Investing in Open Source: The FOSS Contributor Fund

Chapter 6. Blueprint Implementation

We’ve taken you through the blueprint for running a FOSS Contributor Fund. We looked closely at each component of the FOSS Fund and the purpose each one serves. In this chapter, we will focus entirely on how to implement your FOSS Fund. We’ll start with the most important implementation step: securing funding. Then we’ll cover everything that comes next: communication, voter identification, voting, payment, and (yet again) iteration. We’ll provide more information about how we implemented our FOSS Fund at Indeed and dive deeper into some specific places where your implementation framework may vary.

Securing Funding

As the Head of Open Source at Indeed, I answer a lot of questions about our blueprint and our processes, but the question I’m asked most frequently is “Duane, how did you get funding for this?” Whether I’m presenting about the FOSS Fund at a conference or chatting casually with an open source peer from another company, this is the question. With so many competing internal priorities, it isn’t always easy to secure financing for a project like the FOSS Fund. While this might seem like the most important question to answer, I want to challenge you to answer a different question first: why are you committed to running a FOSS Fund?

Without a commitment to everything that makes the FOSS Fund a program—the blueprint, unexpected challenges, iteration, growth, iteration, and more growth—your FOSS Fund will not succeed. So, again: why are ...