Q. What should open source projects spend money on?

A. Of course, this is a second-order problem. I’d be happy if we could just solve getting money into open source projects first! But there are important considerations.

Think about how much time is eaten up onboarding people, answering questions, and reviewing issues. If you used money to pay someone to do support, you could get back to focusing on the code, as a passion project. And you’ll still sleep well at night, knowing there’s someone taking care of the community.

If you use money to pay someone to do support, you can get back to focusing on the code.

Take the example of surfers who became singers, like Ben Harper and Jack Johnson. They loved surfing so much that they didn’t want to do it as a job, because they’d have to make compromises. So they did something else for money, and kept surfing on their own terms. Maybe this is the right approach for open source as well.

Gregor telling the Hoodie story at GitHub Universe

Open source relies on community facilitators, but we can’t hold them accountable if they are volunteers. If they suddenly say, “Sorry, I can’t do this anymore”, what can we do?

Once we hit the $10,000/year milestone, we plan to hire a part time facilitator in the Hoodie community. Or maybe we could join forces with other aligned projects and create a full-time role for someone with great skills.

Open source relies on community facilitators, but we can’t hold them accountable if they are volunteers.

We want to invest in making the contributor experience better: finding issues for new people to work on, answering questions, and making sure any infringements of the code of conduct are handled well. It’s great to have this clear goal with a specific budget that I can pitch to potential sponsors.

I’m not concerned about traditional open source contributions. I think the real challenge is to scale the work we currently put into making Hoodie the most welcoming community possible. — Hoodie Blog

Funding someone to be responsible for support would free up a lot of time for the people who do maintenance on the codebase, and increase overall capacity. We know how to effectively bring on new contributors, but we haven’t had the resources to do it up to now. Having someone accountable for onboarding would accelerate the growth of the community.