Next Steps for Funding Contributors
Over the last few months, our system for compensating core contributors has proven effective. We've built a sustainable foundation that recognizes the invisible labor that keeps the project running. Now, it's time to look ahead.
Expanding Rewards Beyond Core Maintenance
While the current program rewards essential maintenance tasks (reviews, triage, releases), we want to broaden our scope. The next step is to reward the people doing the work that moves the project forward — fixing bugs, implementing features, and improving the user experience.
The Ideal: Targeted Donations
In a perfect world, we'd enable donors to fund specific issues or features directly. Someone could say, "I'll donate $50 toward fixing this bug," or "I'll help fund this feature I really want."
At this time, OpenCollective doesn't offer targeted donations, and previous third-party tools designed for this purpose have either been discontinued, changed direction in problematic ways, or mismanaged funds. To avoid potential risks and additional administrative overhead, we're not pursuing targeted donations right now. That said, we'll keep evaluating this option and revisit it if a reliable solution becomes available in the future.
A Practical Alternative: Points for Feature Work
If targeted donations aren't possible, the next best approach may be to extend our existing points-based system for core maintainers. Each merged pull request could earn the author a fixed number of points. This approach encourages contributors to submit smaller, more focused pull requests rather than large, hard-to-review ones.
At the end of each month, we'll calculate the points earned by each contributor from all eligible activities—including merged pull requests, code and docs reviews, and triaging issues. Each person's payout will be proportional to their total points out of everyone's combined score for the month. To reflect the broader range of rewarded work, we're increasing our monthly funding pool from $1,000 to $2,000.
This model keeps things transparent and simple while rewarding real work from across the community.
Funding all contributors
There's strong interest in compensating everyone who contributes meaningful work. However, we also have a valid concern that broad payments might encourage low-quality or superficial pull requests. We need to find a balance between being open to more contributors and maintaining quality.
Steps we plan to take:
Donating a portion of funds to upstream projects or well-maintained plugins that our project depends on.
Using a nomination-based system (similar to how we distribute swag) to recognize and reward active contributors.
For non-maintainers:
Consensus is leaning toward nominations and issue bounties rather than tracking every single contribution.
There's an open question on how to implement bounties efficiently without adding heavy administrative overhead. We're open to hearing all ideas in this domain!
Share Your Thoughts
We'd love to hear what you think. Does this direction make sense to you? Should we move forward with it?
All feedback is welcome — your input helps shape how we fund and sustain this project.