mybinder.org as membership org

[betatim]

I started writing down some ideas around there being a membership organisation that supports the operation and development of mybinder.org

The basic idea is that organisations/individuals can become members of "mybinder.org-fan-club" for a fee. The money goes towards mybinder.org's mission. Members receive some form of benefit.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b5U1FTnF7b2ROXTE2f5W6GlNZvQM8_nFmu_44rjCc7w/edit?usp=sharing

Feel free to edit, comment and add to the document. I started writing down the personas of some "bodies" I could imagine as potential members. I think we need to have some idea here who we target before we can define good/attractive benefits.

Inspiration comes from https://carpentries.org/membership/ if you know other/similar setups please post them.

[choldgraf]

+1 to laying out some concrete foundation here...I'll take a look on the plane back from Europe once my honeymoon is over next week!

[betatim]

An interesting draft from the NumFocus people that is worth reading while thinking about this: https://docs.google.com/document/d/15F_yf3U_JHs_kQ9Hk0Q0JlzkId6y1GV2yE_Wis-ROiI/edit#

[betatim]

Another example: http://datadryad.org/pages/membershipOverview

[choldgraf]

@betatim the numfocus draft is interesting - maybe a little short on details but it's cool to see that they're interested in shared cloud hosting!

[choldgraf]

re: the DataDryad thing - the one thing that gives me pause with models like this is that it feels very "pay to play". I get that "influence" is something that many organizations would want to pay for, but I think this is a bit fraught with failure patterns as well, especially since Jupyter's user/developer-base comes from a wide range of backgrounds/organizations/$$$ situations/etc.

[betatim]

For me the membership organisation model felt like the least "pay to play" of all the possible mechanisms. For example the carpentries don't feel like that to me, even though they are a membership org with some benefits that you only get if you are a (paying) member.

An interesting idea could be to define "paying" as something that allows in-kind contributions. "Can't afford to pay money? Donate a day per week of a software engineer/devops/xxx person instead."

Right now a lot of open-source projects are "pay to play": individual's are "paying" from their private money to have time to work on projects. Or an even worse situation where an entity has enough resources to de facto dominate a project and its direction. Simply because a large fraction of the active contributors are employed by that entity (which could be a university or a company or ...).

Another recent example: http://gael-varoquaux.info/programming/a-foundation-for-scikit-learn-at-inria.html