Democratic funding has already raised over $11M for over 7,000 projects!

What is Democratic Funding

There’s a disconnect between those who build upon and collaborate within Open Source and those in a position to provide significant financial support. FundOSS bridges that divide through a process called Democratic Funding. Watch this video to learn more.

A contribution and a vote

Every contribution, regardless of amount, is considered as a vote for a project under Democratic Funding. At the conclusion of the campaign, funds are distributed from a huge matching pool based on the frequency of donations, using a quadratic matching approach popularized by GitCoin Grants.

10x’ing individual contributions

For many FundOSS will be the most significant impact on the open-source they can have as an individual. Sounds exciting!

The matching money is distributed mostly based on votes, rather than the value of donations. As a result, the total matched can be 10x or even 100x the amount an individual donated which is more weight is given to a project with a high frequency of contributions rather than a single, large contributor that dominates the round.

Then the matching amount when you contribute is estimated, then let you know at the end of the round what impact your contribution had made and how much of the matching fund was allocated to the projects you supported.

How to Fund OSS (Mautic)

You can donate to Mautic as we are participating in the first FundOSS round between the 10th and 24th of June at fundoss.com. With the FundOSS’ cart system, you can contribute to Mautic open source project (and other projects that you may want to support) and checkout.

Note: At present you need to log in with Github but they are working to implement Google, Facebook and Twitter logins which we hope will be available shortly.

At the end of the round, a matching fund of $75,000 will be allocated depending on the frequency and volume of donations across the round.

The key feature of Democratic Funding is that small contributions can have a large impact.

Do help us to grow our reach by contributing, and sharing your personalised carts and your previous donations with your friends, relatives and pets

Sometimes there’s a lot of community interest to work on something and a willingness to pay someone/a group of people to focus on it so that it is addressed in a timely manner.

Also, more generally, we know that many people are contributing to Mautic in their spare time, and we believe that more people (particularly those who do not have the privilege of free time) may be able to contribute if there was a way that some tasks or initiatives were able to provide them with financial compensation.

Often features, initiatives and bug fixes are important for the community – and deliver significant value to both the project and organisations who are dependent on Mautic – so we want to find a way forward which creates a sustainable ecosystem around Mautic.

At the same time, we don’t want to create a culture of people only working on things if they are paid to do so, therefore it’s important that we have some boundaries and set expectations.

Now that we have our Open Collective, which brings the practical toolset to facilitate financially supporting the Mautic project, we also need to set out some basic guidelines on how we intend to use our funds.

We should also have clarity on how people can get paid to work on projects or reimbursed for expenses incurred on behalf of Mautic, and establish some processes around all of this.

A proposed solution: Funding in the Mautic Community

There are two core areas where we will be initially providing opportunities for contributors to be financially compensated – a bounty programme for contributions to Mautic core, and the funding of initiatives.

Mautic Community Bounty Programme

A bounty programme in Open Source projects is when a monetary reward is offered for completing a task.

What follows is an initial proposal to implement a bounty scheme which we will be trialling for six months (January to June 2021) for contributions to Mautic Core via the Github repository.

We fully appreciate that this community has many more forms of contribution than writing code, however this is where we have the most activity and the most practical place to start such a scheme.

If you have feedback on this, please join the next team meeting on Slack in #t-product (get an invite at mautic.org/slack).

Get paid to contribute to Open Source!

The Mautic Community Product Team is small, and we’re always looking for new contributors to our Open Source codebases. Our Bounty programme will enable community members to financially reward developers who work on the issues they care about through our partnership with Bountysource.

With Bountysource, issues in the Github issue queue can have a bounty associated with them by one or more people or organisations. This means that one person could add a single bounty of $500 or 10 people could add a bounty of $50, with the person resolving the issue receiving the funds from Bountysource when the fix or feature is merged.

No compromise on quality

As is already the case, we will not accept pull requests unless they are:

• Completed to a high standard
• Fully covered by automated tests
• Prepared in a reasonable timeframe
• Resolving the linked issue in its entirety

We want to attract quality contributions only. For general guidelines about what’s expected in pull requests to Mautic core, see more info here.

The issue will only be considered complete and approved by BountySource for payment if the pull request is merged by a member of the Mautic Community Core Team. Read more in the BountySource FAQs.

Developers may only be assigned tasks and projects that they are confident can be completed in their entirety, seen through to completion, and which they are capable of working on at their current knowledge and skill level.

Our Product Team is happy to answer questions and provide some limited support, but don’t have the capacity to mentor junior developers working on bounty issues – developers are expected to work on the task without requiring direct support from the team.

This bounty programme will be running as a trial for the next six months and will be closely monitored by the Product Team.

We invite feedback from contributors and bounty posters – please provide in the meetings of the Product Team on Slack as mentioned earlier.

Funding Strategic and Community Initiatives

The Project Lead has an annual budget allocation for supporting Strategic Initiatives with community funds where required.

This coming year (January-December 2021), the budget is $6,000.

Strategic and Community Initiatives can also be funded in part or wholly by companies or individuals via a fundraising tier on our Open Collective.

Initiatives that require funding of any kind (whether this is to hold an in-person sprint, pay for development time, or any other expenses) must have a clear project plan with a roadmap on their Confluence page which includes dated milestones and a full financial requirements breakdown.

Payments will be made based on the delivery of agreed objectives within the project plan, rather than on a time and materials basis for hours worked.

Strategic or Community Initiatives that require funding will have their project plan accepted by the Project Lead prior to any funds being committed.

Once approved, if community funding is required a tier will be created on the Mautic Open Collective. This will allow organisations or individuals to contribute which will be used specifically for that initiative.

Funds will be paid on invoice from the Open Collective or if the individual prefers, a gift coupon for the Swag Store can be issued in place of financial reward in multiples of $25.

Conclusion

We appreciate that there are a lot of opinions around paying for contributions in Open Source, and whatever approach we take we know that there will be some in favour, and others not.

This is our first pilot into funding in two different ways, and is a trial to test the waters and see what works for us. We hope that it will be the first step towards building a sustainable ecosystem, and attract contributions from folk who may not otherwise be in a position to give their time to Mautic.

We welcome and value respectful discussion on any aspect of the trial and will have a standing topic in the Product Team meetings once a fortnight should you wish to share your thoughts.

Mautic and the Open Source community was very much built as a bootstrapped startup, and as a result there are some areas where things were put together quickly and are starting to hold us back as we grow and scale. Other areas simply weren’t addressed as they were not needed at the time.

Earlier in the year we addressed some of the urgent concerns by migrating the mautic.org website over to Drupal and deploying a new documentation portal.

Today I am excited to share two areas that we have been working on behind the scenes and are now ready to share with the wider community.

Getting stuff done!

In any Open Source project there will always be tasks that need to be completed and projects that range in duration from a few months to several years.

When I started as Community Manager back in August 2019, as a short term fix we set up a Trello team, with each team having its own public board. This enabled us to get started quickly, work together transparently, and certainly served us well over the past year.

More recently we started to struggle with missing features and having to work creatively around the maximum number of boards available. We also wanted a way to link up meeting notes, sprint reviews and documentation with the project tools.

The community carried out some research into the tools that were available and after an extended trial by the Community and Product teams we have now migrated to Jira/Confluence at mautic.atlassian.net.

Most of our boards have public read access by default, and any existing members are able to invite new members. If you had previously participated on Trello you should already have received an invitation to join Jira – if you need an invite please drop a message in #community on Slack (get an invite at mautic.org/slack).

All teams will now be using their Jira projects to manage workflows and tasks, so take a look and see if any open tasks take your interest.

Managing community finances

To date, Acquia has been managing any financial obligations on behalf of the Mautic Community and covering the cost for many expenses that we incur.

As part of the work we are doing to organise Mauticon in November it quickly became apparent that we need a way to manage the finances of the community that is transparent, and makes it easy for us to accept contributions and to spend the money that we have available according to a budget.

We need to have a process that is transparent to all, and that is very difficult to do within Acquia’s financial management processes.

I am happy to share that – with the agreement of Acquia’s CFO Chris Andersen and the Community Leadership Team – we have created a collective on Open Collective through which we plan to manage all the finances of the community. If you are not aware of Open Collective, it is specifically aimed at Open Source projects who need a way of managing the tax and financial side of running a project.

Acquia will now become a contributor to that Open Collective, so that the funds they have allocated in the budget will ultimately be demonstrated through their contributions and the expenses that they pay on our behalf (for example using a corporate credit card) will be more transparent. Other companies and individuals may also decide to become contributors to the project either on a regular basis, as a fixed donation for each Mautic project they deploy, or to support specific initiatives.

We are currently finalising the governance required around this, including policies about what can and can’t be covered, who can sign off expenses and how team leads will manage budgets (if you would like to help with this, do join the Legal & Finance team on Slack!).  In the interim I will manage this directly until we have those processes in place.

In the meantime you can take a look here: https://opencollective.com/mautic – note that we are currently showing some default options for donations and we will be expanding this over time.  It will take us time to transition all the expenses over to Open Collective and transfer the currently budgeted funds, so please bear with us!

I am really excited about this step, as I feel like this gives the Mautic Community an opportunity to grow and take control of our own finances, raise revenue for projects that we may want to work on, and of course allows us to easily manage the funds from sponsors and ticket sales related to the upcoming Mauticon event.

Establishing Working Groups

As we continue to grow there are areas where we need community contributors to help manage specific projects. Here are three Working Groups who are looking for members:

Infrastructure Working Group

As a community we have multiple servers that power our web-based resources.

We are currently recruiting interested community contributors who would like to help as part of the newly forming Infrastructure Working Group.

You must have a solid understanding and demonstrable experience of working with Linux servers and be able to commit at least 1-2 hours a week.

If you are interested please drop me an email at ruth.cheesley@mautic.org.

Website Working Group

We are looking for folk with experience working with Drupal to help us manage the mautic.org website on a day-to-day basis.

We also need content writers and editors to help us with reviewing, updating and creating more content for the community blog.

You should have a good background in Drupal and/or content writing depending on how you want to be involved, and 1-2 hours a week that you can commit to working on these tasks.

If you are interested please drop a message in #website on Slack (get an invite at mautic.org/slack).

Mauticon Working Group

If you are interested in helping us to plan, organise, host and manage Mauticon on 17th November, now is the time to raise your hand!

We have a wide range of ways that you can contribute with differing time commitments – if you’re interested please drop us a message in #mauticon on Slack (get an invite at mautic.org/slack).