[FM Discuss] residency, and floss for $

[Delirium]

adam hyde wrote:
> The first is that I am looking at (through the business plan) Book
> Bounties. This would mean finding a book topic and having a call for
> content. This call would be open to anyone, anywhere, to contribute.
> Contributions to the 'final' version of the proposed book (remembering
> that all FM content is able to be edited and modified at any time) will
> be collated and paid.
>   
The biggest issue I see here is how exactly to pay out the bounties to 
multiple contributors (obviously if one guy writes the whole manual it's 
easy), because all of the ways to divvy up money have problems. For 
example, paying based on proportion of the final word count rewards 
rambling, verbose text (not that I should talk); paying based on the 
number of chapters doesn't take into account that some are much harder 
to write than others; etc. The most flexible and least gameable would be 
for some human to judge what proportion of the final product each person 
deserves credit for, but that adds a social problem if people feel like 
their contribution was undervalued and get mad. I'll admit though that I 
haven't thought about this at length or looked to see if anyone else has 
come up with workable models; do you have any ideas on that?

> These are just three ideas at present. I wanted to bring them up because
> I think its important before we get too far down the road to be clear
> about FMs position regarding voluntary work and paid work. I see
> voluntary work as the norm for FM, but I also want paid work to be
> accepted. I can see in very mature open source projects that this has
> become a problem perhaps because it was not discussed early on.
>   

I think the big difficulty is that volunteers don't like to feel like 
they're "working for free" when someone else is getting paid to do the 
same thing.  I'm not sure of how exactly to handle it best, but it seems 
like a way this might naturally work out in FLOSSmanuals is that the 
paid people would have more responsibility.  For example, a paid person 
might have deadlines, or they might be responsible for ensuring a manual 
gets finished (writing the parts nobody else wants to, etc.), doing 
editing/integration, meeting/negotiating with sponsors, etc.  The 
volunteer person, of course, would just write what they feel like when 
they feel like, though of course they would still coordinate with the 
other writers as good project citizens.

Things should be fun and based on mutual agreement for both volunteer 
and paid writers (making paid writers do more unnecessary work isn't a 
solution), but it might smooth things over if the paid writers clearly 
have more responsibilities... then a volunteer is less likely to think, 
"wtf, that guy's getting $500 for the same thing I'm doing free; where's 
my $500?"

A separate suggestion might be to have some pool of discretionary funds 
(if enough money can be raised) to reward longtime and productive 
volunteers, either with direct payments, or with purchase of equipment 
or sending them to conferences or something like that.  Basically some 
funds that can be used for, "hey, this guy's written like 3 manuals for 
free, we should do something for him".

-Mark