seek funding from Mozilla #637
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Looks like there are three main programs, and the one we'd fit best is Mission Partners—which has a deadline in a few days!
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To: [Mozillian introduced in private email by LDB]
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Ping @bbangert @tarekziade. Do you think Gratipay is a good candidate for the Mozilla MOSS Mission Partners track? |
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Looks like the Mission Partners track was launched a couple weeks ago: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.moss/kEfcZkfb2Go |
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Finding an endorser within the deadline seems like a big part of the work here. Who could we ask?
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The other interesting questions are: Requested amount: Please give in US dollars (max: $250,000) What are the concrete, specific outputs and outcomes this grant would produce, and how do those activities further the Mozilla Mission? Please describe what you would use the funds for - what you are going to build, hack or fix. Also, explains how it furthers our mission, perhaps tying your activities to items in the Manifesto - https://www.mozilla.org/about/manifesto/. (Max 8k chars) Please tell us more about how your project is managed. Please describe your core team. Please tell us more about your community. |
Maybe Jeff Spies? |
Thanks, []. Let's hold off on a call for now. The MOSS pages list some potential contacts, I think I will follow up on those. Thanks for the response and best wishes for now! À plus tard ! :-) |
Draft 1Project description: Gratipay offers payment products for open organizations: pay-what-you-want payments from customers to organizations, and take-what-you-want compensation from open organizations to their collaborators. Our customers include open-source projects, open SaaS products, and coworking spaces. We've been around for four years and have moved over $1 million (US), though we had to reboot the business a year ago due to legal concerns. Now we're approaching 200 customers on Gratipay 2.0, and we move $1,000 per week. Gratipay competes on price because we're pay-what-you-want on our own platform (our "soft fee" ends up being 5% of total volume), and we compete on mission because we're here to cultivate an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love! :-) Requested amount: Please give in US dollars (max: $250,000) $250,000 What are the concrete, specific outputs and outcomes this grant would produce, and how do those activities further the Mozilla Mission? Please describe what you would use the funds for - what you are going to build, hack or fix. Also, explains how it furthers our mission, perhaps tying your activities to items in the Manifesto - https://www.mozilla.org/about/manifesto/. (Max 8k chars) == Outcomes == This grant would fund two orders of magnitude of growth for Gratipay. As mentioned, we currently move $1,000 per week for ~200 customers. Our goal with this grant would be to reach $100,000 weekly volume for ~20,000 customers within two years. The grant would fund activities of the Gratipay core team, including but not limited to marketing, sales, product design and development, customer support, accounting, security, compliance, and governance. Here are specific projects on our plate: Improve the product.—There are many glaring deficiencies in our basic giving workflow for individual and corporate givers, and on the receiver side as well. Reimplement take-what-you-want compensation.—Our main innovation is take-what-you-want compensation, but we turned this off after a two-year pilot when we rebooted as Gratipay 2.0. We need to bring it back. Implement identity verification.—We need to store and verify national identity information in order to participate more fully in the global financial system. Strengthen security.—We need to evolve our security program, especially as we start handling identity information. Diversify payments infrastructure.—We need to work with more partners to reduce risk and costs, and expand our service. Account for funds.—We recently set up a double-entry accounting system with a CPA, and now we need to input four years of data. Clean up tech debt.—In particular, we made some database schema mistakes that are slowing us down in other areas. For more details, please see our recent "Making it Right" blog post: https://gratipay.news/making-it-right-f8e1eccb46e == Mission Alignment == Mozilla's mission is "to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent." Fueling Gratipay's growth furthers Mozilla's mission by contributing to a vibrant and sustainable open-source software ecosystem (Principle 7). Fueling Gratipay's growth protects and empowers individuals on the Internet (Principles 3, 4, and 5), because Gratipay's pay-what-you-want model is less invasive and privacy-eroding than the ad models currently prevalent. Fueling Gratipay's growth improves the organizations that provide the Internet (Principles 5, 6, and 8), because Gratipay strongly encourages open organizations. Gratipay's values of safety, consent, transparency, openness, and love ("the ladder of love"— http://inside.gratipay.com/big-picture/brand/) strongly align with Mozilla's principles of security and privacy (Principle 4), individual autonomy (Principle 5), and transparency (Principle 8). Indeed, Gratipay has been a leader in developing "[t]ransparent community-based processes [that] promote participation, accountability and trust" (Principle 8). Furthermore, Gratipay aligns with Mozilla's principle of balancing "commercial profit and public benefit" (Principle 9): we exist to make collaboration economically normal. Please tell us more about how your project is managed. Please describe your core team. Gratipay is managed as a benevolent dictatorship with a core team of about seven people from four countries. Our internal processes are documented on our (public) intranet, /Inside Gratipay/: http://inside.gratipay.com/big-picture/welcome Please tell us more about your community. Gratipay has two layers of community: contributors and users. We have had 100+ code contributors and 900+ GitHub issue commenters over the past four years, and 100 people took compensation from Gratipay during our 2-year take-what-you-want pilot. We've held three annual in-person contributor retreats. In our 1.0 phase we saw about 4200 users from 30+ countries, and under Gratipay 2.0 we currently have 187 approved receivers and about 750 givers. |
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To: Resig
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I posted a message on the mozilla.moss Google Group, but it seems to have gotten swallowed—perhaps into a moderator queue? I'll check again later ... |
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Yesssssss ... https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.moss/CZY1TiyZOyY
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I've moved the draft to an etherpad. I'm going to pursue the conversation over on mozilla.moss without cross-posting here, since mozilla.moss is an open list. |
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Maybe mitsuhiko? |
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Stats for growth (payday 208):
1 OOM growth: $10,000 per week, 1,780 Teams, 7,000 ~users To get that sort of growth, I think we need to address some of the core "financial system" issues we're having and make things easy. How to make taxes easier? How to include as many different payin and payout routes as possible? At the same time, how to scale up Team review or really proxy out the KYC stuff? |
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This a great exercise to think about growth, anyway. If we're focusing on the long tail and using the processing amount as a growth measure, the number of teams and ~users will probably grow much, much more in order to meet each order of magnitude increase in processing. |
My only concern is how were are supposed to address all of those points in 8k chars. |
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@kaguillera :-) Check out the thread. We had some additional back-and-forth.
@mattbk I think what Gerv is questioning is how predictable growth is. VCs are in the business of taking risks—counting on 9 out of 10 investments to fail, so number 10 has to really win. We have to keep in mind that MOSS isn't VC, it's a grant. Maybe a middle ground between the "$X for Y feature" and "Zx growth" paradigms would be to put together an annual budget, and use that together with this tool (#405 (comment)) to make some worst, likely, and best-case predictions. Here's a spreadsheet. What numbers should we plug in for you, @aandis @clone1018 @mattbk @rohitpaulk @TheHmadQureshi et al.? What other line-items are missing or should be changed? |
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I'll take $1/week. Are hosting costs included in operations or is this just "payroll"? |
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http://paulgraham.com/aord.html Our revenue right now is $200/wk. Our expenses are $100/wk, so technically we're default alive right now but only because we're all willing to work for free, which isn't sustainable and defeats the whole purpose of Gratipay. A few scenarios:
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Payroll is "Core Team" on that spreadsheet. I'm taking the operations number from the old finances spreadsheet, which includes (is mostly) hosting costs. |
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Alright, so (re)reading http://paulgraham.com/aord.html, our biggest problem is our 0% growth over the past year. Number of teams is increasing, but users and volume are constant, and revenue is slipping:
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"Grant folks will tell you what details they want. And if they don't ask for them, that means they don't have the time to read about them and they don't think they're that important." —@timothyfcook I'm going to compare the Mission Partners and Foundational Tech applications ... |
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Same: FT:
MP:
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Alright, so I take it that @bbangert is a "grant folk" for our purposes here, and he has told us what "they" want. :-) Questions therefore stand:
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@whit537 I think there may be some conflict of interest with me endorsing the grant was well as providing part of the tooling to support the "package manager" feature, as we're also planning on applying for MOSS funding at some point I wouldn't want to jeopardize that |
Ah, well. I wondered about that. Okay! Thanks anyway, @andrew. :-) Feel free to unsubscribe to avoid further notifications from this ticket, I imagine we're going to be generating quite a few over the coming days. See you around! :-) |
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... aaaaaaaaaaaaaaand we're back to no endorser. :o) @bbangert Think there's a chance we can converge on a scope of work for the package manager integration that you'd feel good about endorsing? :) Let's dig into that for a minute ... |
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The fundamental idea is to get a viral loop going again like we had under Gittipay 1.0. As @clone1018 points out, that happened with a not-so-fancy visual design, suggesting that we could remove that piece from this grant without detracting from the fundamental idea. At the very least, we could plow it in with feature development rather than itemizing it separately. Here's the way Gittip worked:
Basically I think we need to reimplement that, but for projects instead of individuals.
I do think there's a role for package manager integration (more on that at gratipay/gratipay.com#4135 (comment)), but the bigger picture is bigger. How do we break that down into a grant application? |
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@whit537 I'm a bit skeptical in general about funding a platform for funding OSS developers vs. funding OSS dev's for work directly on a specific project, mainly for the reasons that follow. I read articles like this (http://www.infoworld.com/article/3144546/security/time-is-running-out-for-ntp.html) and I'll admit they reinforce my thinking that the entire concept of funding OSS via donations is totally broken. Maybe companies will donate to trendy tech they use, but then they skimp on core tech that everyone requires (in this case NTP, but see-also OpenSSL)? How is this good for the Internet or OSS as a whole? Perhaps its the car broken on the side of the freeway problem. The one where a car broken down on the side of a heavily-trafficked freeway can have a greater delay in having a motorist stop to help than on a very rarely-traveled road.... because on the heavy-traffic route everyone assumes someone else will stop to help out while on the rarely-traveled road the passing motorists believes (rightfully so) that it's critical they stop. Are the OpenSSL and NTP projects on Gratipay? Does it seem likely that if a company submits their package manifesto it will include such core, critical, and under-funded things such as these? Or will they just assume someone else is dealing with that and throw money at the latest fad OSS library instead of the old, boring, and legacy thing everyone actually is using? How does Gratipay help provide feedback to companies about what projects are over or under-funded, and whether the resources are actually urgently needed? Could Gratiay provide a way for a project to indicate whether developers are willing or not to work full-time on security or bug fixes such that funding it would result in substantially better results than a OSS lib where the dev is going to treat it as merely some extra dough? I mean, I think it's very useful to be honest in this discussion. In that, I am grateful that @whit537 has been exceptionally transparent in his handling of all of this. I'd love to see such honesty from projects requesting money on whether any of them would actually quit a day-job to survive purely on donations (I can imagine how tough such a choice would be). So.... to stop my rant here.. what would I feel good about endorsing? I think the package manager concept has some good foundational underpinnings, but if someone is ready to commit money to OSS, is there an opportunity to do better? Do they use NTP/OpenSSL or some other severely under-funded OSS project that is critical to the Internet that they just didn't know needed a bit more money? Maybe right then might be a good time to mention how important it is that some of their donation be directed there? If this feature was about surfacing OSS projects that are critical to wide swaths of the Internet that apparently go under-funded until an article like that appears (I sincerely hope an article like that results in some funding, but maybe heavy-freeway syndrome will hit again)... I'd be behind it in a second. :) Let's take the NTP example. How could such a gratipay page for this project be setup? I would expect to see whether or not the funds go to developers attempting to make this a full-time job vs. those just appreciating some extra money. It'd be even better for a project like this to see how they figure more funds might increase response-time to handle critical security bugs. Maybe the project could indicate if its a core-req for the majority of linux distros (how many other core libs/daemons need funding besides NTP/OpenSSL?). Can projects set a spending-goal such that companies/people donating know they can stop when its been accomplished? Or maybe they can see that they've ensured the project is financially sound for the next N years with M developers fully funded? I have yet to see any way to do such a thing. Handling any/most of these concerns of mine would make me feel quite good about endorsing this. |
@bbangert we'll have to get you to endorse the https://libraries.io grant next year 😉 |
@bbangert Great point. This may need a huge dependency graph of all the projects/libraries, with the information about the organizations owning those. I imagine that will require big effort, like @whit537 mentioned above ("the bigger picture is bigger"), and can only be achieved incrementally. Current effort of integrating npm package manager could be the first step.
Sounds like kickstarter. Not sure if it can be accomplished with the grant, along with other critical features. |
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Hey
I’ve been lurking too.
I would just like to say that I agree with much of what Ben says here. When posed with the hypothetical question ‘how much of my money do you want in order to “save” FOSS?’ the answer is pretty much always ‘all of it’ which is why we (by which I mean Libraries.io <http://libraries.io/>, the Core Infrastructure team, the Linux Foundation etc) are trying to tackle this problem by prioritising.
But I do think that there is a way to harness the ‘next fad’ syndrome in OSS: by funding the complete ‘toolchain’ for that new thing roughly inversely proportionate to the value it inherits from its stack. This will over time result in well funded core FOSS and yet sustain that new thing at a rate that enables it to flourish.
rant/
I think the core principle of funding the total ecosystem for a given application, framework or library is sound and that these kinds of initiatives will help provide a more sustainable ecosystem for FOSS in general. At the same time I think that it’s necessary for everyone to work together in this space, regardless of financial, organisational or legal structure.
Divisive politics is getting us nowhere at the moment… how about we don’t replicate that here?
/rant
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@bbangert et al.—Awesome discussion. 👍 What about a 5% "tax" that goes to core tech? Currently the full face value of a payment goes to the recipient. So if I give $100 to Hip Project, they get all $100. If we implement a tax, Hip would get $95, and $5 would go to core tech. We'd have a board to decide what receivers qualify as "core tech" (Core Infrastructure Initiative, Internet Bug Bounty, etc.) and how that budget gets split. P.S. I think Gratipay should qualify, since we don't have a hard fee for ourselves otherwise. To avoid some of the loss of agency involved in a tax, we could grant givers control over their allocation if they want it. In other words, payments directly to qualifying core tech projects would offset one's tax burden. P.S. I would also want a 5% tax for demographic diversity programs with a board of its own. |
The technical term for this is the bystander effect (sorry, married to a psychology professor). |
Let's try to be aware of and work to resist it! ;-) |
Before Gratipocalypse, there was a "goal" feature that would show how close a ~user was to reaching a defined weekly income. I think this would be worth resurrecting, if only to focus on the "sustainability" part--regardless of anything else, I think the goal of Gratipay is for funding to remain constant, rather than require repeated push for funds, grants, or Kickstarter-like campaigns. People (givers) like to see that they're moving the needle. Yes, they'll be giving that amount every week, but it drives home the message that the work doesn't stop just because the Indiegogo campaign is over. |
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Deadline is past. |
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Reopening for next deadline. |
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(per slack) |
In conversation at #314, Louis-David Benyayer suggested that we seek funding from Mozilla and other large open-source foundations.
https://twitter.com/LDBenyayer/status/735556364269916162
We're writing our proposal at https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/gratipay-moss-track-2-2016.
The application form is at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1rwYQTT-9-eldS-kElY646bMwMzJpxfL8lDskX86xgCQ/viewform.
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