sponsorship style workflow

[fommil]

(As requested by Rasmus)

The way we work (in team ensime) is that we have a bunch of sponsors who pay monthly through salt and then we pay our sponsored developer monthly (when we have the money and they are available).

I don't feel that bounties work. It isn't fair on the developer, and requires time to estimate each ticket, and in any case doesn't attract contributors (we tried several years ago and I ended up just cashing out to myself).

Fundamentally I would like to throw away the bounty-hunter side of the website and have "sponsored developer" support from our monthly salt sponsorship funds. Right now the only way to hack this is to give the sponsored developer have full admin rights. There is a lot of trust involved in doing that (so we've only been able to do it with people we've worked with via GSoC). If we were dealing with more money than we have, I'd almost certainly have to look at an alternative.

The way I can see it working is that we save up throughout the year, hopefully win a GSoC slot, and then offer to keep the student on for a few months after it finishes. I don't see our sponsorship pot growing beyond what it currently is.

[Cervator]

Thanks :-)

To throw in some additional thoughts:

• Maybe this could work by having a bounty hunter apply to a team for some sort of project, rather than a bounty, which could be something explicit or just "Sponsored work for June 2017" - whatever the team wants to make it. Or by having teams offer such projects, instead of bounties. Either way include a signup/approval step on both sides
• Maybe it could somehow be worked into fancier fundraisers. When a team has reached some target of funds that level could be configured as a project that becomes available for work. Rather than expressing interest in working on an issue a bounty hunter could express interest in such a project, and the team can approve a specific person to start.
• Maybe there should just be some simple way to send funds from a team account to a bounty hunter that bypasses bounties or any sort of project entirely (probably the easiest option)