We have some money with the OSI we’d like to spend on hiring someone to work on Snowdrift.coop, since our main bottleneck right now is volunteer time. The introduction of money to a (currently) all-volunteer team brings with it a new challenge: how to decide who to pay, when we already have volunteers working for free?
We have reasonable ways to address this problem in this particular instance, since we have limited funds and clear priorities to spend them on. However, it would be nice to do this in a thoughtful, deliberate way, because:
- Although we can minimize it, whatever we do here will set some precedent.
- As a crowdfunding platform, our goal is to introduce this problem to other FLO projects, many of which are currently volunteer efforts.[1] So it would be nice if we had an answer, ourselves.
To do this, I propose that we:
- Decide on values around spending $
- Decide on process to decide where to spend that will uphold those values
For example, if we decide we value seniority / demonstrated commitment to the project, our process might look like: in order of seniority, offer each team member the opportunity to do a paid contract for snowdrift for half the [remaining] funds. At the end, split the remaining amount equally among anyone who has accepted (or, if nobody has, look for an outside contractor).
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Although we'll be starting with projects that already have systems in place to spend money. ↩︎