues
Recurring Contributors (3 or more completed issues)
- Added to the “Recurring Contributors” group on the Open Collective GitHub organization
- Can assign themselves bounty issues (limited to two at a time)
- Have access to minimal, simple or medium complexity issues
Confirmed Contributors (3 completed issues including at least 2 with medium complexity)
- Added to the “Confirmed Contributors” group on the Open Collective GitHub organization
- Become candidates to work on complex issues or projects on a negotiable per-project or hourly rate
Could something like this work for LibreTime?
We’d obviously need a budget to provide bounties, but incorporating some of the sustainability initiatives listed above could provide a way to do that.
What does everybody think?