Hello farmOS Community! My gears have been turning lately on how we can put our OpenCollective funds to good use. Historically we’ve tried to focus these funds on non-development efforts to support the community, because development is expensive. But some recent discussion in chat made me think:
@Symbioquine: farmOS needs to be able to stand strongly enough that such a new player would need to justify themselves and their intentions. And it needs to keep accumulating passionate and exceptional community like we find here already.
@mstenta: Agreed.
@mstenta: And the perennial question is: what can we do to stay on that course?
@mstenta: With the resources we have
@mstenta: What broad and fine strokes are the most impactful
@Symbioquine: Yeah, there can be no complacency/stagnation.
@mstenta: And one big challenge we have is: most of our development right now is sponsored, which means that it largely focuses on the use-cases of groups who have money to fund us. That’s not a bad thing, but it doesn’t guarantee that long term and short term strategy is aligned.
@mstenta: And that of course raises the broader question: how do we (as a community) decide what the most impactful long term strategies are for the project as a whole?
@mstenta: I think we have an answer to these questions already. We have an OpenCollective: farmOS - Open Collective. And we have a “funding proposal” policy for proposing/voting on/spending those funds.
@mstenta: We just don’t have enough funds to support big development efforts.
@mstenta: We need fundraising initiatives
@mstenta: Maybe we should propose to spend some of our funds on supporting a fundraising effort
I have little/no experience in “active” fundraising. All of our OpenCollective backer/sponsor growth has been “passive” (organic) thusfar.
What can we do to support a more active campaign to draw backers/sponsors to our OpenCollective?