One big problem is that $5000 just isn’t a lot of money. If it were a few billion, they could just buy a building and staff it with lots of people.
The best use, is for a summer co-op student. Get a local software company to volunteer some office space and a computer, then use the money to hire a co-op to refactor some of the uglier code. Supervising the work (for free) is the biggest problem, get past that and it’s easy.
Possible called it a micro-grant and let the student work from home? It should be ‘tangible’ work, that can be monitored.
Use it for a couple development machines, or a front end web proxy or other component of the wiki system. Its tempting to wait for the 100% ideal use for the money however since you do want it spent, the lesson might be to just spend it now on something less than ideal.
The simplest way to spend the money is never the easiest. There seems to be various ways they could handle this.
If they have a contest for best plug-ins, etc, they could hire a lawyer to review the contest details for legalities as well as review their license for the project to make sure it is fully within the realm required.
They could use the money to better promote the project. AdWords, PPC, etc., all would make use of the money to make the project bigger.
However, there was one suggestion thus far that really would make this project a bigger project without making the money directly change it. Purchase another computer, and bring in local high school kids to work part-time on this project. In a way, they could do this at home, however, this would be a learning experience for everyone. Use the money for transportation, items, another computer, etc all to allow the project to not grow bigger by users, but grow bigger by the experience of working with and on the project.
I think next time you give money, you need to give out a certain boundary of the cash use…$1,000 for marketing to an OSP, $1,000 for server upgrades, $1,000 for legal costs, etc.
I think the problem is Italy; I’m Italian and live in Italy, so I know what I’m talking about.
It is almost impossible for any individual to put up a contest in italy, too many complicated laws to fight against…
I think the simpler thing he could is to work on the project full time for a while, that is 5000$/his_daily_rate_at_work days, or hire someone to do so.
I’m late to the commenting, so nobody will ever read this, or it’s a dupe, but I’m not reading through all the comments to try and figure that out.
They should pay people to set up a ScrewTurn Wiki site of their own. Have a contest. Top site gets $1000, then $500, then $100 to a bunch of little guys, and maybe even some smaller prizes. Make the contest go on for a year, to see who can accumulate the most content, users, and also judge things based on originality.
The best thing they could ask for is for more people to be using their product. More real world testing, more motivation for people to send in patches, more reason for other companies to put ads on their site.
Um, I have an open source project. I would happily take the $5k - I’d use it as encouragement to keep developing open source projects and would probably pay down my loans.
Although, since I am the sole maintainer/developer of my project, maybe I would feel less guilt using it as personal payment than I would if I had a huge development team.
You hit the oldest and most pervasive problem in philanthropy: What to do with the money?
It’s not an easy problem to solve, ever. The problem is compounded by the fact that solving the problem takes time, which effectively eats into the contribution. Effective charitable organizations try to minimize their administrative costs, but they don’t eliminate administration.
What you’ve set up is a charitable organization that has no administration, that the money goes unused (or is used poorly) shouldn’t be a surprise.
If you’re serious about letting the project organizer spend it on beer, then why not just send him $5,000 worth of beer? I imagine that it’s because you’re not sure that beer is what he really wants or needs.
But figuring out what the .Net open source community really wants or needs will take time and, yes, money. (There are a lot of good ideas in the comments, but to know which ones are actually good requires testing.)
Finally, much of the problem here is a matter of scale. at $5,000 a pop, with distributed administration, admin costs will eat significantly into each grant. If, however, you increase the size of a grant you can benefit from economies of scale.
So here’s my suggestion. Save your money. Don’t give out $5,000 grants. Save it up and help found an organization dedicated to supporting the .Net open-source community.
Most open source projects are poorly documented, no one likes to do that, it’s a chore. In other words, outsource the thing they lack the most, that the least amount of people want to do, and that has the biggest gains for the world (including the person donating).
But whatever you decide, I would suggest being specific about it. For example if you just give money, then it might be too big a decision involving too many people (who should get the money, who should we fly, where will the party be, who do we hire, etc.). If you specifically assign it to a task, it’s delegated for the project and there are no hurt feelings
Boy, I would be glad to get even one tenth of that prize. The project I’m working on (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Kosmos) needs a lot of quite fat and expensive books on computer graphics and cartography. And I would also like to host a web map.
My vote goes for branding and a lack of ads. I’m not intimate with the project other than hearing about it here, but when I visit the page I’m immediately drawn to the distracting ad. $5k could pay ad costs for awhile, and certainly produce some branding which all projects need.
I have to agree with those above in saying this is not the worst outcome. When something comes up, and it will, it’ll be covered by Coding Horror.
…btw, in reading comments, people are horrifically abusive. I have no idea how you handle it every day Jeff.
They should pay someone to set up a bug tracking system (bugzilla or whatever) for this project, for replacement of the actual way of bug reporting/tracking/solving, which is a forum section. That person should also migrate the bug reports in the forum to the new platform. That would improve the usability of the project, and the developers own way of handling and keeping track of bugs.
As alternatives, make a bug squashing contest with the money going for the guy that solves more (reported) bugs in one defined month. Or pay someone to do the translation to one still not supported language (noticed that there’s no Portuguese support yet, for instance). Now, you need to have in mind that spending money also takes time If they don’t want to spend that time, then suggest to use that money to finance other Open Source project - they’re using phpBB, an phpBB is trying to get money by displaying advertisements, so maybe they could use that money to place an ad on phpBB website. And they use an wordpress blog with a theme made by Fahlstad.se - which is asking for PayPal donations - so they could always give them the money. Or - heck - give the money to any other open source software they like, as they seem fit.
On open source projects and money (in general), I must say that I don’t really see that this example can be taken as conclusive. I have some examples of open source projects that make good use of the money given to them, and others that actually are in need of money to do some things. In doubt, you can always help the Free Software Foundation, for instance. Recently a Google SoC-like event started in Portugal, where money is the reason for 10 new Open Source projects.
Most open source projects are lacking in documentation, and are therefore only used by experienced developers. Hiring a technical writer to produce good, quality documentation would be an excellent use for the funds.
Simply sitting on the money may be one of the best possible things to can do with such a sum - saving for a rainy day, if you like. Having funds that can be deployed rapidly during unforeseen circumstances can help to reduce the impact of potential threats to the stability and continuity of a project, and is a tell-tail sign of a mature, forward-looking community.
One common scenario that free software projects encounter is legal threats from opportunistic companies and poisonous individuals. I’m not thinking so much of the large patent trolls or the giant software behemoths on their annual reign-of-terror against which a small sum will provide inadequate protection, but rather the threats from the smaller imps which can still have a significant negative effect by wasting the project leaders’ time and energy that would better be spent on coding and project management.
I have on a couple such occasions put donations to my projects to good use to publicly rebut idle threats. I’d rather invest a small amount towards some well-written legal advice than waste time arguing perpetually in matters about which I have only limited authority.
Like most free software developers, I do not expect payment as compensation for the time spent on my own projects. If this were the case I would have abandoned them long ago since there is no conceivable way that I am likely to receive the amount I would expect for upholding the long-term responsibility to fix bugs and protect people’s investment in the project by adding such new functionality necessary to maintain its relevance in the marketplace. It would surely make more sense to be paid on contract for programming somebody else’s project (commercial or otherwise) where the responsibility ceases as soon as the money stops coming in!
Essentially, I enjoy working on free software projects for a variety of non-commercial reasons that I’ll not enumerate here. I wholeheartedly agree that the life-blood of free software is the developer time that can be volunteered to it, and this is a precious commodity. I have on several occasions used lump sum donations in exchange for my time that I would otherwise have been required to place into something more mundane, for instance to pay for a garage to fix the car (instead of doing it myself) so that I could spend the weekend coding on project - essentially buying back my own time!
I think that the above scenario represents another good use of rainy-day donations that the benefit of a free software project, although I know other (more ascetic) developers that would be quick to disagree.
In my opinion not spending the money isn’t a bad thing at all. Eventually they will have expenses, be it hardware, a designer, furniture, office space or a library of Jeff’s recommended readings. Until then, let the money collect interest, why hurry to spend it right away?
I’d go with the hardware suggestion, if he wanted to (or felt an obligation to) spend it on something directly related to the project. Otherwise what OSS thrives on most is the people involved, so how about a good holiday as a personal reward for the people involved?
