paying-the-piper
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beeware
Frame funding costs so they can be covered by discretionary spending
18F recently announced a plan to use discretionary spending limits to pay for open source code development on the micro scale.
The key factor here is that many employees have access to discretionary funding pools; if we can find a way to make "selling" something that can be purchased by these discretionary funds, then funding an FOSS developer becomes a lot easier.
In informal discussions, annual discretionary budgets on the order of $10-25k have been suggested as common for mid-high managers in established companies.
Some questions to answer:
- How do you package the offering into something that can be "bought"?
- How do you "sell" this idea? Does a project need brochures, a white paper, or something similar to back up the spending decision?
- Can it work for bootstrapping new work, or just for maintaining existing work?
The micro funding idea is really interesting.
Re Packaging: EDIT See thread on #13 ~~An idea: packaging contributions at the issue or milestones level of a project, tied to Github? Patrons would give :moneybag: to specific issues, milestones, or perhaps a "general" fund that got evenly spread throughout a set of issues selected by the library developers. You could use the same "contractor" model to disperse these funds, opening up funded issues/milestones to a bidding process a la 18f.~~
Re "sell": There are so many factors that go into making a project successful (impact of the idea, documentation, developer activity in the community, developer reputation, current hot framework/buzzwords), but at the very least it would probably need a medium to present these facets and explain the value of the project.
Re new vs "used": I think funding both is plausible - can't say I know what will capture people's attention. On a side note, some developers have an impact over tens or even hundreds of small projects. Funding that kind of work, where only a few individual projects are eye popping, but the aggregate contribution is much larger and correspondingly taxing on the dev, seems like another case to consider. It may be more open to funding the dev full time or part time to contribute to open source projects.
Using discretionary spending for conference sponsorship is already happening, I believe. Using it to fund projects is also possible. At a previous employer, the developers voted on which projects they wanted to give a pot of money to then blogged about it. The projects got some money and the company looked generous for doing it.
