Fundraisers, nonprofit hackathons, training, and other creative ways to enable open source contributions

[gusaus]

Updating and reformatting this discussion to hash out some creative ideas for enabling contributions to projects and programs OpenProducer supports. I'll keep this description updated based on feedback in threaded comments and elsewhere:

• Hackathons and other types of contribution events
• Fundraising events and campaigns
• Bounties, RFPs, and other types of funding campaigns

Indie Media and Arts Pilot

OpenProducer’s Media and Arts Pilot provides indie media and arts orgs with training, mentorship and technical assistance while growing the organizational capacity to sustain over time.

Sustainability

• Enable and enhance original content creation
• Grow revenue via fundraising, sponsorships, partnerships, and related services.
• Identify new models for content distribution and licensing
• Increase audience engagement

Training

• Training, mentorship and technical assistance to help strengthen organizational capacities as well as diversify revenue streams.
• Provide community members real-world learning opportunities to produce, engineer, host, write, interview, and create the media

Process

Once enrolled, OpenProducer and partners would do the following:

• Set Up an onboarding meeting to discuss specific goals and needs
• Continuing research into best practices in revenue development
• Series of in-person and virtual courses, workshops, hackathons, and other training opportunities for staff and volunteers.
• Create toolkits and share best practices to help achieve long-term sustainability
• Enroll in quarterly fundraising events

Fundraising Events

• Format: An ongoing fundraising initiative that leverages Open Collective and the Quadratic Funding model to support organizations participating in do_action hackathons.
• Objective/Purpose: To provide fair and inclusive funding to organizations, empowering them to participate in hackathons, receive website development support, and strengthen their online presence.
• Target Audience: Organizations, donors, WordPress contributors, the WordPress community.
• Activities: Quarterly fundraising campaigns, transparent allocation of funds to participating organizations, and support for hackathon participation.
• Key Components:
  • Open Collective Platform: Utilizes the Open Collective platform for transparent fund management, reporting, and collaboration.
  • Quadratic Funding Model: Employs Quadratic Funding to ensure that smaller organizations receive proportional funding based on community support.
  • Community Decision-Making: Engages the WordPress community in decision-making processes for fund allocation and selecting hackathon participants.
• Required Items/Tools/Facilities: Access to the Open Collective platform, a transparent governance framework, communication tools for community engagement, funding campaign management tools.
• Team Structure: Fund administrators, community managers, financial oversight committee, hackathon organizers, contributors, and supporters.

WordPress/Nonprofit Hackathon series

• Format: A series of community-organized virtual and in-person hackathons.
• Objective/Purpose: To empower organizations with a new online presence using WordPress while offering hands-on training and mentorship to new WordPress contributors and future maintainers of the website.
• Target Audience: Local WordPress community members, developers, designers, nonprofit representatives, and new WordPress contributors.
• Activities: Collaborative website planning, development, and design tailored to organizations in need. New contributors receive training and mentorship throughout the event, ensuring they can maintain the website effectively.
• Required Items/Tools/Facilities: Venue, computers, WordPress development tools, project planning materials, mentorship resources, etc.
• Team Structure: Organizers, web developers, designers, nonprofit representatives, mentors for new contributors and maintainers.

[gusaus]

Hackathons and other types of contribution events

We'd like to begin hosting and/or collaborating on hackathons and other types of contribution events as a way to increase contributions to projects and communities we support.

There are many projects and communities going virtual in this time of Covid, the WordPress charity format, do_action, could work well as they already provide other elements we'd like to incorporate.

We couldn’t call the events do_action, but we've been encouraged by the organizers to fork and remix their format

For example we can tweak some of the following ideas (which I did) -

Format

https://make.wordpress.org/community/2020/03/20/taking-charity-hackathons-online/

• Organize a country-wide event. Since these events are going to be virtual, it makes sense to bring in talents from the whole country, as well as reach more organizations that would otherwise be possible.
• Spread the work out over a few days/weeks. In order to give people the time to work on the websites for the stations, allow them to work over a longer time period than just one day.
• Provide virtual communication channels. Use your local WordPress community Slack group (or create one if you don’t have one already) and set up separate channels for each team to communicate.

Participant Roles

https://make.wordpress.org/community/handbook/meetup-organizer/event-formats/do_action-charity-hackathon/getting-particpants/#participant-roles

Not sure this has been addressed (in-person vs virtual do_action)… having completely separate teams per org might be a bit messy and inefficient for a countrywide/global, virtual event

In our case we’d probably want to identify roles and participants who can work across all projects
So a variation on the roles referenced -

• Project Manager
• Content Creator
• Social Media Manager
• Designer
• Site Configuration
• Quality Assurance Tester
• Documentation
• Fundraising
• Development (this work would primarily be as part of the OSS projects themselves - Newspack, LibreTime, Radio Station plugin, etc.)

With several other projects/communities needing a similar process, there's potential to pool resources for anyone interested in taking this on.

[gusaus]

Bounties, RFPs, and other types of funding campaigns

Open Collective already provides a way to create campaigns similar to https://civicrm.org/make-it-happen. Unlike a bounty (relying on platforms/programs https://www.bountysource.com/ or https://gitcoin.co/explorer), this type of campaign could be created as a tier on https://opencollective.com/openproducer and embedded on a website.

OBS recently launched its bounty program which provides some great examples for using Open Collective and Github. Maybe we can incorporate some of what they're doing into our flow.

• https://obsproject.com/blog/announcing-the-obs-project-bounty-program
• https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/wiki/OBS-Project-Bounty-Program
• https://opencollective.com/obsproject/projects/obs-project-bounty-program

[gusaus]

In addition to OBS, our friends at Mautic have some great resources -

• Guide for paying contributors - https://contribute.mautic.org/policies/paying-contributors
• RFP process for feature development https://contribute.mautic.org/product-team/request-for-proposals-rfp-process
• Bounty program for smaller tasks https://contribute.mautic.org/product-team/mautic-bounty-programme

More than enough source material for someone interested in creating and running our own program to support projects we're working with.

[gusaus]

Fundraising events and campaigns

Two years ago, GitCoin and Open Source Collective launched FUNDOSS, a pilot matching campaign based on a novel new matching model that amplifies the voice of the many. Called – democratic funding – this matching algorithm raised over $11M for over 7,000 projects by that time.

Our OpenProducer platform (which we've since dropped) was one of the participants and raised a little over $5k (after fees) in a two week period. Even though there were several issues that affected our (and other pilot participants) ability to fundraise.

After the pilot the organizers deemed it successful enough to make some fixes/improvements and follow through with their plan of regular/recurring rounds. But soonafter activity around program and platform died off - even after several (Open Collective) community members expressed interest in not only participating but contributing to the platform and organizing the program.

Relevant here as I'm one of those community members making another push to help revive.

If successful we'll be able to run multiple flavors (FundOSS, Drupal, WordPress, Community Media, Radio, Publishing etc.) in partnership with orgs and funders in those respective ecosystems.

That said - I'm curious to hear from the other folks active or interested in these types of fundraisers and funding experiments.
Does it seem like a good opportunity? Could you and/or your org help make it happen? How?