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Gus Austin edited this page Apr 14, 2022 · 16 revisions

Open source services

OpenProducer is a service provider that leverages the Open Collective platform and community. A few examples of how OpenProducer can provide services are as follows:

Open Source projects

Providing services to open source projects.

Funds can flow as follows:

  • OpenProducer helps direct people resources (fundraising, marketing, events, social networking) to the project
  • Project collective sponsors monthly amount to OpenProducer and the project collective appears on OpenProducer collective and website as a sponsor or backer
  • If a project like AzuraCast is providing a portion of the services, OpenProducer can allocate funds to AzuraCast collective
  • Individuals doing the work can expense or invoice against OpenProducer collective or the project collective

Priority OSS projects and collectives include:

Partner provider service offerings

Working with partners on new or existing service offerings

Funds can flow as follows:

  • OpenProducer helps direct people resources (fundraising, marketing, events, social networking) to the partner provider (Netmix, AzuraCast, LibreTime etc.)
  • Provider collective sponsors monthly amount to OpenProducer collective and the project collective appears on OpenProducer collective and website as a sponsor or backer
  • Provider collective sponsors monthly amount to white label provider for hosting and add-on services
  • Individuals doing the work can expense or invoice against OpenProducer collective or the provider collective.

Netmix SaaS

Still working out the details:

Partner projects

Managing and expanding existing partner projects

Funds can flow as follows:

  • OpenProducer helps direct people resources (fundraising, marketing, events, social networking) to the partner collective
  • Partner collective sponsors monthly amount to OpenProducer collective and the partner collective appears on OpenProducer collective as a sponsor or backer
  • Partner collective sponsors monthly amount to white label provider for hosting and add-on services
  • Individuals doing the work can expense or invoice against OpenProducer collective or platform collective.

Priority partner projects include:

Additional Notes

While some projects require a significant amount upfront time required to be market ready or have sponsor/backer value; for the most part, the amount of available budget in a collective will dictate the amount of actual work project team members will commit.

Likewise, the actual budget for the program team, allocated as 15% from each collective, will have a large dependency on meeting fundraising goals. For this reason, fundraising, sponsor wrangling, grant writing, etc. will be both a primary responsibility of the program team as well as a valuable service.

Bounty Program

The following is inspired by Open Collective, who just relaunched their bounty program. This is the basic way it works -

Process

  • Bounty contributors first comment on the issue they’re interested in, to ask a core contributor to assign them to it. This ensures that multiple people aren’t unknowingly working on the same bounty simultaneously, and gives our core team the chance to check everything’s in order.
  • Set a time limit based on the complexity of the issue, so that if an initial bounty contributor doesn’t deliver it can be opened up to others
  • Contributors must complete a simple issue before moving on to one more complex. This helps assess skill level and avoid frustration and lost time.
  • Complex issues don’t really work as bounties, because they usually require a lot of back and forth and are hard to scope accurately in advance. drop them in favor of larger issues split into small bounties.
  • Use a “bounty candidate” label so other team members could bring potential bounty issues to the attention of the core dev team and they could be assessed for suitability.
  • Make sure bounty issues are fully specced out and don’t require more design before starting implementation.

Bounty levels

  • $100 for "minimal complexity issues" (<1 hour average estimated completion time)
  • $200 for "simple complexity issues" (~1 or 2 hours average estimated completion time)
  • $500 for "medium complexity issues" (~1 day average estimated completion time)

Contributor Ladder

First Time Contributors

  • Have access to minimal or simple complexity issues
  • Contributors are not part of the OpenProducer GitHub organization
  • Fork our projects on GitHub and push changes on their forks
  • Should comment on bounty issues to get assigned (limited to one at a time)

Contributors (at least 1 completed issue)

  • They get added to the OpenProducer GitHub organization
  • Can assign themselves bounty issues (limited to one at a time)
  • Have access to minimal, simple or medium complexity issues

Recurring Contributors (3 or more completed issues)

  • Added to the "Recurring Contributors" group on the OpenProducer GitHub organization
  • Can assign themselves bounty issues (limited to two at a time)
  • Have access to minimal, simple or medium complexity issues

Confirmed Contributors (3 completed issues including at least 2 with medium complexity)

  • Added to the "Confirmed Contributors" group on the OpenProducer GitHub organization
  • Become candidates to work on complex issues or projects on a negotiable per-project or hourly rate

Crowdfunding Campaign

The following is 'very' inspired by CiviCRM's Make It Happen program. We will personalize this soon....

Crowdfunding campaigns are a great way to get or support new features that you’d like to see into OpenProducer projects which haven't been included within core development. Driven by the community, crowdfunding campaigns can be a fast, easy way to support a specific new feature or improvement. Not only do they fund a specific project, a portion of each campaign directly supports the Core Team.

Crowdfunding FAQ

When will the code be ready?

In most cases, campaigns are coordinated with a project’s release cycle. That means crowdfunded projects will have stable releases at the same time a project releases core.

How do I get access to the functionality?

Crowdfunded projects are either released as part of core or as extensions available to download from our extensions directory.

Who develops the projects?

Crowdfunding campaigns are either carried out by the Core Team or by trusted developers on behalf of OpenProducer.

What license is the code released under?

Make it happens are all released under an open source license. We recommend AGPLv3 and require at least 'GPLv2 or later'.

Platform Beta

We're currently working out pricing, perks, and a process for a Newspack beta/initial product offering in this discussion. We'll update the following section as the plan evolves.

Purpose

  • Learn more about customer needs
  • Release DIY version of the platform(s)

Process

Find 10 or so radio stations, internet broadcasters, podcasters, music/arts orgs interested in joining this paid BETA/initial product offering

For each participant, we’ll do the following:

  • Collect TBD down payment
  • Perform site audit checking for best practices and security concerns; make a report.
  • Setup an on-boarding meeting – At the onboarding meeting we’ll
    • discuss the existing site to learn about any pending tasks you need taken care of right away and walk you through the site audit report.
    • Gather use cases from them to cover the critical features
  • Build, migrate and launch each site

During this time we would:

  • Iterate until we have something solid and generally usable
  • Launch the first version of the SaaS “self-service plan”, ending the beta period, and moving to general availability
  • Contribute code, documentation, and related materials back to the project during the entire process.

Pricing

Hackathon

In addition to having participants pay to participate, we can also increase contributions by building sites and integrations during a hackathon.

Format

  • 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.

Contributor Roles

Platform

Collaboration will happen in the Newspack platform repo OpenProducer maintains. Our product manager will be responsible for assessing the resources (budget and people) needed to create and maintain the 'Radio' and other subsequent branches.

Projects

Projects could be done in collaboration with OpenProducer and partners like SPEC and Open Collective Foundation. Each participant would be assigned a project manager and a variety of contributors depending on their specific needs.

  • Project Manager
  • Writer
  • Marketer
  • Designer
  • Site Configuration
  • Quality Assurance Tester
  • Fundraiser
  • Developer - depending on the need, this work would involve working with Newspack/WordPress and other projects (LibreTime, AzuraCast, Radio Station, Open Collective etc.) we're including in our platform OR on behalf of a partner (for custom/bespoke work that would 'not' be contributed back to the open source projects).

Participants

We'll update the list when the program is announced and participants sign up.

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