Report on projects financial sustainability requirements

[Relequestual]

(To avoid taking credit, note, the below was written by @Julian)

The JSON Schema team is generously sponsored by a number of organizations. In some sense, Postman is a particularly notable organization in this regard, as it funds a number of developers from the team in order to be able to dedicate full-time effort to the JSON Schema ecosystem without any distraction.

Still, it is useful to ask and answer questions like "How much does development of JSON Schema cost today" in order to understand what is needed to sustain, maintain or grow development. This likely includes ensuring we understand what might happen if sponsorship of the project decreases, or more optimistically, how we could grow the project if sponsorship were to increase.

This likely includes:

• assessing the approximate combined operating expense today
  • including one level down of specificity to differentiate between "$$ spent to push the specification forward" vs "$$ spent to support implementations" -- we could perhaps address this with current contributors (speaking e.g. for myself, @Julian) by estimating the fraction of time we spend on implementation specific work vs. community-wide work
  • reviewing yearly expenses beyond salaries (e.g. hosting costs)
• tallying the current source of funding which supports the above, and including some "gut" estimate of how stable this funding is
  • including OpenCollective funding and/or any other joint funds targeting the community
• calling out specific pieces of ongoing expense which are critical to operation of the project (e.g. maintaining the json-schema.org site)

It is very likely that we would benefit from having someone who has done this sort of calculation (e.g. as part of operations within a for-profit company, as part of a business case, or of course the best would be for a similar open source project).

So a preliminary task for this issue is likely to identify a party qualified to ask the right questions for the above.

The primary goal/output is to produce a deliverable which:

• can be maintained on an ongoing basis
• and which contains information about
  • how much does running the project cost today
  • where does the current funding for that cost come from today
  • how stable do we consider that funding

Once we have such a thing, the two obvious follow-on questions would be:

• Do we have a viable plan if the amount of money changes there in either direction, either for finding additional sponsors or otherwise
• How does an increase in $$ relate to any additional help we may want to bring in

Assessed as low-medium impact/low-medium effort during our collaborators summit 2023.

[Julian]

OK I've taken a first pass at writing out some context on this one too, lemme know if what I put in the issue makes any sense!

[Julian]

An additional concern (either to think about as part of this or in a related issue) is discussing and finishing setting up our GitHub sponsors page -- if only because I do suspect there are people who would donate there and not anywhere else (e.g. OpenCollective). I'm not sure whether any of our existing agreements prohibit us from doing this, but hopefully not?

[Relequestual]

An additional concern (either to think about as part of this or in a related issue) is discussing and finishing setting up our GitHub sponsors page -- if only because I do suspect there are people who would donate there and not anywhere else (e.g. OpenCollective). I'm not sure whether any of our existing agreements prohibit us from doing this, but hopefully not?

I believe we are fine to do this and should do it. We can pipe the funds into our Open Collective still. https://docs.oscollective.org/campagins-programs-and-partnerships/github-sponsors

[benjagm]

GitHub sponsors page

I am ok with having Open Collective and Github Sponsors as way of getting funds, however my only concern is that to list the current sponsors we'll need a process to get the names from each platform or do this manually.

[Relequestual]

GitHub sponsors page

I am ok with having Open Collective and Github Sponsors as way of getting funds, however my only concern is that to list the current sponsors we'll need a process to get the names from each platform or do this manually.

For Open Collective, this is already in place, and simply uses image URLs which include the collective name. For GitHub Sponsors, we would need to use an existing action or do it manually.

There is some argument for doing it manually for both though, but only for the top tiers (not for everyone). Arguments are, we could filter out undesierable sponsors, such as "Carbon Ads" which isn't actually a sponsor, or betting sites. Although I understand that happens less now.

If we decided to do it manually, we could manage it from one file and have GH Actions do the duplication work across repos (including the website).

[Julian]

https://github.com/orgs/asyncapi/discussions/1017 is a good thing to compare here, it has some relevance to a part of what this issue is about.