The primary use of funds collected for the project is for the health and benefit of it and its community. All use of funds should be of direct benefit to that.
TSC– refers to the Technical Steering Commitee of a project or, for those projects that lack an explicitTSC, the lead maintainer(s) of the projectContributors– refers to any non-TSCmember of of the project
- 70% Project Development
- 0% Travel and Event Expenses
- 10% Contributor Pool
- 20% Dependencies and Community Projects
- <1% Support Systems
A project using these guidelines can decide to specify their own allocation and/or limit any specific area to a minimum/maximum amount.
The allocation is based on monthly or yearly funds – estimated, average or actual ones (depending on availability and reliability of data).
The project will keep a level of transparency that makes it possible for givers to roughly follow up on this allocation, but exact level of transparency is out-of-scope of these guidelines.
Expenses can be submitted by project members (Project Contributors or TSC Members).
Contributions include submitting code, writing documentation, answering questions in chat, attending meetings on behalf of the project, and so on. All contributions to an open-source project are valuable, and we feel that compensating team members for any time they spend on the project is the right thing to do.
Project members should track their time and submit a monthly invoice at the beginning of the month with those hours split up across the following categories and across any sub-projects / areas within the project:
- Discord/Discussions Help
- Infrastructure
- Issues/Pull Request Triage
- Meetings
- Programming
- Project Management
- Writing
Before doing and submitting significant expenses a project's members should get pre-approval from the TSC.
To ensure transparency and avoid conflicts of interest, contributors and TSC members should not request compensation from the project for specific work (e.g., features, bug fixes) that has already been directly funded by other sources, such as employer contracts, external sponsorships, or crowdfunding campaigns.
However, the TSC may evaluate scenarios on a case-by-case basis and may agree to co-fund specific work if a suitable arrangement can be reached.
Personal non-targeted donations such as GitHub Sponsors should generally not classify as direct funding, unless eg. specifically mentioned or requested together with specific work.
- TSC Members: $80.00 USD/hour
- Project Contributors: $50.00 USD/hour
Projects using these guidelines can, and are encouraged to, specify their own rates that are adjusted for their project's financial capabilities. See “How To Adopt”.
Guidelines for this are out of scope of these financial guidelines and should be defined separately by those wanting to use it. See eg. WebdriverIO for inspiration.
The project sets aside money to pay outside contributors who have made significant contributions to the project.
Contributions include submitting code, writing documentation, answering questions in our Discord server, and more.
The project believe that open source projects who are lucky enough to get funded have a responsibility to pay that forward and support the smaller projects they rely on and as such uses its funds to support its dependencies
The project also supports auxiliary projects that benefit its community at large by augmenting or extending the project, or similar.
These funds should generally not go to projects maintained by members of this project as members should get compensated through the Project Development funds.
The project uses this to pay for software the team uses to help manage the project, which can include things like Google Workspace and cloud storage.
Additionally, from time to time the TSC can use funds to pay contractors to work on things that are important to the project and where the team doesn’t have the time or expertise to complete the work on their own.
Funds allowing, the TSC can decide that for a period of time it allows its members to submit expenditures that go beyond what the project takes in monthly, to allow for extended maintenance and/or handling of tech debt.
The TSC should then decide a guiding upper limit for what each member can expense monthly.
Add a note in your README.md, or a FUNDING.md, file in the root directory of your project’s repository:
# Fund Usage Guidelines
This project follows the [Collective Funds Guidelines 0.1](https://github.com/collective-funds/guidelines).
If you want to specify your own allocation, hourly rates and/or additional notes then do something like:
# Fund Usage Guidelines
This project follows [Collective Funds Guidelines 0.1](https://github.com/collective-funds/guidelines) with the below customizations.
## Allocation
* 70% Project Development
* 0% Travel and Event Expenses
* 10% Contributor Pool (Min: $100/month)
* 20% Dependencies and Community Projects (Max: $200/month)
* <1% Support Systems
## Rates
* TSC Members: $80.00 USD/hour
* Project Contributors: $50.00 USD/hour
## Additional notes
<Any additional notes you would want to add>
These guidelines have been strongly inspired by the excellent work of the ESLint and WebdriverIO projects and were created for the Mocha and neostandard projects, with feedback given from the co-maintainers of those projects.
The content of this license (apart from name) is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License.