whatdotheyknow-theme
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mysociety
Consider how to help financially support users, community members, currently unpaid admins and activists
Ideas:
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Can we integrate with services eg. https://www.buymeacoffee.com/ https://www.patreon.com/en-GB to help users who are making great use of FOI/WDTK receive tips/gifts/payments from those who want to support their work? Are our users in some way analogous to creators on websites like YouTube? One could imagine users discussing their requests / responses with their patreons.
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Perhaps linked with being more public about contributions unpaid admins make to the service eg. https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/6619 https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/1198 we could provide routes for people to directly financially support those doing that work, potentially via similar services as mentioned above.
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Open source bounties have been discussed. These could be a way to enable people to fund specific improvements to the service, including those which can be made by non-developers, eg. adding more bodies [in-line with existing policies], and a way to direct the funding to those doing the work.
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Funding more of the community and activism work via mySociety's existing funding streams. mySociety has professionalised, and made sustainable, the coding and sysadmin element of providing the WDTK and other services; it has recently been expanding the scope of what it funds, but is still heavily reliant on individuals freely donating their time, content and resources.
Perhaps this could be formulated into an agenda item meeting the criteria for the community and activism call. The initial question could be if we want to pursue these general ideas at all.
This is a general overarching ticket from which more specific tickets could be spun off.
See also internal documents: https://wdtkwiki.mysociety.org/wiki/Meeting_notes#Papers%20from%20January%202021%20meeting%20on%20funding%20opportunities
Declaration of interest: I've spent over 10 years as an unpaid volunteer working on WhatDoTheyKnow, and I seek to use the service for public spirited requests. I might personally seek support for my work via such routes if they were available.
Edit: formatting
Users could already seek donations for their work via their profiles, or by including text as a header / footer in their correspondence.
If the feature suggested at "Show the requester's user profile on each request page" (https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/6654) was implemented a user could put a support / donate link in their profile and have it appear next to all their requests.
Linking to
- https://github.com/mysociety/whatdotheyknow-theme/issues/434
mySociety has included in grant applications funding for multiple layers of management, communications but has generally been reluctant to seek funding for the non-technical aspects of keeping the service running, despite the grant-funded projects being reliant on that work for impact/success.