I’ve been talking with several folks from other projects in Open Collective Slack about their governance and spending policies. Many don’t yet have a finely tuned governance structure and spending policy in place ‘before’ raising and distributing funds via their collective.
This includes OBS which is currently sustaining 2 full-time devs and a handful of other paid contributors via their Patreon and Open Collective.
If projects with multiple contributors and large communities can sustain organically, so could LibreTime.
It’s good to sort the governance and spending but it shouldn’t be a blocker for raising funds.
While I agree that we don’t need a fully fleshed out governance policy for raising money, we do need it before we can spend money. Otherwise, the process is way too open to abuse. We want our donors to have confidence that the money they are donating is going where it is most needed and that they are not donating to the whims of a single maintainer.
It’s good to be transparent and have policy. I agree with you on that. One of the strengths but also challenges of LibreTime is our governance is rather robust in terms of our coding contract.
Other projects like AzuraCast have been able to increase their primary developers income by having all money flow to the person who coded most everything and so who can just put more time in knowing that they will receive some level of financial remuneration from users.
We have relied upon volunteer labor (for the most part), and individuals who have been compensated for their work have done so outside of the confines of LibreTime itself. I think this is similar to how work is compensated on other free software projects such as the Linux kernel. Corporations pay maintainers who contribute to the community on behalf of their company in ways that benefit all users.
In some ways we put the cart before the horse by collecting money with no real plans for how or what we would spend it on. We haven’t collected enough money for this to matter but it is something we should consider before we start distributing funds.
The project is kind of at a stand-still from a development perspective if we are waiting to switch to a Python/Django based back-end to replace Zend1. Once that is in place it is likely that we could hopefully speed up development. Dumping any funds into the project right now would be like painting and remodeling a room before you plan on tearing down the walls to put in new plumbing. This I suspect is also one of the reasons that there has been a lagging effort to push out a beta (from a psychological motivation perspective). On the other hand I’m done with school and thus I personally have more free time to siphon to thinking about LibreTime, whether we want to try to pay more people to dedicate their time under the auspices of our OpenCollective is up to our project as a whole to decide. At this point the amount of funds in the bank account are not enough to supplant the income one can generate doing IT professionally and so it isn’t super important.
There are a lot of different financial models we could deploy but it would be tricky to employ the model used by OBS and AzuraCast where the money just goes to a couple of individuals directly and they work on the code while everyone else is considered a volunteer. We also don’t have enough money in our bank to fund specific bounties for features in my opinion.
So currently I think the thinking is that the funds can be applied for to cover costs related to the project as sort of mini-grants. Like we could easily pay for our domain registration for libretime.org. Or help offset travel costs if people ever started travelling again and wanted to go to a conference. We could also invest in something like t-shirts or whatever or other small perks to thank those who contribute code and/or documentation that make the project happen. This seems to be about the level of funding we currently have.
Any Contributor, Maintainer or Administrator can propose a project related to LibreTime (demo, website, documentation, feature implementation, etc.) that could be funded by the LibreTime Open Collective. All proposals must include an estimated cost.
Question from me regarding the section of the proposal referenced above:
I’m trying to wrap my head around this section. Is it saying that anyone can create a feature request and LibreTime ‘might’ fund it? If yes, how would that be possible considering the limited amount of funds in LibreTime’s collective? LibreTime - Open Collective
Your reading is correct, anyone who is active in the project can propose a project. However there is an evaluation step that will include how much LibreTime has to spend. If there is no money to spend, then there is no approval for any projects. I agree that there should probably be motivation for fundraising, but it shouldn’t be required. Perhaps a requirement is a note somewhere/blog post acknowledging the fact that LibreTime provided the funding
With that, I’d like to recommend we look at how open source projects OBS and Mautic are using tools like Github and Open Collective to encourage and facilitate community contributions.
Discourse category for ideas and feature requests (this could also be done as by enabling discussions in the LibreTime repo and creating a similar category.
The spending proposal doesn’t really cater for development funding. We don’t receive nearly enough into the open collective for that and I haven’t had any indication from any of the maintainers that they would be able to work on LibreTime if they got paid for it. If anyone does indicate that they have capacity and interest in completing paid features/bug fixes then maybe we can look into that. Until then, the spending proposal is focused on other things like funding testing and demo servers, domain and email.
Understood - my suggestions (at the tail end of my previous comment) have more to do with larger issues of enabling current and future maintainers the ability to spend time on development priorities and sustaining the project, rather than the spending policy itself.
and we’ve been talking about it in the