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Paying for Volunteers?
E1ven asks: "As the Head Producer of a moderate/early OSS game project, one of the constant questions is how to get quality people to volunteer time. One idea I've come up with is the concept of paying someone a small sum ($100/week?) to volunteer to work on the project. [Offering money will] make volunteering their time easier for them.
I know that some projects, like Freenet, that already do this to some extent. However, I'm not sure on exactly how to go about it. I can't just advertise on Monster or Dice, can I?
Does anyone have any advice they could offer on this subject? Has anyone gone through it?"
Sounds like you are asking for business advice, you should of framed your question more like that (Judging by the offers to work for $100 a week, I guess it just didn't come across right). If your game is popular, you might be able to attract a sponsor, and using sponsorship money pay developers. But the days of high-advertising money are over. Have you considered contacting Sierra (developers of the original series)?
It usually also works the other way around, that you are first semi-popular, and then sponsored, as opposed to seeking sponsorship at an early phase. To get your project semi-popular, use some initiative to get the word out (you obviously are, by asking slashdot).
I cant really see any other source of revenue from such a project. Other projects that are applicable to business or consumer use have potential for support, customisation and other revenues (eg. MySQL, Snort, PHP, etc. etc.).
I would go into this more, but feel free to email me.
Colin, whether you know it or not, your project has just reached the point of trial by fire (I was kidding earlier about taking $100/week, if I like a project I will contribute to it.). Regardless of your $100/week question, the project has just been seen by tons of slashdotters. If they approve, they will contribute to your project, $100/week or no.
Whether you can afford $100/week doesn't matter, some may contribute just magically expecting it. Snicker and mumble "suckers" to yourself. But slashdot is, what slashdot is. You already crossed a big obsticle here just getting slashdotted. Talk about exposure. I'd wait and see if it turns out you'll still NEED to pay for developers.
Say you get 5 developers contributing extensively to your project, would you then pay each one of them $100 a week? That's $500 a week out of pocket. The more developers you get the more costly it becomes. Unless you are some millionaire, you can't afford to pay people. What you need to do is find people interested in your project and that in itself is a challenge. Sourceforge is your best bet.
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One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
I am a "paid volunteer" at my company. I volunteer to provide services, and my company is wonderful enough to pay me for it.
Some people label this an "employee".
Volunteer: A person who holds property under a deed made without consideration. (Payment is consideration for those not in the know)
Employee: A person who works for another in return for financial or other compensation.
You are looking for very cheap employees, not volunteers.
Volunteering is when someone wants to support your cause. If youre profiting from the game and youre name alone is stamped on it, dont expect real Volunteering.
Now Volunteering is very much a community thing. Say you have a project for a cause that needs work and you know sincere programmers are out there. It will be best to advertise to local programmers since interacting with your neighbors and meeting them face to face increases sincerety to the cause. It can also bind them to work longer on the project. Ideally, setup a place where developers can physically come and sit on some workstations and develop. They will love the interaction with other developers from around and coke/chips offerings will complete the volunteering setup, getting the work done. Just dumping the work on someone remotely doesnt work on the sincerest of volunteers.
Now opensource software programming can be different. If it is something like gcc or the Linux kernel, the desire is globally strong enough for people to flock to it and submit patches regularly from 8 time zones away. And then, theyre working on a HUGE project with huge effects in the (computer) society. Their code will be used on tens of millions of computers. Thats the real motivation and the real itch. If you can duplicate that, or show the importance of your project to the community, you can expect help. Samba is pretty important. Everyone is using linux along with windows, and linux better look good. KDE is important. It shows the power of Linux on the desktop. Next are games projects like SDL, crystal space and mesa3d. Games are among the last remaining reasons to keep a windows partitions and is attracting a lot of volunteer programmers now. Keep a clean structure, an open environment, good responsive mailing lists, make great demos, always keep complete documentation and build 3d model/image/map import filters. Do not stamp your name all over the place (geeks are more egoistic than the rest), and that should entice a threshold number of developers.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I hit the web-site, and as other posters pointed out there is no download link, and there is no license.
o n issues that you just don't want in your life.
People who make Free/OpenSource software happen want some kind of guarantee that their contribution will go back to the community. The sincere promises that you're considering several licenses won't cut it with many folk. Once you have the license in place you can post your stuff. Till then you can't really post much because you can't specify the conditions underwhich it can be downloaded/used.
One of the best ways an author knows what he might contribute to a project is downloading things and taking a look at the state of them. Whatever you've got will help this process along. Judging by the âoeStatusâ page at your site:
We're going through, one scene, one act, at a time, to get the job done. This aren't going to change much from month to month, but I'll try to keep you posted.
How about posting 2 completed scenes. I know it seems out of order to put finishing touches on 2 scenes when you have 70 to go, but it will let you share your vision with the gaming world and perhaps attract coders that didn't play the previous SpaceQuests.
Regardless, give'em something, anything, and don't make them sign up as developers to get to it.
Share the plan. Software development is a fairly quantifiable task these days. One thing that very much benefits a project is a clear development plan. I would suggest a unit of four hours resolution or better. If you make up a plan that starts with a list of features, and your story board, you should be able to map out the units of work needed to get it done. Miscellaneous tasks can be lumped together into four hour blocks but all the other coding tasks that bring about your story in an engine with the desired list of features should be included. This is a kind of super TODO list that will bring you three important advantatges:
Parallelism: code and artistry that might not be necessary till the end scenes can be started by those with the talent early rather than waiting for the herd to get that scene.
Progress indication: when you have the project mapped out into work units you can see/display/prove you're making progress even on weeks where all the progress was infrastructural, and didn't make any difference to the "scenes completed" counter. With the âoejust the end goalâ definitions, it's hard to see and share (as your status page would indicate).
Basis for reward system: Completing blocks of work can both decide where the author's name appears in the credits, and place him/her properly in the reward system.
As for the payment. I would highly recommend that you avoid letting money change hands in this. There are copyright/contract/wage/tax/underage/descriminati
If the reward system were mine to structure first off I'd make sure that everyone knew that their code was freely contributed under the chosen license. The $100 a week you have available is more than enough to inspire some help. Over the next 3 months that's $1200. If your income is steady and you can put that aside, I would set up a reward system like this:
The top 4 contributors get:
--A Radeon 9500 128MB card. (totals 548)
The next 4 get:
--A CL Audigy Platinum card (totals 264)
The next 4 get:
--A Razor Boomslang (totals 168)
Big reward totals: $980
And everyone else who completes at least one âoeacceptedâ unit of work gets a free âoeI made Space Quest 7â t-shirt.
I've helped plan a number of mediums scale software projects and would be glad to lend a hand. Cheers.