digest "Problems and Strategies in Financing Voluntary Free Software Projects"

[chadwhitacre]

"Problems and Strategies in Financing Voluntary Free Software Projects"

[chadwhitacre]

Learned about this underneath gratipay/gratipay.com#3319.

[chadwhitacre]

https://twitter.com/whit537/status/585885586302619648

[chadwhitacre]

Heh. We're the second and fourth hit on Google. :-)

[chadwhitacre]

Here's a patch that fixes typos in v0.2.1 of "Problems and Strategies."

[chadwhitacre]

Hill starts by describing the central role that voluntary labor plays in open-source software, and its benefits: high quality, low cost, and institutional independence. The drawback of voluntary labor is that it can't be scheduled as predictably as paid labor. Introducing paid labor into a volunteer project, however, brings problems: "crowding out" of volunteers, decreased transparency, and lower quality. Mako identifies seven tactics for funding volunteer projects. Here they are (lightly edited) in order of how much risk they hold for introducing the problems identified:

n	Strategy	Examples	Notes
0	Refuse all funding.
1	Fund shared infrastructure.	hardware, bandwidth
2	Fund "capacity."	an accounting system
3	Fund events.	conferences, sprints	Watch out for favoritism.
4	Fund non-technical work.	project management, book-keeping, grant writing	Similar to (2), funding capacity.
5	Fund difficult work.	technically challenging, tedious, time-sensitive, and/or high-demand projects	Make sure there is community buy-in to avoid crowding out.
6	Accept work product from corporations.		Maintain diverse corporate relationships to ensure independence.

The piece ends with advice on maintaining transparency: report everything back to a public, open-registration mailing list (~= GitHub).

[chadwhitacre]

How does this relate to Gratipay? What's been our experience with funding per Hill's schema? How does our payroll model relate to his schema?

[chadwhitacre]

n	Strategy	Gratipay's Experience
0	Refuse all funding.	We've turned down overtures for all venture funding, at least.
1	Fund shared infrastructure.	GitHub, Travis CI, Transifex, etc.
2	Fund "capacity."	I suppose the rest of our operations budget fits here.
3	Fund events.	We paid for the first retreat individually, but for the second we tapped into Gratipay funds. We also paid some for PyCon.
4	Fund non-technical work.	We burst the dam on this with a lawyer. Now we're looking at engaging a CPA and a designer.
5	Fund difficult work.	This is where our payroll model comes in.
6	Accept work product from corporations.	Balanced helped us out with our initial integration with them, as well as our second design.

[chadwhitacre]

Our payroll model, wherein everyone sets their own take, is a new way to fund volunteer work that didn't exist when Hill wrote his article. Our response, I think, is in fact that our model solves the problem of funding core work in a volunteer project, by giving each individual full responsibility for their own guilt and resentment. We remove the artificial technical and bureaucratic limitations on the proper functioning of a team as a socioeconomic unit.

The bounty model is the other new development since 2005, when "Problems and Strategies" was published, and even since 2012, when it was last updated. Gratipay's critique of the bounty model is that it encourages competition rather than collaboration (cf. @rohitpaulk's report re: Assembly).

[chadwhitacre]

I think Hill's seven-fold schema is helpful. Let's refer back to it when we're faced with decisions about how to spend money (e.g.).

[chadwhitacre]

Anyone else want to jump in before I close this ticket?

[tshepang]

nothing new (to me) here, so I'm kool

[tshepang]

I'm impressed by how well the Gratipay sort of funding works (each worker takes what they feel they deserve, what you call guilt and resentment), though it needs to see wider use to get truly validated.

[tshepang]

It's the same as envisioned by Anarchists I believe... the ideal Anarchist economy. Exciting stuff!

[chadwhitacre]

I'm impressed by how well the Gratipay sort of funding works

Yeah! A pleasant surprise. We discovered something interesting! I don't know enough about Anarchism to say whether that label applies. To me, the reality is more interesting than the label, anyway. :-)

[chadwhitacre]

@SimonSarazin I see that you engaged with "Problems and Solutions" a bit on http://unisson.co/fr/wiki/retribuer/. Your point about labor law at the bottom of that post is germane: we're wrestling with that over on #242, and it's a big blocker to our bringing back our unique payroll distribution feature, which we turned off in Gratipay 2.0 precisely because of labor law concerns.

I tried to visit http://cobudget.co/, but my library won't let me visit the Netherlands. :-(

Also, where is the quote at the top of http://simons.fr/2013/11/gittip/ from?

[chadwhitacre]

I subscribed for an invite to the Cobudget private bet.

[chadwhitacre]

I think we're good here, ya?

!m *