The following excerpts from an ongoing conversation with the same folks behind this complimentary initiative should further illustrate the potential benefits of creating an Open Collective for LibreTime…
Open Collective provides a platform and community that would enable LibreTime to increase contributions and grow it’s community by collaborating with complimentary OSS projects, nonprofit organizations, and funded initiatives.
If we can table the issue of needing a clear policy before considering paying developers (again - that would be a next step - we’d create a github issue), are there valid reasons why we wouldn’t want Open Collective as a tool to enable collaboration and community?
I would be happy to run point as the community liaison/outreach type.
The following webinar provides a great amount of information about OpenCollective and how other OSS projects and communities are using to help sustain and facilitate collaboration. Possibly there enough here to alleviate concerns that have prevented maintainers from wanting to create a collective for LibreTime.
I think an Open Collective is an attractive idea. Being able to give key developers even a token amount would be useful. I am not sure there are many companies and organisations willing to contribute to LibreTime’s on-going development (this may well change after 3.0.0 though). It would be useful to have some sort of support structure set up before then though so that when potential backers to come, we have somewhere to point them to.
We would need guidelines around who gets paid, etc. (Maybe some sort of bug bounty?) The project maintainers or project admins should probably be the ones managing the collective too, but we need solid guidelines around their selection and delegation too.
One such project, Open Broadcaster Software (OBS), provides some inspiration for how to incorporate Open Collective as a way to sustain. New Ways to Support OBS Development | OBS
It would probably make sense to create an issue in our github repo and work out a process in the open. Again there are many other projects experimenting with bounty programs that can serve as inspiration
Unless there are maintainers against the idea of having a LibreTime Open Collective, I’d suggest that one of the project leads apply and invite anyone else who would like to help manage. We could then create an issue in github to work out our guidelines.
There’s also much-improved documentation on the Open Collective side -
Possibly the time is right to finally do this? Let me know if I can help.
We’ve created a #sustain channel in https://libretime.slack.com/ to discuss Open Collective and other platforms/partnerships/etc. that would help us sustain and grow LibreTime. The room is open 24/7 - please join in anytime!
There are also some related collaborations happening in #communitymedia#openproducer channels in Open Collective’s Slack https://slack.opencollective.com/
Just FYI Open Collective is about to roll out improvements to the collective page. It should provide a more intuitive way to create campaigns for stuff like reaching a milestone, funding new features, and other ways to sustain the project.
You can test by dropping in “/v2” at the tail end of the url -