Compensating Contributors

[wbnns]

I'm opening this issue as a place we can discuss best ways to reward/compensate contributors for improving Bitcoin.org. Currently, we're testing bounties on various open issues.

An alternative to bounties would be to compensate different contributors based on an agreed upon hourly rate, however, this would be much more expensive and there are a limited amount of funds at the moment to be able to do this (we have also already tested this in the past).

Other possibilities of compensating contributors may exist as well, which we can discuss here.

Goals behind compensating contributors are:

• Catalyzing efforts on Bitcoin.org to resolve issues and improve the site
• Helping people earn some extra money for working on Bitcoin.org

Coming from a background in open source, and as many of you may already know first-hand, it's difficult to have time to contribute to projects and to also earn income to pay the bills. Usually something has to give and more times than not, it's what you're working on for free.

My personal goal with compensating contributors is that at a certain point in the future, people who are passionate about contributing to this project, can earn a stable and reliable supplemental income from doing so.

Anyhow, comments and feedback welcome.

[achow101]

Would it be possible to use a different symbol, perhaps just a label "bounty"? Whatever character you used just shows up as a square on my device, and the same probably happens on many other devices too.

[wbnns]

@achow101 Sure, no problem, thanks for the heads up! Fixed in #1608.

[harding]

1. The PR that made this change was merged within 15 minutes of being opened, but this represents a significant change in site policy. I think that fundamentally means it should have been discussed before merge. As I asked in #1607, could we please have time to discuss non-emergency changes to the site and its policies before they get merged?

2. I don't think a bounty system works well for free software projects. I think this article does a good job describing why competing for bounties harms the collaborative spirit essential to community-maintained projects.

[wbnns]

Quick update to anyone who is following the thread. Within 24 hours of beginning the experiment testing bounties on issues that had been open anywhere from weeks to over a year, over 60% of them had already received work resolving them.

Big thanks to @achow101! 👏 🍻 💯

[kanzure]

So... I think that paying people is important and an interesting idea. In addition to payment, I have another recommendation. Bitcoin.org might have limited funding in terms of hard cash, however it has another form of currency that is valuable to contributors, namely a reputational currency.

Traditionally a reputational currency is spent by granting people titles (like job titles). I want to emphasize that I am not suggesting this instead of monetary compensation. I would much rather see monetary compensation get implemented as a priority. Job titles and affiliation are valuable because they get to be put on contributors resumes and woven into a story about a contributor's prior work, which is helpful when engaging and picking their future work.

One downside to using reputational currency in the case of Bitcoin.org is that it has to be clearly defined especially in the context of the operation of bitcoin.org.... ideally some way of spending reputational currency could be figured out in a way that does not create bureaucracy. Someone would have to put a lot of thinking into how this could be made to be practical without also radically altering how things work around here.

I think that the biggest concern with this approach is that there might be opportunity for reputational abuse: someone who has their pic slapped up on the website then goes around misrepresenting what bitcoin is, or what bitcoin.org is; in which case, titles or reputational currency should be terminated.