Clojurians Log v2

Are any of you considering becoming a board member for Clojurists Together? https://www.clojuriststogether.org/news/clojurists-together-board-nominations-and-annual-members-meeting/

Not really, in the sense that I think the current board seems to be doing a good job, so nothing I’d want to change there. Of course, one could consider it, to ensure that the current direction will be followed.

@slipset The other board is stepping down

right.

TL;DR or something.

I would have thunk that it would have been nice to have 50% of the board stepping down as to ensure some continuation. Maybe they’re doing that?

Which they do.

Seems so

Maybe there can be a tighter collaboration between clj-commons and CT, which is why they probably need you ;P

Conflict of interest?

Or policy? Maybe one of the four projects can be from clj-commons to ensure the future if important libs?

But yeah, one area that I see that could be improved is that the grants now don’t fit my use case.

Not sure I’m in the target audience, but I think there is an area which is more covered by the Cognitect sponsorship model than the Clojurists Together model.

As in: continuing sponsorship vs 3 months? I get that yes

You could argue that the stuff that I do for clj-commons could have been supported by Clojurists Together, but their grant modeling doesn’t quite fit.

Yes, exactly.

I also think that would be something they could consider: ongoing sponsorships

And I believe there are a lot of project which would potentially fall into the ongoing sponsorship thingy.

So, important project which are mature and which don’t need a big push.

If I would have somewhere between 5k and 10k of continuing sponsorships I would dedicate my full time to OSS I think

I have an impression that this is how the FSF might have worked at some point. The maintainer of eg emacs or bash has a salary or some such from the FSF.

So, just to pick an example. You could imagine giving James Reeves an ongoing lump of money for maintaining Ring.

Rather than sponsoring him “just” for making Ring 2.0

Yes. Also I was hesitant to apply for funding, since I had already done clj-kondo and babashka in my spare time for a long time, and funding meant I would have to double that effort during this 3 months? Initially I declined because I didn't want that pressure.

So what crossed my mind then was: why don't projects get funding for work they already have done. But I can see from their perspective that it's not how it works.

But ongoing sponsorship would mean more constant maintenance (which honestly the people behind these projects are already doing, except for the projects that went to clj-commons)

So maybe CT can choose, for a certain period or so, some projects that they sponsor for, say 500-1000 dollars a month for maintenance (this can be 6 maintenance projects vs 1 project for 3k a month) for a year instead of 3 months

D*mn, I just nominated myself. Thanks for the push @borkdude and @martinklepsch.

Luckily I’m in a overrepresented group (white, male, middleaged) so I’ll probably not get elected 🙂

Hmm, maybe I’m not middle aged any more, just old, and thus under-represented?

@slipset Btw, about conflict of interest: you are representing the interest of the community, I think, more than yourself with clj-commons, since what does it get you, if one of the clj-commons projects gets funding.

Maybe clj-commons and CT can become just one thing / legal entity / together with clojars. I don't see a problem with that

heck, just rename the repo to clojurists-together

If I’m the maintainer of a funded project, then it would put me at conflict I guess.

yeah, but you are more the coordinator than the maintainer of most projects, I assume

True, but maybe the coordinator got funded 🙂

Anyways, there are ways to deal with this. In government, our representatives have conflicts of interest all the time, they just need to be transparent about it and step away from the processes where there are such conflicts.

Anyway, thanks for considering that position: I think you are a wise man who I would trust in such a role to make the best decision for the community.

🙏

That's an interesting discussion. As the maintainer of liberator if have the problem that I have no idea how important/essential it really is for the community. I'm staying away from applying for funding because I think other projects are more important. I'd prefer if companies making money using it would pay me a little free, best would be monthly. That would naturally scale with the adoption and thus "importance" of my work. But most companies don't have a way to spend 5€ a month so some entity. The accounting overhead etc.

Github sponsors is now a possible channel, or OpenCollective

It will just be a part of their Github bill

so basically no overhead

> Not sure I’m in the target audience, but I think there is an area which is more covered by the Cognitect sponsorship model than the Clojurists Together model. Big +1, I think smaller more targeted funding is something that could be done better by Clojurists Together. That said it also requires more work per $ distributed.

Great to hear you nominated yourself @slipset, you’re a great fit IMHO

Thank you :)

I think a lot of people on this channel would fit well.

Glad I brought it up then 😄

pats himself on the back

I guess the model proposed above could be fairly easily implemented by opening an opencollective, people donate money to it and the opencollective distributes that money again via Github sponsors or other opencollectives. But what would motivate people to donate to the "super" opencollective instead of directly to the OSS devs?

In that sense the current CT still adds value because it's different

Maybe the supercollective could be something for the use case: company X wants to donate 1k of money to Clojure OSS but don't want to think about it too much. The supercollective figures out where the money goes?

Like an index fund

Both Ardoq and I are CT members. I prefer giving a lump sum to one org rather than managing sponsorship of the different projects I may or may not currently be using.

So, +1 for the super collective.

Yeah, I think people have different preferences and it’s nice that CT allows the more “into a general bucket” type contribution

Maybe CT could maintain an index of essential libs/projects that people can vote on, for general ongoing smaller amounts of funding

or the supercollective

that’s an interesting idea

And the voting would only be open to people who donate

and also CT could distribute money via Github sponsors for that kind of stuff

Maybe we should have something like a lein-donate plugin that would telling you where you can donate?

I think it’s difficult to have a large group of people re-vote every quarter, my impression is already that the surveys have somewhat limited response rates

@ordnungswidrig just go to the Github profile and hit the donate button

(assuming everyone is on Github, but Gitlab may have something similar, dunno)

As you said, companies don't want to think about it too much, so "lein donate" could lookup the donation infos for the libraries and orchestrate everything for you. Can be in github, directly per paypal or CT, FSF. I think that would be smart. Or something like the OSS superfund where a company pays X per month and depending on the information collected from all of you projects (project.cjs, pom.xml, package.json) it would distribute accordingly. :thinking_face:

that would make leftpad rich, and it's a lousy library ;)

I think Github is already doing something like this btw, by looking at your pom.xml to suggest projects to fund

Hehe npm donate --exclude leftpad