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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?"
umm you just got your game slashdotted with your message, what better advertising do you need? $100/week, I'm so there.
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)
I don't think it is appropriate to use the word "volunteering" when in fact you are just hiring freelancers for an extra-low wage.
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.
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
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.
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.
Just post on the project page things like:
-Peter
No, its actually free - look closely. It was a future plan to charge members, but that plan is up in the air now. If we (the members also have to agree) change our minds on that at a later date, existing members will get 12 months through for free regardless. I guess the site needs updating. It is still in early development stages, but is looking good.