Write blog post about contribution tracking

[vladh]

I had a lovely conversation with Mary Hubbard at WordCamp. I asked whether cash payments to maintainers could be recognised as part of Five for the Future. In addition to advancing our mission of getting maintainers paid, this would create cool partnership opportunities between WordPress and the Pledge.

Mary said this is definitely something WordPress leadership is willing to consider, but that a problem needs to be solved first — the problem of contribution tracking.

Currently, we ask companies to pay maintainers, but we have no visibility over what work that money ends up enabling. There seem to be two possibilities here:

1. Chosen bounties — Maintainers advertise which work needs to be done, and how much money it would take to do it. Companies pay the maintainers, and ask that they payment be put toward a certain task.
2. Allocation transparency — Some time after maintainers have received a contribution, they publicly explain which tasks they managed to fund using that contribution, or using a set of contributions. However, companies have no say in which tasks funds go towards.

Because the Pledge requires no-strings-attached payments, option (1) would not count towards the Pledge. But option (2) would.

So, a system that is compatible with the Pledge, and a good fit for Five for the Future, would have to:

1. Be no-strings-attached — maintainers merely post transparency reports about which funding enabled which work, approximately
2. Incorporate a proposal for contribution tracking — with many sources of funding, and many contributors, how can we know which funding enabled which work?

If we had some good thoughts about this, we could write a blog post with our ideas, and then reach out to Mary to offer our suggestions. Mary said she is willing to keep this conversation going with us.

This problem of tracking contributions enabled by funding isn't trivial to solve, but it's come up before anyway, so let's think about it.

Resources:

• GrimoireLab

[gusaus]

Mary said this is definitely something WordPress leadership is willing to consider, but that a problem needs to be solved first — the problem of contribution tracking.

Not only it it outlined as a key component in the roadmap/canvas shared in WordPress Slack (copied below), it sure seemed like Mary was interested in prioritizing when Courtney asked for Matt's support during the WordCamp Q&A in Basel.

Contribution Tracking System

The Contribution Health Dashboards project, using tools like Bitergia to track various types of contributions, could be expanded to include an enhanced credit system. This tracking system would measure contributions across code, documentation, event participation, and financial support, creating a more holistic view of the contributor ecosystem. Specific functionality could include:

• Automated Crediting System: Create an automated system to recognize contributions of both individual contributors and their organizational sponsors, and to begin measuring the contribution ecosystem that supports WordPress.
• Individual Contributor Recognition: Recognize individual contributors for their work across various areas, including code, documentation, events, and more.
• Organizational Sponsor Recognition: Recognize contributions made by organizations, showcasing their support within the ecosystem.
• Financial Contributions: Enable financial contributions to be recognized and integrated into the contribution credit system.

So, a system that is compatible with the Pledge, and a good fit for Five for the Future, would have to...

...enable financial contributions to WordPress core and community initiatives in a transparent, automated, and scalable way. As mentioned in our Slack discussion, extending Five for the Future by adopting Open Collective and leveraging contributor dashboards were priorities on the Sustainability team roadmap and I was having multiple conversations with leadership including:

• multiple executive directors (including several conversations with Josepha in Open Collective Slack around the time when she posted about sustaining and growing the project.
• the leaders of Five of Five for the Future; including several hours spent with Hari at WCUS and a couple calls thereafter
• the project co-founder via several Twitter threads and his conversations with project and program leadership

Even before the Sustainability team was shut down we began redirecting discussions about implementation and continuing the work started by Hari into #five-for-the-future (WordPress Slack) and compiling goals, recommendations, and implantation steps in a canvas and google doc.

With regards to how Open Source Pledge (and other partners) can support the effort - I think having key contributors involved will strengthen our case for getting the funding mechanism approved that will enable organizations to support a team of independent contributors AND receive credit for making the pledge (if they meet the criteria).

[chadwhitacre]

Foundations and package repos are the two basic avenues for other ecosystems. Does that map to WP? Whether FAIR or WP's OG package manager, could that be used as the basis for distributions through Thanks.dev / OSC / GHS?

[gusaus]

As mentioned in related Slack discussions, I think we should hold off writing blog posts until adoption/integration of Open Source Pledge is on the roadmap for contribution crediting systems for WordPress (see my previous comment for context) and Drupal (via the Innovation Hub).

As both are priorities of CMS Makers, a working group consisting of contributors/supporters from those ecosystems and open source sustainers (like The WPCC, GitHub, Sustain, Open Source Collective/Ecosyste.ms, Open Source Pledge, etc.) we 'should' have capacity to embed the pledge into projects that power about 45% of websites and have economies of over 600 billion (according to my friend ChatGPT).

We do that and there will be great source material for a variety of blog posts, interviews, videos, and award shows.

[gusaus]

@chadwhitacre In an attempt to capture more related Slack discussion (before the logs disappear), here's a variation of what I was riffing on in this ethical business thread.

Drupal has such an established culture of reciprocating with time/code, I'm finding it difficult to transfer that into reciprocating with cash as well.

Reason is the incentive structure has been based on non-monetary contributions (similar situation in WordPress) but there are efforts in both communities to enable and incentivize financial contributions by adopting/extending contribution crediting systems

• Contribution Health Dashboards as a key component in Five for the Future (see this comment and the entire scoping discussion for context)
• Innovation Hub to extend the Drupal contribution crediting system (see the open collective campaign for additional detail and a way to fund)

We can integrate Open Source Pledge into those systems by:

• providing organizations automated ways to opt-into the pledge
• displaying logos and badges on multiple platforms (see Leaderboard or Funders Dashboard for Ecosyste.ms Funds ecosyste-ms/funds#236)

We can make those integrations possible by creating curated Ecosystems funds and directing supporters (of those ecosystems and Open Source Pledge) to pledge to the following:

• Explore how Ecosyste.ms Funds can help support Drupal community initiatives, working groups, and teams ecosyste-ms/funds#256
• Explore how Ecosyste.ms Funds can help support WordPress community initiatives, working groups, and teams ecosyste-ms/funds#255

Just the latter should bring the pledge to a variety of organizations that fuel about 45% of the web.

Think its something worth contributing to (time and/or funds)?