Marco Rogers
I feel like I'm gonna get into a lot of trouble if I keep asking this question. But fr fr. If this is taking up a significant portion of your time such that you can't make ends meet doing other things, is it really "volunteering"?
Many orgs that do have money still accept volunteer hours. Maybe we should be using a different word for the people who need to get paid in order to keep doing this.
https://akko.erincandescent.net/objects/4e4c1368-59b8-4223-8b4b-3278314b737c
Evan Prodromou
@erincandescent @mcc @polotek it was on me to get companies and Open Source projects on board for launch.
It sounds like you think there are some others that have the financial and time resources to dedicate to Fediverse-wide projects.
If you have some specific ideas for groups I should reach out to, lmk here or DM. Otherwise, I'll keep working on it.
mcc
@polotek I think the spirit of the post above is that it feels fine to be volunteering in a space until somebody comes and just plops down a big safe full of money in the middle of the space, and then the act of volunteering starts to feel kind of weird. You're responding as if this is about who gets the money (and you're right, that deciding who gets the money and how is a hard problem), but this isn't quite responsive if the objection is "to whom are the benefits of the volunteering accruing?"
Erin 💽✨
@mcc @polotek I think the above captures this well.
There are dozens of existing projects in the Fediverse. Why did the Social Web Foundation decide to only invite three of the long term projects that have existed in this space?
And did the people who started FediForum (who were new to the space) reach out to any of the people behind the projects of the Fediverse? From my vantage point of talking to the people who work on lots of those projects, it sure didn’t sound like it.
As for whether it is truly volunteering: for a lot of projects, it truly is. Many of the projects in this ecosystem are developed by people in their spare time and they’re happy with that. But there’s also a reason I included the “(or grant supported)” paraenthetical, because by and large the projects which have people working on them full time are receiving a lot of funding from grant giving orgs.
Realistically what this comes down to is that a lot of people keep setting up organizations and things around the fediverse but if they’re talking to the people who’ve been building it they’ve certainly not been talking to many of them.
Marco Rogers
Anyway, I don't see how you can see yourself as a "volunteer" and also be mad that people won't pay money. Feels sort of contradictory.
I think many purists at the center of the fediverse movement have expectations that align more with philanthropy. But if those folks actually talked to other philanthropic orgs, they would learn something pretty quickly. If you want people to give, you have to spend *a lot* of time telling a story that makes them want to do that.
Marco Rogers
If you're doing something because you're hoping it becomes important enough to generate money, just say that. That's not volunteer work though. It's actually entrepreneurship. That's actually a good thing. And I wish more open source people would lean into it.
If you want people to pay for a certain future to exist, that's cool too. That's called philanthropy. Also not the same as volunteering. For instance, you really have to tell people a story about what that future looks like.
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