Around the same time last year, I was talking with @owocki about leveraging Simple Grants for FundOSS (the pilot was a partnership between Gitcoin and Open Source Collective) and specific rounds for global projects/communities like WordPress and Drupal.
That said, I haven’t talked with Kevin (nor seen discussions in this forum) about status, needs, and if/how Simple Grants fits in with current strategy.
Simple Grants is available as open source software for anyone who wants to run a fiat QF campaign. Feel free to fork it + run with it. But you need to BYO Dev.
At a certain campaign size (probably somewhere between $100k - $1m, closer to the higher end) we could contribute time/dev resources to the campaign. But we’d need a credible financial commitment from a credible partner to staff that. The more credible the more the chances we can allocate resources.
Really appreciate the additional info! Wanna make sure I’m clear before I circle back to partners and contributors.
Assuming the other admins buy into the idea do you have a general sense of the functionality we’d need to build before we could use for subsequent FundOSS rounds? For example, would we need to build the Open Collective integration (or checkout plugin)?
As a project of Open Source Collective, I’m hoping they’ll be able to contribute dev and match fund for the next FundOSS round. If we include Drupal and WordPress in that round (and have orgs from both ecosystems contribute to the match), we should be able to meet that criteria.
Assuming we could lock that down, what kinds of resources could you commit to the campaign? Would that be more on the marketing side or also some degree of support getting the platform FundOSS ready?
Apologies if I’m asking previously asked (and answered) questions. Just want to be sure I’m conveying the right info back to the other players.
no not really. if you fork the codebase + run with it yourself, you need to bring your own dev.
i’d have to rally some people if this gets serious to know for sure… (theres a bit of a chicken and an egg problem between getting funding + staffing resourcing against that funding) but if you can bring us a credible $1m in commitments, i bet i could rally some dev/product/marketing help.
so far i’ve not seen that kind of momentum from FundOSS revivalists. its been 12-18 months of answering hypotheticals in random github, gdoc, and forum threads. TBH it feels like its just not gonna happen. there’s not enough force + legitimacy behind the revivalist efforts, so instead we get this slow drip of hypothetical “what if we revived FundOSS? can you help? can you generate momentum?” that just suck away attention from things that do have momentum (but people are just too polite to say no… so they just dont respond or respond non committally). this lack of momentum is reflexive and creates more lack of momentum as everyone senses “yeah this isnt it”. candidly, i’ve stopped paying attention because it seems like if the momentum was gonna happen, itd have happened already. my recommendation is to stop trying and to channel that energy into something that you can be successful at (and therefore is a better use of your beuatiful energy/passion for this cause!).
thank you for your understanding and grace as i try to communicate where the observations/boundaries/constraints are here for me as firmly/politely as I can!
