Hi Walt, excellent questions and I am very glad you have brought them up. The entire process is still an experiment that needs our engagement as a community.
What I share below are my personal thoughts only and much of it is just thinking out loud.
I think the governance of decisions regarding how money contributed to the general fund is spent is something that we as a community need to discuss and help reach consensus on. Personally, I would be very happy for this to be allocated to Jeremy or be left at this discretion in light of the enormous amount of work put into the project.
Regarding launching particular projects, I think the first step is for there to be interest from the community. We probably don’t want a plethora of options at Open Collective lest they become difficult to navigate, so at first maybe we need to be somewhat selective about which new projects to support until we have learnt our way around this as a community. I think the primary requirements that might make sense are:
- a well defined user problem or vision of what is desired.
- a threshold of users who express the desire or need for the project and the willingness to work on it or support it, which could be as low a number as we thought appropriate.
- someone (one or more) with good standing in the community who volunteered to govern the project in terms of how it is run, what precisely is being developed and fundraised for, who does the work and who ensures the quality of the work, and how the funds raised are allocated. We need to make sure that any project supported in this manner has a reasonable chance of success.
A secondary requirement would be to find volunteers and/or semi-paid community members to work on the actual implementation.
It definitely seems like there is some interest there, and to try to support an edition via Open Collective would be very interesting. I think a good first step would be for a person or person(s) from the community to take the lead on establishing consensus around what exactly the user needs are and what the requirements are for meeting those needs, to better define the work that needs to happen.
With that in place, it would make sense to then request that the project be added to Open Collective, with that decision perhaps resting with Jeremy (and maybe Boris?). Ultimately it would be good to develop a community governance model for this so that it is the community that makes these judgement calls, following some guidelines and norms that have been established.
I welcome thoughts from everyone else, and in particular from @jeremyruston and @boris.