Decide on a funding scheme for the teams

[thufschmitt]

(proposal by @fricklerhandwerk):

Problem

some important work is never done by volunteers because it's too involved or not fun at all

examples:

• writing meeting notes or retrospectives; those are important for visibility, participation, and keeping track of past decisions
• triaging issues and pull requests; this is a boring chore that often can be done by anyone who we trust and has a bit of context, but just takes lots of time as there is lots of stuff out there. it would help using maintainers' attention (our scarcest resource) more effectively
• small-scale investigations into technical subjects; a great way to onboard beginners that can't afford non-trivial volunteer participation
• outreach and fundraising; it's work that many developers don't like or care about, which requires a completely different skill set, and would unlock more volunteer participation and enable large-scale work respectively

Proposal

• foundation allocates a budget for community teams, e.g. 50k EUR
• since the foundation is not supposed to do technical decisions, which involves prioritisation, teams (representatives) decide on an allocation, e.g. 10k EUR/team if there were 5 teams that need funding
  • not all teams need or can meaningfully use funding, e.g. the foundation board or RFC steering committee wouldn't make sense to fund, the documentation team has their own Open Collective project
• each team's budget is only released if the team provides a statement of work to ensure public accountability
  • after that the team is solely responsible for the budget, and the foundation will pay invoices approved by designated team members
• there needs to be some retrospective to compare goals with outcomes

Advantages

• implements the foundation's mission to enable teams
• gets things done that otherwise don't
• can help free team members with more experience from small-impact tasks to do more critical work
• paid work can help onboard new team members
  • can attract people who cannot afford non-trivial volunteer participation -- which is most of people -- and thus increase community diversity
  • open source work boosts job opportunities (which is a good thing in itself) -- it could help team members to eventually fund themselves and stick around as volunteers
• opportunity to create more structure; we need more structure at this scale
  • pull from new team members interested in doing paid work will require making more processes and power structures explicit

Drawbacks, objections

• inherent unfairness: existing teams are self-organised, money gives power to people who just happened to be there, entrenches the current structure
  • see above; it can be used as a forcing function to make processes more explicit and participatory
• the amount of money is too little to get any large-scale or continuous work done
  • but that's not the purpose anyway
• burdens teams with overhead
  • taking funding is not required, it's on the teams to decide

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/is-summer-of-nix-worth-the-money/43856/1