Open Source

[gusaus]

The idea of creating an open source working group came out of my urgent call to action (in Open Collective's #opensource Slack channel) about providing open source collectives and maintainers with resources they need. While there was some productive discussion in the thread, we've yet to move beyond trying to solidify mission/goals/needs/priorities in this issue and accompanying Google doc.

Considering Open Source Collective is the fiscal host for most (but not all) open source collectives, we need to work with the OSC team to help accomplish and extend the goals and priorities outlined in their 2022-2025 strategy.

Mission/vision

Working group focusing on showcasing, supporting, enabling, and sustaining open source projects and contributors in the ecosystem.

Goals

Build open collective platform solutions with members of our community

• [ ] Help prioritize integration options that lower the barriers for fundraising using the platform.

Develop and highlight opportunities for open source projects to help themselves

• [ ] Create (and aggregate) more workshops, guides, training materials, blog posts, podcasts, case studies, and anything else that will help collectives sustain
• [ ] Partner with organizations like Sustain, Open Source Design, Write The Docs and The Good Docs project to amplify their impact

Help support and sustain open source projects, contributors, and maintainers

• [ ] Launch offers and needs marketplace/job board and partner program.
• [ ] Create fundraising opportunities through FundOSS, Funds for Open Source, EthicalAds, the Open Collective bounty program, and other platforms and programs.
• [ ] Provide training and mentoring through partnerships with Google Summer of Code, Outreachy, Major League Hacking, and OSC projects themselves.

Team

To do

• [ ] Gauge interest from OSC and other orgs, groups, that support open source projects and maintainers in the ecosystem.
• [ ] Ask interested org and community members to join the team
• [ ] Discuss/determine/document process for contributing
• [ ] Discuss/determine/document goals and strategy
• [ ] Discuss/determine/document contributor compensation structure

[schalkneethling]

Partner with organizations like Sustain, Open Source Design, Write The Docs and The Good Docs project to amplify their impact

We might consider Open Web Docs here as well.

[gusaus]

@schalkneethling Agreed!

That part of outline was copied from Ben's response to my urgent call to action (I recommend all team members skim through at some point) in the #opensource/OSC channel going back almost a year. I'm going to leave his full reply below as it provides some context around my goal (enabling community), Ben's priority (focusing on OSC), what they would support (projects with clear, measurable goals), and how the collective (that is now https://opencollective.com/community-contributor-group) came to exist.

hey @gusaus sorry for not responding sooner. I read through everything here and I’ll just outline, in general what our approach is:

• To build solutions with members of our community
• To develop and highlight opportunities for our projects to help themselves
• To partner with organisations like Open Source Deign, Write The Docs and The Good Docs project to amplify their impact

That is to say while I’m happy to subsidise efforts (like the workshops) temporarily ultimately we need projects to take the lead and to help themselves. Financially it doesn’t work if Open Source Collective is paying for the community to support itself on 10% of funds raised (our fees) but if we can see how some investment now might create a sustainable programme in the future we’ll do it.

So in answer to your ideas about creating self-governed working groups, yes, go do it and if you’ve got a clear set of goals that we can get behind we’ll support you with some money to get you started.

On everything else: Many of the ideas you’ve highlighted are things that we’re working toward (maybe not quickly enough, but we’re still young as a team and we’re getting better). For example:

• We’ve overhauled our documentation and are building our guides for projects based on the content delivered in workshops
• We’ll (if Sumana a is open to it) be continuing the workshops, and will continue to subsidise them for participants (but will be asking for a contribution from projects themselves)
• We’re working on the platform to better reflect what projects are spending money on so that we can them work with funders to help them make the case to grow their support.
• We will be providing a way to include non-financial contributors in contributor lists, to bring everyone into the circle.

On the funding side, and I think i’ve said this before, I think FundOSS is the wrong format for a fundraising campaign. I don’t like the competitive nature of having a funding pool which is split based on the success of individual projects to campaign well. So that won’t be coming back without some fundamental changes made.

That said we will be working on a campaign generator for FOSS contributor funds, elements of which we can and will repurpose. And of course we’re building the infrastructure that’ll enable us to relaunch backyourstack.com which I must prefer as a mode of supporting all the software you depend upon.

Again this was almost a year ago and OSC has yet to provide 'any' financial support, or even much guidance beyond a few comments you'll see in this OSC Working group - Google doc

The thread will tell a story about what did/didn't happen from there. You'll also see how other community members have shown interest but haven't been able to contribute due to lack of time.

With the core team we have onboard now - if we can tighten up the goals, priorities, benefits in the Google doc, I'm confident OSC (and other open source stakeholders) would sponsor a working group in that channel.