Listening to maintainers for the next phase of Clojurists Together

Clojurists Together wants to hear from you, the open source Clojure community about how we can better serve you. You can fill out the survey today.

Background

Now that we’ve been operating as a 501(c)6 for almost a year, we’re wanting to talk to our members and the Clojure open source community about ideas for alternative funding structures.

For most of our life, Clojurists Together has funded projects in 3 month cycles. First for $1,800/month ($5,400/cycle), and then for $3,000 month ($9,000/cycle).

This has been a successful model but we’ve heard from both maintainers and members that they’d like to see us experiment with other funding models. Last year as part of the Summer of Bugs where we funded 7 projects with micro-grants of $500 or $1,000. We’ve also been funding Clojars for $1,500/month.

These experiements have been successful. We’ve improved our processes to make contracts and payments run more smoothly.

Ideas

Some ideas to get you thinking:

• Pay one person $5,000/month for 12 months.
• Pay 10 people $200 each for documentation patches.
• Run a mentoring program where the mentor and mentee each get paid to work on an open source project.
• Let projects choose the intensity of their program, e.g. work full time for one month, or work very part-time for 12 months but still receive the same amount.
• Have Clojurists Together commission work that they (and their members) think is valuable, rather than waiting for projects to apply for funding.

Next steps

If you’re an open source Clojure developer, we want to hear from you in this survey.

If you’re a Clojurists Together member, we also have a private survey that you’ll receive shortly to hear more about what you’d like to see as a member.

If you have thoughts or suggestions and don’t fall into either of those groups, feel free to send them through our contact page. Thanks!