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jazzband / help

Use this repo to get help from the roadies
https://jazzband.co/roadies
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Pondering the sustainability question #125

Open ncoghlan opened 5 years ago

ncoghlan commented 5 years ago

(Exporting a discussion @jezdez and I had on https://github.com/orgs/jazzband/teams/members/discussions/2 in late 2017 to a public location)

Jazzband is wonderful, but from a sustainability perspective, it's primarily a risk mitigation approach: we avoid the "single point of organisational failure" problem by ensuring that someone other than ourselves has permission to publish new releases of our projects.

maintainer.io is an interesting service that puts a price tag on what's essentially ongoing "front line support" for an open source repository: USD$50-100 per month (so $600-1200 per year). (Based on their rates at https://plasso.com/s/RMPMGYmBER)

They also offer one-off contributor experience audits (with resulting PRs) at prices similar to a single month of one of the maintenance plans.

At the same time, https://opencollective.com/learn-more is an interesting approach to pooling funds that essentially operates as a completely transparent set of accounting books - everybody can see exactly what money is going in, and what money is going out.

What I'm wondering is whether or not it might make sense to register Jazzband on OpenCollective, with a view to funding service subscriptions that take some of the stress of open source project maintenance off both the roadies and off the maintainers of individual Jazzband projects.

Doing that would no doubt introduce new kinds of stress (like creating and maintaining a list of "approved expenses" for the OpenCollective funding pool), but it could still be an interesting experiment to try.

aleksihakli commented 5 years ago

Improving maintenance models will require trying out different things. Trying out the OpenCollective funding model would be interesting. If the Jazzband organization is to evolve over time, then pooling resources into applying for grants and funding is needed in the long run as well, so I think putting some effort into this is a good idea.

jezdez commented 5 years ago

Totally agreed @aleksihakli. In fact I'm currently working on a plan to better facilitate the discussion around this. More news soon.

brainwane commented 4 years ago

Totally agreed @aleksihakli. In fact I'm currently working on a plan to better facilitate the discussion around this. More news soon.

Where should I look for that update @jezdez ?

matthiask commented 4 years ago

I'm wondering about this too. I don't really know what to do with https://github.com/jazzband/django-debug-toolbar/pull/1201 – I especially do not know whether funds would reach the intended recipient(s), whoever that may be.

jezdez commented 3 years ago

Just a quick update that I'm still working on this and will have an update later in Q1/21.

auvipy commented 3 years ago

Just a quick update that I'm still working on this and will have an update later in Q1/21.

looking forward to it

jezdez commented 3 years ago

Just a quick update that I'm still working on this and will have an update later in Q1/21.

looking forward to it

Thanks for reminding me of this thread, the decision has been moved to Q2/21 for the record.

ncoghlan commented 3 years ago

I believe @jezdez's comments above were referring to the recently announced acceptance of Jazzband as a PSF Fiscal sponsoree: https://jazzband.co/news/2021/06/04/fiscal-sponsorship

There's a more detailed internal members post on the topic, but if I've understood the announcement correctly, we're still in the relatively early stages of that project, where the agreement is in place for the PSF to accept funds on Jazzband's behalf, but that doesn't auto-magically address the challenges of further distributing the funding (whether to the roadies to support shared infrastructure work or somehow distributing it to individual projects)

jezdez commented 3 years ago

I believe @jezdez's comments above were referring to the recently announced acceptance of Jazzband as a PSF Fiscal sponsoree: https://jazzband.co/news/2021/06/04/fiscal-sponsorship

There's a more detailed internal members post on the topic, but if I've understood the announcement correctly, we're still in the relatively early stages of that project, where the agreement is in place for the PSF to accept funds on Jazzband's behalf, but that doesn't auto-magically address the challenges of further distributing the funding (whether to the roadies to support shared infrastructure work or somehow distributing it to individual projects)

Exactly right, thanks Nick for elaborating on this. Here's the members-only post.

The fiscal sponsorship agreement with the PSF has been signed and with that Jazzband is able to raise funds under the PSF's non-profit tax status. Setting the agreement up took >6 months to finalize.

The next step is to extend the Jazzband guidelines to include this new ability of the Jazzband community, e.g. how we'll distribute the funds going forward. There are also a few other items that we're now able to start working on, like thinking about participating in the ReadTheDocs ethical ads program and maybe Tidelift or similar platforms.

I'll do a kick-off for this discussion most likely later in Q3/21. To be clear, I'm not receiving anything from these donations in the meantime, it goes straight to the PSF, is "earmarked" for Jazzband and is not to be used for regular PSF funding. For anyone having shown interest for this in the past, please have a bit more patience while we're figuring this out.