Sandstorm Community Funding Update

[Jake W]

Hello sandcats!

The Sandstorm community organization side of things has been a little quiet of late, but I wanted to talk about a couple things really quickly. The GitHub Sponsors Matching Fund has ended (even though the GitHub CEO seems to be unaware of this...) and that really means we should figure out a better way to fund Sandstorm development, and see if we can get any sort of interest or investment that might get us resources outside our own little bubble. Note that if you want to continue to fund Ian's various improvements to Sandstorm directly, his GitHub Sponsors page (https://github.com/sponsors/zenhack) is still a really good choice, as there are no fees taken out by GitHub

However, the Sandstorm Community OpenCollective (https://opencollective.com/sandstormcommunity) really should be the foundation of what we do here because it's open and transparent. We currently have $133 US in it, and we've never done anything with it. I have been looking into some opportunities we can take advantage of, but I think any of those will route to OpenCollective, not to individual contributors' GitHub Sponsors pages. At this time, we do not have a particularly formal process for submitting and approving expenses on OpenCollective, and I'm hoping this thread can evoke some consensus on how we should handle it.

When we first talked about raising funds to support community developers contributing to Sandstorm, there was kind of a group of people talking about this and maybe a core circle of people who might have made decisions about how to spend the money. Some of those people are still actively around, some are probably lurking and may respond to this post, and some do not seem to still be here. And hopefully there is some new interest that didn't exist before. But the point is, we do not have an explicit roster of community "members" who could vote on disbursing the community's funds, nor do we have a "leadership" that could make executive decisions on it.

I do not believe that the Sandstorm community is particularly argumentative or combative, and I think we could probably safely handle this on a loose consensus model, where upon a contributor submitting an invoice to the Sandstorm community, we should post it to the mailing list for comment or objection. And if after, for example, two weeks, nobody is strongly opposed to either the worthiness of the contribution or the amount, we approve the transaction an allow it to be paid out. It would make sense to bring a proposal out for discussion in advance to get a general idea if there's support for it on the mailing list before proceeding to work and file an invoice.

There is probably some possible edge cases we could imagine where someone joins the mailing list and tries to block everything as some form of trolling or deliberate obstruction. I think in that case those of us with admin control of the OpenCollective (currently Ian and myself) may reserve the option to make an executive decision, but that would be held as a last resort, and very skeptically used when a conflict of interest is involved. While it may make sense to establish some sort of community leadership group in the future, I'd rather a model where everyone who participates in the Sandstorm community is heard and has a say in how we operate. (Including now, this is very much open for comments!)