Open funding

Hi, I don’t know if this has already been discussed but thought I’d add it to your ideas pool.

eZ Publish offers its developers an Open Funding scheme which I could imagine would also work well within the modx community, Open Funding basicily translats into interested parties offering to sumitt part funding for the undertaking of custom modular/extension/plug-in etc developments to the core system.

So lets say you have a feature, outside of standard modx CMS which you’d like to see built, while I’m sure the core modx team would always try to cater for such demands sometimes the feature could be niche. So you post the project on a board and see if anyone else would also be interested in building a similar module. If you find such like minded people a While Paper/Spec Sheet gets written up with a list of companies willing to fund, as the project gets costed and the agreed funds get guaranteed the modx core team are paid to develop the new feature.

In this way the extension gets built quicker (as classed as paid work), cheaper for the individual parties requiring the feature (sharing cost), and as the developed modular/extension becomes available open source it extends modx repository of features.

http://ez.no/developer/open_funding

That’s a very interesting idea indeed. Thanks for sharing.

That is a very interesting suggestion indeed. I’ve been thinking on such types of ventures nice to see a working model.

Thanks for the input.

Great suggestion. I like it

Indeed a great suggestion. I can see that work for both the evolution and revolution branches .

Great pointer and this could be great for modx !

Quite interresting to read the business model behind this, not unlike several things I have come accross but it’s always good to see such ideas in motion.

Now how do we fund the modx open funding project ?
Seriously it’s definitely a very interresting project to launch... food for thoughts (and hopefully, action) !

Hi All,

Maybe I am missing the point, but here I go anyway, let me know your thoughts.

1 - we get a section on the forum where we can post projects
2 - we take votes to see how many people would be willing to participate - workwise and financially
3 - we throw around ideas until we are pretty sure what needs to be built
4 - we decide upon a budget and who wants to do it
5 - we post the project on elance or getacoder and use their escrow service to get the funders to throw in the money so the builders know they will get paid

Questions:
- who will divide the money around the builders
- who is going to do the project managing

Hope this helps, because this is a great idea.

OlivierF.

This could be a way to do it, but the "workflow" is too complex IMHO and I’d rather it stays with the community than going to third parties... that is except for the financial part, don’t know much about escrow accounts.

The way I see it this could be done with modx itself, especially now that we have a fundraising snippet with ThermX.

1- People submit their request for a snippet, module or plugin. They include a budget.
2- Developpers can take up the project if the budget is realistic or comment if it’s not and submit an estimate of how much more it would cost.
3- Other parties interrested in having the addon developped can pledge an additionnal funding for the addon, and meet the developper’s estimate.

What if we were to have a structure where a project is posted, be it by a group or by an individual, and there is a value set for the project with a donate button next to it and the thermometer showing how close to the goal it is and another marking the project progress. People who want to help the project on can donate funds or help code. As part of this structure the project gets a public svn bin and the project manager can give commit permissions to other developers to form a team, but the code remains public as well as some sort of task management.

However, at this point in the MODx history, with so much effort and development going on to release Revolution and the new MODx website and a whole world of good stuff, it would be a very good idea to funnel funds into the MODx project itself. There are only a small number of people doing a large amount of work as volunteers.

You can also think of it this way, the quicker the top brains of MODx are finished with Revolution they can focus on some other cool add-ons

that’s a good idea cw. that’s what drupal/acquia are doing with their code-sprints on a larger scale using chip-in.
http://drupal.org/node/356002