Investing in Open Source: The FOSS Contributor Fund

Chapter 5. Iteration

The fifth blueprint component is iteration. Every time you hold a FOSS Fund vote, you have a chance to iterate on your process and improve your outcomes. If you’re fortunate enough to be able to iterate frequently, this means you get a lot of chances to improve. If you are holding fewer votes, then it’s important to make sure that you’re learning as much as possible from each iteration. Here are some best practices we recommend.

Frequent Iterations

If you’re iterating frequently, you get a lot of chances to make changes. This can be helpful if you see something wrong and want to make a quick change. It can also cause friction in the process by introducing too much churn.

Don’t Change Big Things Frequently

If you change big things about the process every voting cycle, like your polling mechanism or your voter eligibility criteria, you’ll generate a lot of confusion. Big things should change less frequently than smaller things, like the emails you send about voting or the way you contextualize content about the projects.

Don’t Worry About Small Errors

Process errors matter less when you are iterating frequently. If you somehow miss a project that should have been included in the vote or fail to identify some eligible voters, don’t worry. Add the project or the voters to your next voting cycle and look forward to the next vote. Frequent iteration allows more room to relax and look forward.

Infrequent Iterations

If you’re running infrequent iterations, ...