It would be great to have a bounty section

[haidar]

@simjim

Would using an outside bounty program be acceptable. If so, could freedombox link to it without an issue with the 501©3 status? Without a connection from freedombox I believe the bounty program would not receive the attention it needs to be successful.

I talked about this with the Foundation staff, and we are open to it. But there are some questions surrounding governance of this bounty program by the developers. In short, if we (the FreedomBox community) begin accepting features through a bounty program, then the core developers would need to find a way to manage these issues:

1. Bounty review process: Any feature which is requested in a bounty program would need to go through a review process by the core devs. This review process would filter out features which the core devs don’t want to integrate into FreedomBox (e.g. if someone offered to pay $300 for the integration of a poorly designed static site generator, the devs would discuss and tell the requester that the request has been rejected and that they better save their money). To solve this issue, the core devs would need to take on the additional responsibility of monitoring the bounty page to make sure that only approved bounties get paid for. We could create a category in the forum called “Bounties” in which interested parties can request for approval from the core devs.

2. Division of funds: Another issue is the division of a bounty for an item
   that was developed by more than one person. Who keeps the money in this
   case, and who decides how the money is divided when there are disputes? I think one way around this is for the bounty feature development process to require a determination of the division of labor and funds BEFORE any work is done. All parties must mutually agree at the beginning of the process.

3. Team-implemented items: Someone may offer a bounty for an item that our
   team was planning to implement anyway (e.g. the reachability wizard). What do we do? Do we reject the bounty, or does the team accept it and divide it among volunteers who made contributions to the development? Though I could imagine the funds being used to “fast track” the development of a feature (so it gets done this month instead of in 6 months), it is an open question as to whether or not the core devs should reject the bounty in cases when a feature was already on the TODO list.

I am putting the topic of bounty governance on the agenda for tomorrow’s progress call. @simjim, you are welcome to join that call if you want to be part of that discussion.

Since this is new to us, an implementation plan will take some time. But our developers will discuss and will try to determine if a governance model is worth trying out.

Tagging @jvalleroy @njoseph @mray so they see this.