Hi all,
Last month, the team members meeting raised the question of team funding.
While there are a lot of open questions (and budget constraints) that make any substantial funding premature at that point, something that was reported is that a bunch of team members end up paying for small services from their own pockets or avoiding them because getting it reimbursed by the foundation is complex. Examples include the newsletter service of the marketing team (currently paid for by @garbas), lightweight video editing for the documentation team (currently not done because of the cost), etc.
This is problematic because people already donating their time shouldn’t have to also pay out of their pocket for community work.
This is also problematic because it means that potentially critical parts of our infrastructure get owned by individuals (with the risk of them vanishing for any reason).
To alleviate that without having to build a too formal system, we’ve decided to allocate an initial budget of 100€/month to each established team (mentioned in Nix Community | Nix & NixOS) for this kind of minor expense.
Spending of that budget is at the discretion of the teams.
The foundation has prioritized structuring and then proposing a more formal fundraising effort for the community. We hope this will positively affect the amount we can allocate.
Further, we will be releasing the financial reports in the coming weeks.
Q/A
I am spending money, or want to, as part of my community team’s work. How can I have it paid for by the Foundation?
- If this is a one-off expense, paying for it and submitting an expense on Open Collective to get reimbursed is simplest.
- If this is a regular expense (service subscription), or you can’t advance the funds, you can open an issue on the issue tracker asking the Foundation to pay directly for it.
I’m not part of a team. Can I use such a budget for a project that I think is relevant to the community?
For practical reasons, this budget is restricted to established community teams.
If you think your project is worthwhile, you can ask the most relevant team to pay for it or rally other members to create a new team if the work doesn’t fall into the existing team’s responsibilities.
There might be an established grant program oriented towards individuals for specific projects in the future, but this is not what the current budget is about.
Where can I see how teams use their budget?
The Foundation will keep track of the budget of the different teams internally and publish that as part of its regular financial report.