Proposal: Grant program and initiative funding#270
Conversation
Perhaps not all listed, but: - Changed profit -> income - Linked to foundation by-laws for purpose quote - Changed "Well-known community members receive grants" -> "Confidence in the team being able to deliver by showing previous evidence of that" - Clarified that companies can be the recipient of funds for contributors, but contributors are individuals (or teams of multiple) - Also have an email address as alternative to the contact form - Also send team initiatives to interested companies, not just grants, for feedback phase - Evaluators get paid 5% of milestones, are required to submit evaluation report - Clarify that any necessary grant proposal PMs are part of the grant budget itself - Clarify that spending on grant evaluators and grant improvements does not come from ear-marked funds - SC decides which grant proposals are accepted - Make it possible to only return part of initiative funding if not all could be allocated to the dedicated purpose
Don't have time to list everything, but mostly minor changes - Don't imply this is only for "major improvements", change to "Nix ecosystem improvements" - Clarify that funding is not limited to official projects
Minorly revised with @infinisil
fricklerhandwerk
left a comment
fricklerhandwerk
left a comment
There was a problem hiding this comment.
I think this is a very good idea overall, and the rough structure seems sound. It's a miniature version of what the European Commission does. If the costs and benefits of doing such a thing are well understood, this can be a good mechanism for coordinating action that would otherwise not happen.
The only thing I'd caution against is assuming that the capacity to operate such a scheme will magically appear out of the blue. This needs considerable up-front investment from everyone involved, and quite a bit of time for building experience and routines, including those to trust and delegate and exercise the control mechanisms outlined here. What may help bootstrapping it is managing expectations with all parties: Initially we can expect that sponsors won't get a good bang for their buck, implementors and reviewers won't get good rates, organisers will do serious work on their free time, balls will get dropped, and there won't be too many exciting success stories for the general audience of users or maintainers. But that's how things go and will be fine if it's approached as a learning process aimed at getting it right eventually.
| - Proposals should primarily include the team to do the work, the milestones, timeline, the amount needed and the recipient of the funds (can be individuals or companies) | ||
| - Proposals may also be for non-official projects | ||
| - A team can be a single individual or multiple individuals with one of them acting as project manager |
There was a problem hiding this comment.
No need to specify what a team is if we don't introduce the term in the first place
| - Proposals should primarily include the team to do the work, the milestones, timeline, the amount needed and the recipient of the funds (can be individuals or companies) | |
| - Proposals may also be for non-official projects | |
| - A team can be a single individual or multiple individuals with one of them acting as project manager | |
| - Proposals should primarily specify the people doing the work, the milestones, timeline, the amount needed and the recipient of the funds (can be individuals or companies) | |
| - Proposals may also be for non-official projects |
| - Proposals may also be for non-official projects | ||
| - A team can be a single individual or multiple individuals with one of them acting as project manager | ||
| - Wave midpoint: Close proposal submissions, announce the feedback phase and reach out to: | ||
| - Various stakeholders for feedback, including teams or individuals |
There was a problem hiding this comment.
| - Various stakeholders for feedback, including teams or individuals | |
| - Various stakeholders for feedback, including community teams or individual contributors |
Is that what you mean?
|
|
||
| - The board/SC trusts the evaluators to do the evaluation properly | ||
| - Evaluators are required to submit an evaluation report including deliverables, evaluation notes and approval decision | ||
| - Evaluators get 5% of the milestone amount |
There was a problem hiding this comment.
This section underspecifies how and when evaluators are appointed. Not saying you need to nail it down now, but since evaluation (or call it "review") is a well-known and somewhat well-understood bottleneck on delivery, it probably needs to be planned ahead of time. I'd even say it needs to be priced right into the original proposal. Which is why it sticks out to me that you fix the review overhead by fiat; I argue this will be highly domain- or even case-specific, because reviewer qualification and time isn't fungible.
| ## Initiative funding | ||
|
|
||
| - Establish a process for going into contracts with companies to supply funding for specific purposes, with a guarantee that the funding (without an additional 10% management overhead) will be used for the stated purpose, and that if not all of the funding could be used as such, the rest is repurposed according to the funder companies wishes. | ||
| - There is a 10% management overhead that will not be allocated to the initiative funding. |
There was a problem hiding this comment.
Is there a particular calculation behind this number? Because from public funding for things like research, this order of magnitude seems to only fly if there already exists sufficient baseline funding independent of such programs. For comparison, Horizon grants give 25% "indirect costs" allowance for operational expenses unrelated to the immediate program goals, and this seems like more in line with the effort of setting up and maintaining a procedure like it's outlined in this document.
One can argue that some effort can be expected to be volunteered for those purposes, but if the goal is to have not just streamlined but reliable operations for passing money through to who is doing the work, that part of the process should better be equipped with the resources to keep those responsible for it around.
|
|
||
| - Establish a process for going into contracts with companies to supply funding for specific purposes, with a guarantee that the funding (without an additional 10% management overhead) will be used for the stated purpose, and that if not all of the funding could be used as such, the rest is repurposed according to the funder companies wishes. | ||
| - There is a 10% management overhead that will not be allocated to the initiative funding. | ||
| - The minimum required funding is 1000 EUR (+10% overhead, excl. VAT). |
There was a problem hiding this comment.
Is there a calculation or bet you're making behind this number? One could argue that 10% is enough up from a certain threshold, but 10 sponsors of that size will amount to a couple of hours of preparation and upkeep. So unless sponsors are fighting to spend their money on NixOS stuff already, or I'm missing some fact about how to do things extremely swiftly without having done that sort of stuff for months or years (the argument above about keeping people around for a long time), off the cuff this seems unlikely to be self-sustaining. Or is it just about making the entry price look reasonable?
2 participants
In recent months, primarily the NixOS Foundation board members, me and @Ra33it0, have been drafting this proposal to fill some gaps in the NixOS Foundation's funding model. Note that this is not yet fully board or SC approved, which we'll need to get before this is implemented.
Brief summary
Motivation:
There are two inter-related parts to this proposal:
Current status
If we need to add more context behind individual parts, we'll add this on demand.