Slashdot Mirror
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?"
In countries with a minimum wage law, wouldn't you be required to pay more it you pay at all?
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
We (Solutionstap) will have a labor-sourcing portal thing specific to paid open source projects shortly:
http://www.solutionstap.com/pimp
$100 a week is a bit too low (within the US and most Western countries, at least)
Do it informally. Someone joins your project, they do a little work for a month, and if you're happy with it you send them $100, or a gift for that amount of money. I could really use a new graphics card, for instance, and I'm sure you could work something out with whoever you're going to pay.
$100 a month still sounds good to me. What kind of programmer/designer do you need? I'm good with bryce and stuff, I know C, Java, ASP, PHP, XML/XSLT... lots of other stuff. I've won writing contests, both poetry and prose, and I'm a good singer with some acting experience if you need voice-overs...
You can't pay enough. Even if you had enough money to pay someone, you'd get better, lovingly written code if you used that money to pay rent and food and worked yourself.
This is true of most Free Software. Big and famous projects may have one or two full time guys; the donation sponsored ones like freenet are much less common than the company that has someone assigned to work 1/4 of their time on something they consider critical.
Here is my belief in how Free Software comes into existence:
1) FSF hiring people. I doubt the FSF would be interested in paying someone to work on this project, especially giving that you don't own the trademarks.
2) Someone writes something for their own use, and releases it because it feels like a waste not to, and they want to see where it will go, and they feel proud of it.
3) Some projects have businesses that pay an employee to make some contributions.
You fit into none of these, and $100 a week won't get you anything either.
If you want to spend some money paying people, you should save up until you have $500 to several thousand, and then pay as a lump sum contract to have someone write a particular interface other chunk of code you feel is beyound you.
But, your real problem is that Free Software authors tend to like to work on reusable stuff. You are mainly working on the actuall game itself, someone who wanted to work on the game engine woudl go over to that other project.
So what can you do ?
I suggest that you take what you have now and make a demo, one level or a short story completely separate from the plot of your larger game but in the same universe with the same characters. It can take as little as 5 minutes to play. Then distribute that as a way of attracting people who want to do art and plot work and coding onteh actual game. If you can bring some computers to a game or sci-fi convention of some sort to attract people that might work well also.
Okay, you don't seem to be getting the information you're really looking for. So, here are my observations (with the caveat it's from the outside looking in).
A friend of mine (who may post here, if he finds the time) is a lead developer on a successful open source project. The project has a donation button both on its website and in the installation. It's a subtle message (end users don't see the donation message, but administrators do). The project has a great product, so the donation model works.
My friend gets these donations, and shares them with the people that help make the product, and there are a lot of them: programmers, graphic designers, technical support (answering questions on the project's forums). The donations don't provide a lot for any one person, but they make a pleasant thank you (when you volunteer expecting nothing, and get something, it's nice).
Now, how did he build up this successful project where he can pay various volunteers? Slowly. He created a product that he himself would use, then released it to the world. At first, just friends used it, but then it grew. The WOW factor helped.
After a while, when the load became too big (programming, tech support, website development), he sent a message to users mailing list asking for help. People volunteered. Not all stuck around, but there has been enough volunteers to sustain the development and help it grow.
So, here's my suggestion: create something with wow factor that people can use/demo/play with. It can be small, that's fine, but give them something to play with, get excited about. Create a user mailing list. Make it really easy to join the list (and don't spam it). Pay attention to what the users say (address concerns if you can). When you need help - ask the list, see what happens. People who are interested will help. If you get revenue (donations, sales, grants), share a bit. Doesn't have to be a lot.
The trick is to get people excited about the project. Actually, that sentence sums up marketing pretty well.
Just post on the project page things like:
-Peter