Investing in Open Source: The FOSS Contributor Fund

Chapter 3. Funding Amounts

The third blueprint component is funding amounts. Your total budget is, naturally, one of the most significant constraints. You will have a fixed amount of money that you can spend. How you divide this money will determine how frequently you hold voting cycles and how many awards you issue. Let’s take a closer look at how this works.

How Much Do You Have?

When we first launched our FOSS Fund, we were fortunate to get strong executive buy-in on awarding $10,000 every month for a year. We hope you have the same support when you launch your fund, but you may find yourself working with a smaller budget in the beginning. Here are some ways to work with budgets of varying sizes.

$100,000 or More

With a budget this size, you can issue substantial awards monthly or quarterly. You might even issue multiple awards every voting cycle.

$20,000–$100,000

At this level, you can issue substantial awards a few times a year. Some FOSS Fund adopters start by issuing a single award on a quarterly basis.

$10,000 or Less

You may only have enough funding for a single substantial award. Don’t let that stop you—any amount is great! You can still use this process to engage a broad group of people in deciding which project you want to support. Alternatively, you could start to shift your focus to funding individual open source contributors and maintainers, so that smaller funding amounts can have a more direct impact.

How Often Do You Vote?

Regardless of your budget, ...