New funding concepts, funding toolchain for GOSH?

General Funding opportunities
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#1

Hi all, some good links through the Global Open Ag Tech (GOAT) community.

https://experty.io --> remember @ryanfobel and joel (not sure you’re forum ID), we talked about the GOSH ‘bat phone’ where you could always get an expert on the link for questions about a specific topic? Well, this is kind of it. I was wondering if you could do group rates, like $20/hr for this group of people, but $100/hr for everyone else. That’d be awesome.

Also https://tidelift.com/… been around, but worth investigating.

I feel it might be time to try to assemble our internal funding toolchain… there may be enough options out there now that we can do it… it’ll just take some thinking about how they apply to GOSHers.

I’d love to have a call regarding this if folks are interesting - reply if you are interested!

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#2

I would be in favor of this program. One of my dreams is to assemble teams around the world to help with environmental issues/investigations for people. I could see a need for the service you are suggesting, particularly with the type of people in GOSH.

#3

Yeah I think it would be a cool program!

#4

hi all
I would love to discuss about this.
I have been thinking about this since some previous conversations Creating a self-sustained entity to support GOSH initiatives
I was interested on understanding a possible distribution/support model for local labs in coordination with and support of a global community.
There are also a few issues related with this topic in the gosh roadmap

#5

Hi all, I am working @experty.io – We have some initiatives to promote open contributions & open knowledge. Let’s what we can do together. Can you message me in PM. Thanks. Greg

#6

I think people with the funds, and an unanswered question paying experts for their time is completely fair. However, our community is about using open knowledge to create more open knowledge. We need to consider how these things align. experty.io may be a good solution for some, but I worry that only the person paying gets the knowledge, and many in the community are unfunded, and many have the same questions.

Personally, I think it would be nice to have a platform something like a forum, you ask your questions. You don’t have to pay, but you (or others) can also pay an set a bounty on a good answer. This way we can encourage open knowledge, but also pay people for their time. It is only an idea, I do not have the time to make it a reality

@Gregbt Is this idea something experty.io would be able to help us do?

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#7

Well you need to find a use case that matches your values. One way can be a “smart donation” to the community. People who would like to help the community can donate fund via a question / answer session with some high skilled community members. We currently have some projects around this model (can’t disclose them here).
Donate model to support open initiatives is working, reward donate via knowledge sounds fair to me. I am personally a donator to various projects, I would be happy to be able to discuss with some members of the projects while donating. What do you think ?

#8

I suppose other members of the community need to tell us what they would be happy with but in both roles of learning and sharing. And then we can discuss what platform could provide what we need/want.

I suppose for me an idea platform would be:

  • Searchable by all (even non-community members)
  • Accessible to all (even by non-community members)
  • Archivable (some way to export saved content, whether that is saved videos of calls with some meta data or whatever)

Obviously I don’t speak for everyone. I am interested to hear what others think.

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#9

I suppose for me an idea platform would be:

Searchable by all (even non-community members)

we have a directory, we can imagine some section with “open-hardware” category
Accessible to all (even by non-community members)
sure
Archivable (some way to export saved content, whether that is saved videos of calls with some meta data or whatever)
recording is not available so far. I don’t have release version candidate for this feature at the moment.

#10

This is interesting… I mean, I actually think we have a lot of knowledge within our community, and it’d be neat to donate consulting time to community funds for people outside the community. I don’t know if those amounts are meaningful, but honestly if we even had 10% of people doing $1000/yr (which could be 5 - 15 hours per person, not a lot) via a program like this… that would be a significant amount of money.

It also leverages our highest value asset (our consulting time) which feels smart.

I strongly agree that it needs to be structured to align with our values, and the outputs should be public. In terms of forums, the best designed question/answer style forum is without a doubt is stackoverflow.com (or the many domain specific implementations of it), though perhaps we just have standard practice in our community that the person doing the consulting notes the results on our own forum in a special section. Not automated but could work.

It also gives a clear pathway to interact with the community for populations who are used to interacting this way… I know that sounds odd, but there are definitely people who are more likely to connect through a consulting relationship that’s paid than by posting for free on the forum. It’s a cultural issue (you could argue it’s dumb)… but it’s real… and if we want to expand it may be necessary to get people’s foot in the door.

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#11

This is a different take on how I had understood the suggestion. I understood it as a way for members of our community to get paid for their time helping others while still providing open knowledge. I am in the fortunate position that I am paid to develop open hardware, I understand that many are not!
The idea of the funds going to GOSH is something that I hadn’t considered. I suppose the fairest thing to do would be for people to choose what percentage they keep/donate.

#12

Just adding another platform to the pot: https://opencollective.com/
Heard good things about this one. @kaspar is using it and maybe could share some insight?

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#13

That one is also being discussed in GOAT, though no one has a lot of experience there either… Kaspar would love to hear more.

#14

thx for sharing @amchagas
just got me inspired aswell to look at. we are in a phase or restructuring hackeria, as an initiative, as a network, as a future vision. we kinda have our 10 year anniversary these weeks, and i wonder a bit how long term such platforms can work. cos we are now looking into where and how to sustainably setup up strucutures and visions for the next 10 years.

greets,
marc

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#15

From @julianstirling

However, our community is about using open knowledge to create more open knowledge. We need to consider how these things align.

I agree - I’d think of this option as one option and not the all-in-one-sustainability solution for GOSH. But still I think it’s a very interesting one for supporting other work that is more difficult to fund, and also for reaching out to some of the possible users that @gbathree mentions here:

It also gives a clear pathway to interact with the community for populations who are used to interacting this way… I know that sounds odd, but there are definitely people who are more likely to connect through a consulting relationship that’s paid than by posting for free on the forum.

The workaround of donors supporting consultation for communities without money is smart - The project gains both advice and visibility.

‘The money goes to GOSH’ part should be discussed, as there’s no structure for that currently.

What about discussing this in the community call? @Gregbt would you like to join there for a discussion?

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#16

PS - Mike Stenta from farmOS and Don Blair made some test pages on opencollective.org … I contributed some money and submitted an expense. Here’s some details on that experience:

  • For open collective, you still need an organization to manage the transactions + cash (a non-profit, or something).
  • Open Collective takes 5% of donations (which is actually pretty comparable to other platforms or non-profits who are fiscal sponsors and take overhead)
  • Anyone can donate to the project ($X / month) similar to Patreon
  • Anyone can submit an expense to the project. The maintainers of the open collective page then approve that expense… if you pay using paypal, it’s pretty seamless - you just click pay expense, put in their email address associated with a paypal account, and poof they are paid. However, if you are paying via check or some other method, basically you still need to do it through the non-profit however you would normally, and just manually maintain the record in open collective.

Summary
I think it’s an extremely transparent and flexible way to manage diverse groups. However, it add’s overhead in terms of cost (5%) and time as compared to just having a traditional fiscal sponsor. Overall, my feeling is IF you can manage all expenses via paypal (which is natively supported)… it’s probably worth it. We would need to maintain an internal governance structure for how decisions are made for spending the money within GOSH (which we’ve discussed), and probably it would still be up to a small group to actually push the ‘pay’ button on expenses within the software, according to the group’s approval.

Thoughts?

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[June] GOSH Community Call - Join us :)
[June] GOSH Community Call - Join us :)
#17

seems similar to open collective, but with no fees

#18

Oops, missed the @ on this for some reason. Opencollective has been handy for Kitspace but as you noticed the fees are relatively high. If you fit into one of the existing does just do everything and gives you a nice overview page which is good for transparency and also allows others to claim expenses.

Liberapay is a good alternative but won’t manage expenses claims I believe.

#19

Hey everybody,

@neuro3en and I recently met for some beers and were talking about GOSH in science and how to improve the visibility of our community in academia. We came up with an idea which is also possibly connected to funding concepts and that’s why I’m posting it here.

What do you think about creating a GOSH affiliation which everybody (but having especially academics in mind) could use in the public to show one’s connection to the community. For academic papers you can have several affiliations and adding one GOSH affiliation when publishing a paper would very likely increase the visibility and (academic) reputation of the community. Apart from that it might also be useful for non-institutional GOSH members to have an affiliation. Here is a similar example of an independent and global research institute.

We already quickly looked into ways to do this. We could easily register an association (NGO) in Germany and would be also eligible to receive funding/donations. Registering such an association doesn’t cost much (not more than 150 EUR) but at least 7 members are needed to do so.

Before I get lost in all the details we imagined …

What do you think? Is it useful or would just feed the shitty part of the academic system which is all about prestige and publications?

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GOSH y GOSH Inc. - Propuesta de debate para la comunidad
Structure + concept for running regional GOSHs
GOSH and GOSH Inc. - Proposal for Community debate
#20

Hello,
Just a quick note to say I find this idea problematic. I’ll shortly write with details of why I think so…
salud!
p

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