Proposal: Grant program and purpose-bound funding - #270
Conversation
Perhaps not all listed, but: - Changed profit -> income - Linked to foundation by-laws for purpose quote - Changed "Well-known community members receive grants" -> "Confidence in the team being able to deliver by showing previous evidence of that" - Clarified that companies can be the recipient of funds for contributors, but contributors are individuals (or teams of multiple) - Also have an email address as alternative to the contact form - Also send team initiatives to interested companies, not just grants, for feedback phase - Evaluators get paid 5% of milestones, are required to submit evaluation report - Clarify that any necessary grant proposal PMs are part of the grant budget itself - Clarify that spending on grant evaluators and grant improvements does not come from ear-marked funds - SC decides which grant proposals are accepted - Make it possible to only return part of initiative funding if not all could be allocated to the dedicated purpose
Don't have time to list everything, but mostly minor changes - Don't imply this is only for "major improvements", change to "Nix ecosystem improvements" - Clarify that funding is not limited to official projects
Minorly revised with @infinisil
fricklerhandwerk
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fricklerhandwerk
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I think this is a very good idea overall, and the rough structure seems sound. It's a miniature version of what the European Commission does. If the costs and benefits of doing such a thing are well understood, this can be a good mechanism for coordinating action that would otherwise not happen.
The only thing I'd caution against is assuming that the capacity to operate such a scheme will magically appear out of the blue. This needs considerable up-front investment from everyone involved, and quite a bit of time for building experience and routines, including those to trust and delegate and exercise the control mechanisms outlined here. What may help bootstrapping it is managing expectations with all parties: Initially we can expect that sponsors won't get a good bang for their buck, implementors and reviewers won't get good rates, organisers will do serious work on their free time, balls will get dropped, and there won't be too many exciting success stories for the general audience of users or maintainers. But that's how things go and will be fine if it's approached as a learning process aimed at getting it right eventually.
cafkafk
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cafkafk
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I already gave feedback in the call yesterday, so I've approved it. I'd still like to see more teams feedback of course
| A grant wave is 3 months long, comprised of two phases, and executed by the board or someone delegated: | ||
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| - Wave start: Widely announce the new wave, including: | ||
| - Decided by the board: how much funds (and how they're ear-marked, if at all) are available to be allocated. This generally includes part of the income and ear-marked funds. |
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I think it would be better not to use "decided" with the board. Maybe "calculated" or "tabulated"?
lisanna-dettwyler
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lisanna-dettwyler
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Nothing especially stands out to me as problematic, but I think @fricklerhandwerk made excellent points.
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@fricklerhandwerk @SomeoneSerge Thanks for the feedback, we'll consider it for the next revision. To leave more room for other people I'd like to request you continue your discussion among yourself in an out-of-band channel for now. |
Address feedback that: - 5% evaluator overhead would take away from the already-small 10% management overhead for initiative funding, and would eat into foundation reserves when there's no initiative funding at all. - Make it more explicit and realistic how evaluators are appointed - Internally budget an extra 5% for evaluator funding - This means there's less available for the grant proposals themselves - Propogate 5% overhead to initiative funding - Have a list of trusted evaluators decided by SC - Board assigns evaluator from the list
The main points we need to preserve is that teams can one person, and that we need a dedicated contact person.
- Rename it to purpose-bound funding, less confusion with team initiatives - Add an extra 20% maintenance overhead for purpose-bound funding for grants only, to encourage funding team initiatives - Wording improvements
- Encourage direct contracts - Add to the motivation reasons for not having direct contracts - Make it clearer that purpose-bound funding from companies for the grant program or team inititatives is not a donation
infinisil
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tomberek
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tomberek
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Looks good, just would like to balance out the criteria with positive reasons as well.
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| ([source](https://excalidraw.com/#json=ibw0fNwkkGuL1QGhAhVIx,cJ-7--yHQVGMEH3Wfcj08A), make sure to update the source link when changing anything) | ||
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| ## SC evaluation criteria and process |
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Most of this section goes over reasons to reject; harms and their various categories. Recommand having at least a section of reasons to accept; positive reasons about evaluating benefits of a proposal in terms of accomplishing the Foundation's goals or being in line with the Values.
Otherwise. Looks good overall!
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Me and @Ra33it0 have now made a number of revisions based on the feedback so far. I encourage everybody to re-read the proposal in full, but a notable point is that we've strengthened the team initiatives concept in comparison to grant proposals: Purpose-bound funding for grant proposals now has an additional 20% maintenance and 5% evaluation charge (in addition to 10% for management), while purpose-bound funding for team initiatives only has the 10% for management. Furthermore, funding for team initiatives is encouraged to be recurring instead of one-time. In general I'd also like to point out that this proposal is not perfect, and will need changes over time. While we try to be as forward-looking as possible, at some point it's better to try something out and iterate on it with real-world data, instead of never getting it out of the discussion phase. |
8 participants
In recent months, primarily the NixOS Foundation board members, me and @Ra33it0, have been drafting this proposal to fill some gaps in the NixOS Foundation's funding model. Note that this is not yet fully board or SC approved, which we'll need to get before this is implemented.
Brief summary
Motivation:
There are two inter-related parts to this proposal:
Current status
If we need to add more context behind individual parts, we'll add this on demand.