Discussion: financial sponsorship for the project

[amunchet]

Are there any plans to accept Github sponsors for the trio project/members? Basically I want to buy @njsmith a coffee every month (but other members as well!).

[njsmith]

The "Github sponsors" program is invitation-only. There's a way to apply for an invitation, but I haven't had a chance to fill it out yet...

There are a few different kinds of ways that folks could eventually provide financial support:

• Donations to the project as a whole: in order to do this we have to set up a fiscal sponsorship agreement with some umbrella organization, like the PSF or Open Collective. This is necessary because otherwise "the project as a whole" simply doesn't exist as a legal entity that can accept money. Once that's set up we could potentially have multiple channels (direct donations, tidelift, etc. I'm not sure if Github sponsors can handle donations to organizations yet?)

• Donations to individuals: Liberapay, Patreon, Github sponsors, etc.

• Commercial support agreements: this can't be done by a non-profit so it can't be done by the project itself, but we could potentially advertise folks who are interested in issuing invoices in return for doing maintenance/support/implementing specific features. Sometimes this is an easier way for companies to contribute.

If anyone wants to send me money directly, I have I do have an extremely un-publicized liberapay account, and am also open to consulting agreements.

I'm hesitant to advertise these options though before we have a way to contribute to the project as a whole, because in the long run Trio is intended to be a community project for the public good, not my personal moneymaker. And when it comes to money and credit, people can get hurt pretty easily, so it's important not to do a half-assed job.

Still, this is definitely something that we should move forward on at some point, so we might as well have an open issue to track the progress. And this might as well be that issue :-)

[decentral1se]

Some data points:

• You can add a .github/FUNDING.yml and add up to 4 "Github sponsors" accounts from core members who work on the project. Users can choose to fund whoever through chosen tiers of the profiles.
• Liberapay communities are pretty decent and if you can agree a workable living wage for hours done then you can start to transparently carve up the cash coming in. Check out the liberapay income shares of Mastodon: https://liberapay.com/Mastodon/income/. It's instructive.

Glad to see this ticket raised and I am glad to see the position of public good but that doesn't mean this work has to be done for free. Certainly, this project itself could be proposed for a Github sponsorship profile (not just members can apply) and the tiers could reflect individual/company rates.