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 culture, leadership, or reputation. To mitigate problematic nominations, stay close to your organizational values and the spirit of the program you’re creating. A curation committee can also help to ensure that alignment guides your choices.

Curating for Legal Considerations

There might also be business reasons for your company to avoid associating itself with a specific project. From restrictions around countries your company can or cannot interact with to restrictions around competitors, work with leadership and your legal department to make sure that you have clear guidance on the highest risk projects.

Regardless of the reason for curating nominations, look for an opportunity to involve others in this process. You can do this formally, through a nomination committee, or informally, holding public discussions on email lists or in chat channels—or both. You can involve all of your voters in this process if you provide information that can help the voters curate the nominations for themselves.

How Do I Get the Word Out About Participating in the FOSS Fund?

If you want to empower your voters to make the best possible decisions, you need to provide information about the nominated projects. The single best source of information is the person who made the nomination. They likely know how it’s used, where it’s used, and how important it is to their work.

After that, you need to collect information yourself. The program administrators should either be open source subject-matter experts themselves or at least familiar enough with the ecosystem that they can do a little research and Googling to compile this information.

Many voters won’t know about individual projects or understand their importance. You can document this in the voting form or in a blog post or by creating quick presentations about each of the projects. If you can provide project information in the context of the vote itself, you ensure that your voters have the information they need.

Some of the information you’ll want to provide includes:

How your company uses the project

At a minimum, provide context about where and how your organization uses the project.

Project funding requests

If the project has made a recent call for help or support or a specific request for funding, call out this information for your voters. Requests such as these can have a significant impact on the voting process because of the perceived urgency and articulated need from the project itself.

Current project support

Your voters may want to know how well your eligible projects are currently supported and which organizations support them. Not all projects publish their budgets, so this information can be tricky to gather. For projects that don’t have public budgets, look for another way to indicate the level of support for the project, such as how many maintainers or contributors it has.

What Tools Can I Use to Make the Entire Process More Efficient?

If you have more than a handful of voters, you’ll benefit from a voting tool. Let’s look at some of the options available.

Hosted Polling System

There are a number of hosted services, free and paid, that run polls and elections using a number of different methodologies.

Chat-Hosted Polls

If you use an internal chat platform—like Slack, for example—in your organization, it may have polling functionality built into the platform or available as a plug-in. Because polls hosted in chats tend to be used for low-stakes decisions, they usually offer fewer options than hosted polling systems. However, there are advantages to hosting the poll in a medium where you can hold active discussions.

Hosted Survey Forms

There are many free and paid survey providers available, and your organization may already have a paid account with one of them. You may have to implement your own polling methodology if the platform doesn’t provide one. However, if you’re building the survey yourself, you can exercise more control over how it contextualizes project information.

In-Person Voting

When safe and possible, in-person voting can be extremely engaging. At a conference or in-person summit, you can set up a booth, explain your FOSS nominations, and allow others to vote. This type of engagement builds external interest in open source funding and allows you to demonstrate your process.

Indeed: Finding a Framework That Works for Us

In the first year of our FOSS Fund, we used a hosted version of the Condorcet Internet Voting System (CIVS). This is a great system for ensuring fair elections that easily addresses most ties, but the hosted version we chose wasn’t a good fit for our process. CIVS sent impersonal emails that were sometimes filtered into spam folders. It was also difficult to provide contextual information about the projects.

Starting in our second year, we switched to using private Slack channels with a polling plug-in. We didn’t love this, because we generally favor a wholly transparent voting process. But it was difficult to enforce voter eligibility requirements in public channels. We were also using a more rudimentary polling methodology, and one of our early results was an unexpected tie that we had to resolve ourselves.

After using Slack for a few voting cycles, we realized that we were constrained by the available options in the polling plug-ins that were supported by IT. We could only create a limited number of polls per month, and if we ran the vote at the end of the month, polling was no longer available because we had already met the limit. We’ve since switched over to OpaVote and are experimenting with that platform.

Other Ways to Vote

Even with a wide range of tools already available, you may want to write your own tool that meets your specific needs.

Johns Hopkins University

When Johns Hopkins University launched its FOSS Fund at the beginning of 2021, the organizers decided to build their own polling application. This gave them full control over the look and feel of the polls and allowed them to have common URLs for each vote. Most importantly, it guaranteed that the university had full control over the data that was collected and how it was used.