Investing in Open Source: The FOSS Contributor Fund

Chapter 4. Voting Framework

The fourth blueprint component is the voting framework. Now that you have some eligible projects, some voters, and some funding, you need a framework for the voting process. You need to prepare to make several key decisions that will inevitably arise.

How Do I Further Curate Eligible Nominations?

At a minimum, you need to ensure that nominated projects meet your eligibility criteria, but you will likely need to curate for other reasons as well.

Curating for Volume

If you have a large organization or a large number of nominations, you will likely need to put a subset of the nominations in front of the voters to make the election manageable. Your voters will find it challenging to select from a dozen or more projects—simply because it’s difficult to know enough about every choice to make an informed decision. We strongly encourage you to form a curation committee to help you narrow things down. Pull in representatives from a variety of disciplines, backgrounds, and interests in the program.

If you have a small organization or a small number of nominations, you will need to put in some extra effort to curate nominations. We’ve used a number of techniques to identify eligible projects, such as revisiting previous nominations or runners-up. We’ve also investigated our own dependencies to see which have an identified funding source.

Curating for Culture

You might receive nominations for projects that meet the eligibility criteria but have a problematic ...