Somewhat funded (question about the capacity)

techtonik commented 8 years ago

@nayafia, the current choices for funding status are "Funded", "Self-Funded", "No funded" and "Unknown", but many projects are partially funded meaning that only few (or even one) developer works on the project (maybe part time), or occasionally funded meaning that somebody is occasionally does the work for bounty (provided that maintainers are still there to review and merge the requests).

jayfk commented 8 years ago

Yeah, that's why I have opened https://github.com/jayfk/fundingoss.com/issues/1

techtonik commented 8 years ago

Nice. I usually search for issues. =) So, keep this open for a discussion space?

heyakyra commented 8 years ago

maybe just merge the bugs

techtonik commented 8 years ago

"Somewhat funded" needs deeper investigation. Means "funded, but things could be better". To get to more theories why open source projects are underfunded and how to fix it, we need more data. And one of the metrics that I think would be useful is called capacity, which I see as two things:

how many people are needed to maintain the project (including bus factor)
how much money these people need to maintain their lives (including occasional contributions)

I am not able to define exact formula for project capacity right now (in terms of money, people or vespene gas), but some answers may at least help with starting:

how many people are contributing to the project
how many contributors have their basic (minimal) needs covered
how many contributors are satisfied with their income, time and life balance
who of those does major work (including reviews, testing, releasing)
is there a lot of technical debt, is there an understanding of that is it
who is dealing with that
is there a lot of competence debt
why people with the knowledge abandoned the project
how many people abandoned project because of money/life support problem
how many of those were able to reduce the technical debt and be useful to the project

So, how do you think - is it the idea of capacity definition is something that could be that useful for this research? Can it be improved?

jayfk / fundingoss.com

Somewhat funded (question about the capacity) #13