Money in communities
From Community Leadership Summit Wiki
Money and community
Or: How to manage paid and unpaid contributors, and spend money to support your community without damaging it.
- Organiser: Dave Neary
Problem statement: Companies or non-profits often have some money to spend on the support of their mission. What are the best practices for spending that money in a way which does not damage the dynamics of your community? What are the worst practices to avoid?
It's important to understand why someone contributes to the project before throwing money at the community. What is their motivation? How do you value their contribution? What is the pain point that you might be able to help with?
Some examples of ways to support your community without paying people:
- Buy laptops or hardware
- Pay for travel to conferences
- Awards - public recognition of effort without any tangible value
There can be a problem avoiding a sense of entitlement - it is not desirable to go from a situation where a community member appreciates your support to a situation where they feel hard done by if they are not supported.
Some situations where hiring people might be appropriate:
- Original role has outgrown volunteer community
- Changing project requires new skills in the project
Some roles where paying money (in a software project) does not typically materially affect the community's intrinsic motivations:
- Event organisation
- System administration
- Relationships management
- Administration
- Lawyers
- Accountant
- Business development
- Marketing & press relations
- Documentation
In brief, roles where getting volunteers is difficult.
Transparency is essential when dealing with volunteers. Example: savannah (from FSF) was cracked, and taken off-line for 5 days, while the system was audited. One email was sent to the community. Result: gna was forked from Savannah, since there was insufficient communication on the issue when the problem arose.
Zenoss spend money on community essentially in 3 ways: community manager (community enabler), upstream project sponsorship (here, now it's your problem how to spend the money) and infrastructure & community support.
Paying someone who was previously an unpaid volunteer is dangerous - the overall amount of contribution may not increase (in fact, there can be a reduction in contribution from other volunteers), and the motivations of the volunteer change - and if salary stops, the person may stop contributing.
Google Summer of Code cited as a good way to spend money: small amount of money, for a short amount of time - it encourages uninvolved people to get involved, has an exceptional prize at the end (the t-shirt) and provides a sufficient impulse to create a sense of membership in the projects concerned, without creating the sense of entitlement of a salary.
WikiAnswers: experience with hiring volunteers to do community enablement and moderation, but now feel like it's not giving a good return, but the choices they have now are all somewhat unsatisfactory - hire in non-volunteers, running the risk of disgruntled volunteers, or continue hiring volunteers with a low return on investment.
Sometimes you want to hire older community members because the cost of replacing their knowledge if they went away is so big. Hiring people becomes an option when life is preventing key contributors from contributing. One option proposed: have hires/expenditures decided by a community council, rather than by the company spending the money.
Core lesson from political parties and other grass roots organisations: hire enablers for your community, and ensure that they have the tools they need, rather than directly paying the people working on your core mission. For software projects, that means paying more for administrative staff and other roles where there are not many volunteers, to provide the volunteers with everything they need to get the job done.
--Dneary 23:09, 18 July 2009 (UTC) --Paper writing service
