Let's spend some money! šŸ¤‘ļø

Open Source Design meta
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Unfortunately I havenā€™t had much time to contribute to OSD for a while, Iā€™ve only been able to help out with my monthly donation. Recently I thought that I might reduce that contribution, because it seems like OSD doesnā€™t really need itā€¦ and I wondered if other financial donors (or potential donors!) might also be thinking the same thing.

So far weā€™ve raised $6192 in our Open Collective, and weā€™ve only ever spent $643 of that (mostly on cards, stickers, banners etc).

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What do we do with our :moneybag:?

Iā€™d love to hear peopleā€™s ideas about what we could use our funds for, in order further our goals as a community.

There has been some brief discussion about getting paid hosting for OSD infrastructure, but as @jan pointed out, we can likely get that kind of thing as sponsorship.

And while $5500 is a lot of money when thinking about getting stickers printed, itā€™s hardly anything in terms of paying people to do OSD-related work.

One idea to get things rolling:

There is a bunch of valuable work ongoing in the community, like re-designing the website, representing OSD at events etc. But thereā€™s also a tonne of less ā€˜glamorousā€™ maintenance work going on behind the scenes, eg. last month @Erioldoesdesign followed up ALL of the outstanding jobs on the job board via email!

With the Secure Scuttlebutt community, we have a Scuttlebutt Maintenance open collective to support this kind of work. Admittedly we had a decent-sized grant to get things started, but I liked the framing - itā€™s mostly money for people in the community rather than for goods and services, and itā€™s not for fancy experiemental new software projects, but rather for the less public and exciting stuff - documentation, bug-wrangling, admin, etc.

What other ideas do you have?

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What if we were able to select a few of the jobs still open or new jobs that get submitted funds for designers to fill those jobs that would have otherwise been gratis?

I think weā€™d need to help the jobs selected be better defined and have variety beyond visual/logo/icon design but I like the idea of open source design valuing the designer contributions with $ as well as the community support we give :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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Yes! I think this would be a good thing to pay for.

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  • I had some vague ideas in the direction of documentation or training materials that benefit our cause. E.g. if we have an ā€œintro to open source designā€ we can write it ourselves, but proofreading and illustrations cost an OK amount of money and can be really helpful to get support with.
  • Trainings or consulting in related causes e.g. diversity, code of conduct etc. for OSD members, e.g. people who are active on Discourse as moderators/Admins or use use the twitter account.
  • Get a accessability review for our website. I think we are all aware of accessability, but I think we do not have (core) community members who e.g. have strong visual impairments or are deaf.
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+100 for accessibility review!

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In case we pay a bit extra and if they are sympathetic to our cause, we might even be able to produce a bit of educational material with them e.g. with a video of a some core steps in the evaluation or a mini case study of a problem with our website. Thus, people could get a less abstraction and rule based grasp on accessability while it might also have the nice effect of showing why a review is actually a good thing to pay for. (For me, it was a great experience to hear how a skilled blind person uses a screen reader a few years back at FOSDEM)

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A11y might even want to partner with us on that? Certainly worth asking them and also @SaptakS is a contributor there!

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These are both wortha. good read re. spending money: Open Source Peer Bonus Program ā€“ opensource.google

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I wrote some things we might be able to use our funding for:

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Okay! everyone hereā€™s the poll where you can vote for what we should be spending the open source design funds on!

https://cloud.opensourcedesign.net/apps/polls/s/D8mVWIz6qMXllkkw

The poll will stay open for a few months so that people who donā€™t regularly check the forum get a chance to see. Iā€™ll be tweeting and trying to ensure we communicate this poll widely to be as transparent and inclusive as possible! But let me know if there are other places we can reach the open source design community best (possible in a github issue?)

If youā€™d like to see our Open Collective to view our funds hereā€™s the link: Open Source Design - Open Collective

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