I think the following suggestion is most likely extremely naive, so please bare with me.
Reading the valid criticism here of such a scheme, why not just approach some contributors, ask them if they would like to contribute more, and offer them short term contracts / rewards for their work?
"We've seen your activity on our issue tracker and we would like to hire you (short term for now) to help us out (home office work). Are you interested, and if so, considering other obligations you might have, how many hours a week would you be able to contribute to the project so we can ballpark a first payment?"
Alternatively you could simply pay for contributions already made to the project. Cherry-picking the contributors you want to see more of seems to be a good system? Even considering the effort this would cause, I do think your idea would be even more cumbersome, as you would have to set up a system to evaluate every single contribution.
I know of a nice open source project, where the lead programmer used part of the project's funding (plus even some of his own assets as far as I know) and more or less out-sourced a lot of work partly to one of the project's most loyal contributors, who he's been working with. Said individual is somewhere from Eastern Europe, where even a "relatively small" amount of money comes a long way. Everyone involved (project lead, the person hired, the community) benefited greatly.
"We've seen your activity on our issue tracker and we would like to hire you (short term for now) to help us out (home office work). Are you interested, and if so, considering other obligations you might have, how many hours a week would you be able to contribute to the project so we can ballpark a first payment?"
I think this only really works when you reach a certain size and/or get lucky with really good early contributors. I did a quick analysis of the repo and this is one year of activity:
Right now it looks like petethepig is doing the lion share of work (switch to the impacts view to see this) and I'm not sure if they have enough previous contributors to really pick from.
Side Note: Don't download my tool as the current docker image has an expired license which I need to sort out when I get the time.
Comments
I think the following suggestion is most likely extremely naive, so please bare with me.
Reading the valid criticism here of such a scheme, why not just approach some contributors, ask them if they would like to contribute more, and offer them short term contracts / rewards for their work?
"We've seen your activity on our issue tracker and we would like to hire you (short term for now) to help us out (home office work). Are you interested, and if so, considering other obligations you might have, how many hours a week would you be able to contribute to the project so we can ballpark a first payment?"
Alternatively you could simply pay for contributions already made to the project. Cherry-picking the contributors you want to see more of seems to be a good system? Even considering the effort this would cause, I do think your idea would be even more cumbersome, as you would have to set up a system to evaluate every single contribution.
I know of a nice open source project, where the lead programmer used part of the project's funding (plus even some of his own assets as far as I know) and more or less out-sourced a lot of work partly to one of the project's most loyal contributors, who he's been working with. Said individual is somewhere from Eastern Europe, where even a "relatively small" amount of money comes a long way. Everyone involved (project lead, the person hired, the community) benefited greatly.
I think this only really works when you reach a certain size and/or get lucky with really good early contributors. I did a quick analysis of the repo and this is one year of activity:
https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?q=wind...
Right now it looks like petethepig is doing the lion share of work (switch to the impacts view to see this) and I'm not sure if they have enough previous contributors to really pick from.
Side Note: Don't download my tool as the current docker image has an expired license which I need to sort out when I get the time.