THIS STARTED AS A PETITION, BUT THERE IS A BETTER APPROACH IN THIS MESSAGE.
Some tasks that are on the roadmap are really hard to go through. For example, some people are working their way regarding TinyMCE v5.
I think that those kind of tasks would get done quicker if we created some kind of task bounty so that the person (or people) who fixes the given issue gets the corresponding bounty. It doesn’t have to be big numbers. But at least some amount that makes it rewarding.
Yes, open source, giving back to the community, … that’s rewarding. But if you get some bucks to buy a new mouse or an amazing coffee from an exotic country, that’s an extra reward.
And I am not saying this because I want to make money collaborating on CP. Not at all. I have my job, I am happy. It’s just that it would be nice to see some things run with a bit more flow. And I am willing to put in some money too if it is openly managed.
Negative points:
Some people will only try to work on tasks that have a bounty. (But that’s not really a bad thing)
Money involves problems and greed. (Openly managed, transparent, clarity… will reduce issues).
I am unaware of legal aspects regarding CP being non-profit. But it’s not a profit thing, it’s more like a donation. And CP does have a donate area.
Positive points:
It may attract new developers.
It may accelerate some stuck projects.
It will benefit the whole community, not just the people getting the bounty.
Donating money for a specific purpose may increase the amount of donations. People put money in a feature they would like to see happen.
In long term, it may be a great resource to attract quality developers who help make CP amazing.
Who decides the bounty amount?
Well, allowing to directly donate money to the exact task (with a good clear description of what shall be achieved). So each one can decide if and how much to donate.
This is a really good idea. The only thing I can think of to add is that the “tasks with bounty” should be chosen from already approved and planned petitions. Or else, this promise of reward can be used to influence the status of some petitions that only a few people want, and that goes against our vision of being community-led.
This has been discussed before (there might even be a petition), but I don’t know how to find it.
It would be great if you could get the facts before using people as examples. For the record, it’s just me working on updating the editor, and it has been pretty much the entire time. It would be better to have a team, even if there is only one programmer in the team. There needs to be testing and decisions made and review of how it fits into the bigger picture.
This is true for all projects, whether it’s an enhancement or a bug fix. I don’t think that a bounty is the right approach. What is needed is more than one person involved in the task, to make it go and provide accountability (to do what is promised and to land it in core).
The idea is great
The results will likely be catastrophic
Why I say this?
Unfortunately we have a history of conflicts within ClassicPress based on bare opinions that habe motivated several folks to fully leave any effort to help ClassicPress behind.
Now imagine you throw money in the pit.
We’ll eat ourselves alive.
Even if not, how would we decide „when it’s done“
When it’s merged? And what it because of some difference in opinion or else a work doesn’t get merged and then the one who did the work doesn’t get the bounty.
It’ll be worse than now - folks will try to push features with a second interest in mind and any voice against it would immediately be colored by „you want to jeopardize my bounty“
I wouldn’t do this. It has potential to make things worse.
I wanted to bring back this topic with a new point of view.
Instead of CP itself organizing this, we could at least make it something that works via an external service.
I don’t know any service that supports this, but, it would be cool to find something where:
Random person A wants thing X to happen, starts a petition, and a petition gets approved as: “okay, this can be done”. Or, random person A sees a petition that was started by someone else in the past, and likes it.
Random person A wants to use money to motivate the person who makes it happen.
Random person A starts a “bounty” based on an existing approved petition, via an external service that supports this stuff.
Once done, random person A will post the link of that external-service-bounty-task into the original petition in the forum. The petition can be tagged as “has-bounty”.
From there on, more people B, C, D … can click that link and either: get it done, or add money to the bounty.
I say that this should be done via an external service because it’s somethig that needs to be professional, probably include some kind of escrow, allow a way to assign this to one person with a deadline, … Building this from scratch for CP would take ages (would not be done).
Also, an external service makes it more a “community” thing. It’s not CP paying you. It’s the community using external tools to motivate people.
This doesn’t even have to be approved. Why would I not, as a random person, be able to use a service to donate for people to make stuff happen?
So the real question is: do you know a suitable service for this?
An extreme solution would be to post it as a job on a freelancer platform. That’s probably too far, and it doesn’t allow more people to add money to the bounty.
Btw, this isn’t a petition anymore, since I’m proposing to use an external service and this doesn’t need approval. Can a moderator (@moderators) move this to general discussion?
Open Collective does bounties on issues in GitHub. They have a whole page dedicated to it. It’s something we should consider once we have a budget. Right now our focus is on meeting our annual budget to cover operating expenses.
Fine idea, as motivation is ALWAYS a key factor in Startups and non-profits. I had suggested the same to another community based CMS that was for using a “coin” based system.
Instead of money or gifts, per se, use a “credits” system and call it ClassicCoin (LOL). Coins compile and over time the collected coins could be used for ‘sponsored’ products which the products might be related to ClassicPress/WP. Maybe premium themes or plugins that others in the community are authors of and would volunteer a license for such that equals xx number of ClassicCoins.
A simple catalog could be created on cp.net ((<- has anyone applied to secure cp.net; it is open)) here, and product donated over time.
In Open Collective’s Slack channel, there were some insightful comments about bounty programs I thought will be helpful to keep in mind if we ever decide to start one:
Never a good idea to let those weedy weak programmers get a foot in the door
The kind of comments above really are really not helping motivate folks to join here.
A suggested edit: “Requiring the development of tests would encourage programmers to more deeply consider the outcomes of the changes they are proposing.”
A foot in the door is exactly what we would want normally, but not for a bounty. Why not? Because it will actually be counter-productive.
The newbie, who thought they were going to make some money, suddenly realizes that the task they took on is far harder, and requires much more work (quite possibly at a level above what they can do), than they thought. Then they get discouraged.
Far better that they take on something small to start with and build some confidence from that. But no-one’s ever going to provide a bounty for something small.
A foot in the door is exactly what we would want normally, but not for a bounty. Why not? Because it will actually be counter-productive.