RFC: The Ten Rupee FOSS fund

Organisation
1

Funding FOSS projects must be affordable, simple, and convenient. Enter The Ten Rupee FOSS Fund. Are you in ? Say YES to…

  • YES, I will donate at-least 10 rupees a month
  • YES, I can get 2 more of my friends/colleagues/co-workers to donate
  • YES, I can get 4 more to donate
  • YES, I can get 8 more to donate
  • YES, I can get 16 more to donate
  • YES, I can get 32 more to donate
0 voters

Frequently Answered Questions

Q: Why this fund ?
A: Free software isn’t free. It can be inexpensive and sustainable, especially when paid for by a large pool of users. Hence this fund. We encourage you to pay as you please, and raise the bar when you are ready. The minimum bar is Rs 10, which even most students (studying undergrad or above tech courses at-least) can afford.

Q: How will I make the donation/payment ?
A: Using UPI, of course!

Q: Who/what will be funded ?
A: You may choose to specify your favourite projects, or developers. The funding will be based on a community voting system. Everyone who makes at-least a 10 month donation in a “funding season” will get a say in which projects get funded at the end of that “season”.

Q: What are the funding seasons ?
A: Same as what the IMD says: Winter(Dec-Feb/3 months), Summer(Mar-May/3 months), Monsoon(Jun-Sep/4 months), Post-Monsoon(Oct-Nov/2 months)

Q: Will this fund pay money to international projects ?
A: No - but you can fund contributors of such projects who are in India.

Q: Can I donate anonymously ?
A: We intend for this to be compliant with all statutory requirements. So, probably not. It won’t be worth the trouble for us to ensure this.

Q: How will costs of running this fund be collected ?
A: The total fund minus administrative overheads will be the funding pool. Costs include probably a flat accountant fee depending on how many micro-donations need to be accounted for, and logistics costs of payment. These will be documented.

Q: Great. How can I help ?
A: Volunteer below to help with the tech to execute this idea, help get more responses to this survey, or chime in below.

10 Likes
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Thank you for creating this RFC and proposing this idea.

As we discussed during our closing session, the membership model should be “no strings attached” from the perspective of FOSS projects themselves. However, as a foundation, we can still offer meaningful benefits to our members—a model that organizations like the Linux Foundation have successfully implemented.

In our context, potential member benefits could include:

  • Discounted access to IndiaFOSS and other community events
  • Job board access with posting privileges for larger membership tiers or significant contributors
  • Mentorship programs in partnership with participating FOSS projects, similar to the GSoC
  • Educational initiatives for students, such as regular sessions on “Getting Started with Open Source Contributions” (something I could personally facilitate)
  • Virtual town halls for direct engagement with the community and leadership

While these ideas are preliminary and would need refinement to align with FOSSUnited’s mission and context, I believe that memberships are more effective when they provide tangible value to participants.

I’m eager to contribute to this initiative in any capacity, including technical implementation if needed.

6 Likes
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Interesting idea. After I posted the fund I realized it does nothing to get funds for FOSS United itself (one of my GB election TODO items). Thanks for this!

Job board access is certainly something that would be appreciated. Virtual town halls are not well attended right now. You’re of course welcome to contribute to the Educational Initiatives already! (I’m also thinking of some kind of a monthly series, but want to be careful not I don’t spread myself too thin)

One possible thing we can do is offer early (and exclusive) access to members for specific things (e.g. IndiaFOSS tickets). This will require us to figure out thresholds and stuff. There have been some previous attempts at memberships (you may have seen this thread). In general folks having members with “special powers/privileges” (e.g. voting rights/control) is something that has not been seen favourably.

Me wonders if the “Ten Rupee Fund” (TRF) should have like two “boxes” - a projects fund, and a foundation fund. Thoughts ?

This will be useful. @khitab has been quietly cooking up how the TRF might look in terms of flows for the user. Something of a “fake it before you make it” :smiley: We’re certainly looking for technical contributors too.

I’ve been a bit caught up with some other work after IndiaFOSS. I’ll be bringing the TRF up in the next governing board meeting (potentially happening somewhere in the first/second week of next month) to see what the next steps could be. I will keep you posted.

5 Likes
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Thanks. I appriciate the response and everything you have been doing.

Agreed 200%!

I should have been clear, memberships should not have any control over any processes whatsoever. The goal should plainly be “if you are able, contribute to the sustainability of FOSS”.

The incentives can be the foundation’s gesture as an appreciation of the patronage (preferably once it is established either in age of contributions or volume, or similar?), nothing more.

For example, Linux foundation offers discounted rates for taking exams like CKAD to members. I am interested in identifying similar win-wins for the community in our context.

Obviously discounted swag and tickets are immediate things that come to mind. IMHO, we should start there and figure it out more later.

Yes—that’s fair.

Awesome! Looking forward to it. Once it’s open for contributions, I am happy to engage. I am willing to contribute up to 3-4 hours weekly.

Thanks. Looking forward to it.

3 Likes
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It might also be worth discussing how/if TRF can be part of an “individuals component” to FOSS pledge.

6

Absolutely, maybe a user story like:

  • As an individual contributor to TRF, and I am supporting the “projects fund”, I get named the FOSS Pledge signatories.
  • As an individual contributor to TRF, and I am supporting the “foundation fund”, I get named the FOSS Pledge honorable mentions.
1 Like
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FOSS Pledge is made for companies, TRF is designed for individuals - that seems to be the primary dividing line… Single person companies or very small teams is perhaps where we have an overlap ?

Initial thoughts… might be useful to have at-least some cross referencing:

  1. After a professional donates some money via TRF, they could be nudged towards the FOSS Pledge. We could collect a list of affiliations to facilitate useful interactions. (e.g. we could list aggregates against affiliations with significant contributions)
  2. FOSS Pledge could nudge individuals towards TRF
2 Likes
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FOSS Pledge is made for companies, TRF is designed for individuals - that seems to be the primary dividing line… Single person companies or very small teams is perhaps where we have an overlap ?

We’ve been actively discussing an individuals component to the FOSS pledge. At its core the pledge is about people acknowledging their FOSS usage and contributions. There’s no solid reason to keep it restricted to organisations only.

At a FOSS pledge session at the Maintainer Summit, perhaps 30% of the participants said that they can convince their employer to sign up for the pledge, but almost everyone was in favor of an individuals’ pledge that they’d like to sign and spread the word around (including bottoms up at their companies).

Initial thoughts… might be useful to have at-least some cross referencing:

Yep, the individuals component for the FOSS pledge could look like -

  • An annual blog post mentioning the FOSS you rely on and how you contribute back
  • Joining the TRF
1 Like
9

I brought this up in the GB meeting today and got some feedback. This does seem feasible.

One question that came up was who can vote. The overall consensus seems to be “anyone in the community can vote”.

However, which projects should get money can be something that can be sourced partly from the donors themselves. (Think of this as donors giving visibility to their favoured projects) If donors don’t specify this could go into a generic pool to be decided in “some way”

The other thing is about contribution to FOSS United itself. I’m of the opinion that the donor directly decide how to much to contribute to FOSS United (so like two donation amounts - a Project fund and a Foundation fund). Another opinion is that how much should go to FOSS United can also be decided by the community.

PS: Related - we also discussed having a UPI donation (QR code) possibility in meetups and more (@Nemo - but also look at this old forum post)

There was also a short discussion about the quantum we could raise this way, and if it’s worth it. At the minimum it would be a good awareness exercise. I’d dare say also a good indicator of community involvement that we’re able to generate.

Also tagging @mrugesh and @khitab for notification as they’ve raised hands to volunteer towards this.

2 Likes
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Just thinking in terms of the lowest hanging fruits we can pick to get this running i.e the most simplified version of what the TRF could look like -

I feel the easiest and low barrier way is to remove the foundation donation component for now ( as you mentioned, we don’t know if the quantum of money donated will be worth the additional accounting this requires) and keep this for projects only. Voting sounds good but we can also just distribute the entire amount collected every month equally amongst grantees or perhaps “active grantees” (projects that are currently getting a grant from FOSS United). Yes, this does not include new, non-grantee projects that can benefit from the fund. That is a good to have later on once we understand the the numbers better but in the initial stages it may not be worth the effort (compliance and accounting)

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Foundation donation component will be optional. So two input boxes.

Do you have thoughts on what additional accounting this will require? To simplify accounting, we were thinking of a separate bank account for this (FOSS United account, but different). This needs to be estimated next - but I don’t think this will be much - must be done in software only for best results. Will discuss this with some folks too. If the order of this cost is less than ten thousand rupees, then that’s not a big deal.

The other thing is that we have think of this in terms of “number of people involved” rather than quantum of money donated. So, right now if you look at the poll, that’s 17+(52)+(45)+16 = 63 people. Forum may not be representative of this - if we can just reach everyone in the closing note, that’s 200 people. And 10 Rs is minimum, not maximum…

1 Like
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hmm, I still think starting with projects first and then bringing in the foundation component (if the experiment is a success) is the right approach. No strong thoughts though.

Aside, I’m working on a overhaul of the grants program which includes the setting up of a grants WG (@Nemo), creating a grants thesis for the foundation and some process changes.

We’re planning to adopt the fundingjson mechanism for FOSS United grants. Considering how successful the experiment has been as part of FLOSS/fund, I think this will be a great way to enhance discoverability for funding requirements of Indian projects. We can create a directory of “Indian projects looking for funding” like dir.floss.fund and then easily link that with the TRF, FOSS pledge and other “giving-back” programs. Will create a new RFC for the grants overhaul but I wanted to throw this out here so that the question of “how to select projects” can be thought through better.

1 Like