I work with a non-profit that supports open source software tools, and we are working on developing a concept of a membership-based organization for supporting those tools. The basic idea is that people could donate $x per month towards a central pool and could then vote on how to spend that money with their vote weight being determined by their total amount of donations over time. We've had a number of people express interest in participating.
I'm aware of DAOs as a concept, but since most people will want to donate with fiat currency, I think they will create more of a headache than a help for this particular situation.
What we need is a software for tracking our list of active members and how many donations they've made over time. What software(s) would you suggest to do this? I know this could be done in Google sheets, LibreOffice, or Airtable or something similar, but I'm hoping there is something more closely tailored to what we're doing and if possible OSS.
We have several things we need to do. In an ideal world one software or platform would do it all but I'm guessing we'll have to use multiple tools:
- Maintain a list of all members and how much they have donated over time to get their vote weight.
- Assign vote weight to members based on their total donations over time (or a specific number we put into this tool) and invite them to vote on things with web link that collects their vote and maybe shows them results. It would be really nice if we could have something where we could create multiple things to be voted on, adjust our vote weights on each poll, and then invite all the members to vote in one click.
The project itself always decides, unless you fork the project and do your own thing. You can wave a carrot in front of them (if you do X then you get $Y), but the relevant factor is going to be the size of the carrot $Y, not directly the "collective bargaining" via that platform. How would your platform facilitate finding a stronger negotiation position?
It sounds like you may have discovered the "fiscal sponsor" concept. There are a couple of nonprofits already offering such services, such as the Software Freedom Conservancy or OpenCollective. The foundations like Linux Foundation, Apache Foundation, or Eclipse Foundation also come to mind.
However, for all of these the project decides to join a host. Foundations can't just annex projects.
Sure. It's less in our case about motivating developers and more about attracting outside development talent (via $$$) to fix bugs and add new features. And also being able to fund things like promotion, documentation, etc. The devs are friendly but just generally at capacity with current maintenance tasks. They accept reasonable PRs but don't accept donations.
Yes I've been looking into OpenCollective, it doesn't do all the things we need, but it does many of them and very well may find a place in this stack of tools we'll be relying on. We already have the 501c3 though so we don't need a fiscal sponsor.