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[[Category:General public]]
[[Category:General public]]
==Funding FOSS Projects to Increase Participation==
Mako's essay (http://mako.cc/writing/funding_volunteers/funding_volunteers.html) identifies the negative impacts of paid labor in free software projects. While I concur with his observations, I also feel that paid labor can not only be beneficial but essential in certain situations. This seemingly dichotomous statement becomes quite consistent when we introduce another variable to the argument. This variable is the “scope of the community.” If we are to consider a bigger universe of the community – a universe that encompasses the lesser developed regions of the world – then each of the risk factor has to be re-examined within the context of its scope. The statement “when it comes to voluntary work and paid labor, you can have one or the other but not both” should thus be extended to say that “In a given scope, when it comes to voluntary work and paid labor, you can have one or the other but not both.“ Let us first examine the need for paid labor.
In most voluntary free software projects there is little or no contribution from lesser developed countries. In developing countries there is a general lack of awareness about the benefits of and the opportunities for volunteering. Two basic reasons stand out: (1) programmers do not have the necessary skill sets to contribute; and (2) the economic conditions make part-time employment more attractive than volunteering. Therefore, if the process is left to natural growth there will continue to be a disproportionately lower share of participation from the developing countries. This will not only exclude a large segment of the population, but it will also starve the project from the diversity of solutions that may be necessary to cater to the different social and educational environments of other countries. Therefore, explicit intervention is required.
The intervention could be in the form of setting up focused teams in various regions, which would be funded for a limited period of time. During this period the team would develop capacity by participation in the project and create a FOSS culture in that region. The team would move towards self sustainability by generating revenue from services, and as a by product, create economic opportunities for other participants. This would create an ecosystem around FOSS in the developing world. The definition of capacity building, as envisioned in Mako's essay, would be expanded to include the training of the team members; a core team of developers would have to be paid for a limited duration.
Now let us examine why such a set up would not perturb the dynamics of the project. For example, if we revisit the negative fall outs of paid development in the X Consortium, it can be seen that root cause was that the paid group had significant weight – both in influencing the direction of the project as well as the output they produced. As the offshore teams would be striving to come at par with the mainstream community it is unlikely that they would produce the negative impacts.
I am glad that Mako concluded his essay with the sentence, “Done critically, creatively, and transparently, voluntary free software projects can use money and paid labor to a tremendous benefit that only magnifies their accomplishments.” I think it is important to explore mechanisms for expanding the reach of FOSS development in the developing world; paid labor may well be one such mechanism.
- Tariq