Chris Aniszczyk's (zx) diatribe

How should open source projects handle donations? And do it in a tasteful fashion?

I ask because I’ve been doing some work lately do expose the Friends of Eclipse program at Eclipse in a variety of ways. For example, I want to add a link on Eclipsepedia as we have on a variety of the Eclipse download pages.

I’m a fan of the Friends of Eclipse program because I believe in the power of community. All donations benefit the Eclipse community in some fashion from providing more bandwidth for users and committers to sponsoring Eclipse community events. The program is there as a way to contribute to Eclipse for people who may not have the time to become a committer but have the financial resources and desire to contribute. For awhile, I don’t think the program was very visible and that’s changed as the link has appeared on the download page. There are now over 1000 donations to the program! I see a future where we could get a considerable amount of support from the Friends of Eclipse program and help the Eclipse Foundation sponsor more events.

But is there a line that we can cross where it seems like we’re pan handling :)?

I tried to look at how other projects handle donations.

If you look at Wikipedia, their approach is to have everything front and center.

It seems to work for Wikipedia as they tend to have a fund raising drive model. Their users don’t seem to mind either. The Linux Foundation has a way to donate on its web page and they also have a program similar to the Friends of Eclipse where you can sign up for individual membership with some benefits.

How do other people view donation in the open source context? Is there a line to cross?

How do other open source projects do this?

One of my big interests is building and analyzing communities, especially in the open source space. I’ve learned a lot from my experience in the Gentoo Linux and Eclipse communities and take joy in the experience. There are so many interesting topics within community building from effective communication mechanisms to development processes to governance. I see a future where a lot of software is developed in the open and building a community around that will be vital to the success of that piece of software. As I was writing this post, Microsoft just announced that they are open sourcing the .NET micro framework and attempting to build a open community around the technology…

Microsoft is also in the process of forming a community of interested and involved members to help shape the future direction of the product. There will be a core technology team that is composed of Microsoft and external partners, and people will be encouraged to propose projects, which will be vetted before they are accepted…. The site will also support people building extensions that exist alongside the platform rather than being integrated into it…

You know when Microsoft is releasing stuff under the Apache 2.0 license and attempting to build communities there’s a shift in the industry happening. Good for them!

Ok, on to the point of this post now. My reading list went empty recently and I needed to fill it with some interesting books. In particular, I was looking for books related to open source and community building. The good news is that I found a couple of interesting books, the bad news is that I wish there were more books on these topics. I’ve been devouring the Art of Community book by Jono Bacon (Ubuntu’s Community Manager).

It’s a fascinating book which outlines some of the aspects of community building and share’s many of Jono’s experiences in developing the Ubuntu community. A lot of the things he discusses can be mapped to what is going on within the Eclipse community. Jono’s coverage of the importance of meritocracy and governance pleases me.

Anyone else have a chance to read the book yet?

Another book that I’m looking to devour is the Groundswell by a couple of Forrester Research’s analysts.

I’m always a fan of case studies around social technology and how it can impact your business. My favorite recent example is the United Breaks Guitars debacle… how much heartache did that cost United? I’ll let people know what I think of Groundswell when I finish it.

Anyone else reading anything good around open source of community building lately? Any recommendations?

Inside the Eclipse community, we’re looking at ways to make it easier for people to contribute. Part of that work involves working on improving the web presence of Eclipse when potential contributors come visit (the other major part is at the code level, but we will leave that for another post). To help me with some ideas on how to improve the contributor experience on the Eclipse.org site, I wanted to look at how other open source communities are handling it at the moment. My thought was that visiting other community sites would also help me play the role as contributor since I’m so entrenched with things at Eclipse and have a difficult time putting myself into the role of a contributor.

Mozilla

When visiting the Mozilla site, I was greeted with a gigantic Get Involved button.

Mozilla realizes that there are many types of contributors out there and accommodates appropriately for that.

As a bonus, Mozilla even had contribution options based on how much time you have available!

Awesome!

Symbian

The Symbian site had no clear way for me to realize how I can contribute to the effort. The site was pretty but I’m not sure the excessive use of flash is going to win bonus points with developers (does Flash even run on Symbian-based phones?).

After some digging, I found the Symbian developer site.

It was pretty easy to find links to code, bug tracking and forums. I didn’t see any obvious links for people who may want to contribute translations or their artistic skills to the project. Then again, the Symbian foundation is pretty new so maybe they aren’t at the point where they need translation contributions.

Fedora

Inside the Fedora site, I immediately was drawn to the Join Fedora link.

After clicking that link, I was presented with a wonderful variety of ways I can contribute to the Fedora project.

I’m a huge fan of any open source community that realizes that contributors come in all shapes and sizes; there aren’t only coders out there.

Ubuntu

The Ubuntu site had nothing obvious on how to get involved immediately (you have to scroll down quite a bit to see a link to get involved).

I dug around a bit and found a link to Get Involved with the Ubuntu community. I was delighted to be presented with the way I would like to get involved.

Ubuntu seemed to classify its contributors into developers, non-technical users, technical users and people willing to donate money.

Seems reasonable.

Conclusion

What did I learn at the end of this exercise? It’s important to realize that there are many different forms of contributor roles in open source. Here’s my simplified version of the major roles contributors may play:

• Writers
  • These people can help with things like documentation and articles
• Developers
  • These people can code; provide patches; potentially become committers
• Translators / Internationalization
  
  • These people can help with internationalization efforts
• Graphical Artists / Designers
  • These people can help with artwork; don’t let coders design things
• Evangelists
  • These people can help organize events and spread the word; marketing is key

There are contributors that may fit many of these roles, but most will specialize in one type of role. The key thing to understand is that you need to cater to each of these roles including how much time people have (like Mozilla did). For example, developers will want to know how to access code and contribute patches to the project. Translators will need to know where to go to translate strings for the project or file bugs for long German words that wreak havoc on your user interface. And so on…

What do people think? What can open source communities do better at making it easier for people to contribute? As a next step, I’ll take a look at playing the role of contributor in one of these communities and write a “Hello, World” type application.

If you have any ideas on how to improve the contributor experience at Eclipse, please comment on this bug.