doc/neps/nep-0048-spending-project-funds.rst
.. _NEP48:
:Author: Ralf Gommers [email protected] :Author: Inessa Pawson [email protected] :Author: Stefan van der Walt [email protected] :Status: Active :Type: Informational :Created: 2021-02-07 :Resolution:
The NumPy project has historically never received significant unrestricted funding. However, that is starting to change. This NEP aims to provide guidance about spending NumPy project unrestricted funds by formulating a set of principles about what to pay for and who to pay. It will also touch on how decisions regarding spending funds get made, how funds get administered, and transparency around these topics.
NumPy is a fiscally sponsored project of NumFOCUS, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in Austin, TX. Therefore, for all legal and accounting matters the NumPy project has to follow the rules and regulations for US nonprofits. All nonprofit donations are classified into two categories: unrestricted funds which may be used for any legal purpose appropriate to the organization and restricted funds, monies set aside for a particular purpose (e.g., project, educational program, etc.).
For the detailed timeline of NumPy funding refer to
:ref:numpy-funding-history.
Since its inception and until 2020, the NumPy project has only spent on the order of $10,000 USD of funds that were not restricted to a particular program. Project income of this type has been relying on donations from individuals and, from mid 2019, recurring monthly contributions from Tidelift. By the end of 2020, the Tidelift contributions increased to $3,000/month, and there's also a potential for an increase of donations and grants going directly to the project. Having a clear set of principles around how to use these funds will facilitate spending them fairly and effectively. Additionally, it will make it easier to solicit donations and other contributions.
A key assumption this NEP makes is that NumPy remains a largely volunteer-driven project, and that the project funds are not enough to employ maintainers full-time. If funding increases to the point where that assumption is no longer true, this NEP should be updated.
In scope for this NEP are:
Out of scope for this NEP are:
NumPy will likely always be a project with many times more volunteer contributors than funded people. Therefore having those funded people operate in ways that attract more volunteers and enhance their participation experience is critical. That key principle motivates many of the more detailed principles given below for what to pay for and whom to pay.
The approach for spending funds will be:
The next sections go into detail on each of these three points.
.. _section-what-to-pay-for:
What to pay for
1. Pay for things that are important *and* otherwise won't get done.
*Rationale: there is way more to be done than there are funds to do all
those things. So count on interested volunteers or external sponsored work
to do many of those things.*
2. Plan for sustainability. Don't rely on money always being there.
3. Consider potential positive benefits for NumPy maintainers and contributors,
maintainers of other projects, end users, and other stakeholders like
packagers and educators.
4. Think broadly. There's more to a project than code: websites, documentation,
community building, governance - it's all important.
5. For proposed funded work, include paid time for others to review your work
if such review is expected to be significant effort - do not just increase
the load on volunteer maintainers.
*Rationale: we want the effect of spending funds to be positive for
everyone, not just for the people getting paid. This is also a matter of
fairness.*
When considering development work, principle (1) implies that priority should
be giving to (a) the most boring/painful tasks that no one likes doing, and to
necessary structural changes to the code base that are too large to be done by
a volunteer in a reasonable amount of time.
There are also many tasks, activities, and projects outside of
development work that are important and could enhance the project or community
- think of, for example, user surveys, translations, outreach, dedicated
mentoring of newcomers, community organizing, website improvements, and
administrative tasks.
Time of people to perform tasks is also not the only thing that funds can be
used for: expenses for in-person developer meetings or sprints, hosted hardware
for benchmarking or development work, and CI or other software services could
all be good candidates to spend funds on.
Whom to pay
```````````
1. All else being equal, give preference to existing maintainers/contributors.
2. When looking outside of the current team, consider this an opportunity to
make the project more diverse.
3. Pay attention to the following when considering paying someone:
- the necessary technical or domain-specific skills to execute the tasks,
- communication and self-management skills,
- experience contributing to and working with open source projects.
It will likely depend on the project/tasks whether there's already a clear best
candidate within the NumPy team, or whether we look for new people to get
involved. Before making any decisions, the decision makers (according to the
NumPy governance document - currently that's the Steering Council) should think
about whether an opportunity should be advertised to give a wider group of
people a chance to apply for it.
Compensating fairly
.. note::
This section on compensating fairly will be considered Draft even if this NEP as a whole is accepted. Once we have applied the approach outlined here at least 2-3 times and we are happy with it, will we remove this note and consider this section Accepted.
Paying people fairly is a difficult topic, especially when it comes to distributed teams. Therefore, we will only offer some guidance here. Final decisions will always have to be considered and approved by the group of people that bears this responsibility (according to the current NumPy governance structure, this would be the NumPy Steering Council).
Discussions on remote employee compensation tend to be dominated by two narratives: "pay local market rates" and "same work -- same pay".
We consider them both extreme:
We seek to find a middle ground between these two extremes.
Useful points of reference include companies like GitLab and Buffer who are transparent about their remuneration policies ([3], [4]), Google Summer of Code stipends ([5]), other open source projects that manage their budget in a transparent manner (e.g., Babel and Webpack on Open Collective ([6], [7]_)), and standard salary comparison sites.
Since NumPy is a not-for-profit project, we also looked to the nonprofit sector for guidelines on remuneration policies and compensation levels. Our findings show that most smaller non-profits tend to pay a median salary/wage. We recognize merit in this approach: applying candidates are likely to have a genuine interest in open source, rather than to be motivated purely by financial incentives.
Considering all of the above, we will use the following guidelines for determining compensation:
Numbeo Cost of Living calculator <https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/>__
(or its equivalent).Some other considerations:
We highly recommend that the individuals involved in decision-making about hiring and compensation peruse the content of the References section of this NEP. It offers a lot of helpful advice on this topic.
We'd like to have a broader set of fundable ideas that we will prioritize with input from NumPy team members and the wider community. All ideas will be documented on a single wiki page. Anyone may propose an idea. Only members of a NumPy team may edit the wiki page.
Each listed idea must meet the following requirements:
section-what-to-pay-for).If a proposed idea has been assigned a high priority level, a decision on allocating funding for it will be made on the private NumPy Steering Council mailing list. Rationale: these will often involve decisions about individuals, which is typically hard to do in public. This is the current practice that seems to be working well.
Sometimes, it may be practical to make a single funding decision ad-hoc (e.g., "Here's a great opportunity plus the right person to execute it right now”). However, this approach to decision-making should be used rarely.
There is an expectation from NumPy individual, corporate, and institutional donors that the funds will be used for the benefit of the project and the community. Therefore, we should spend available funds, thoughtfully, strategically, and fairly, as they come in. For emergencies, we should keep a $10,000 - $15,000 USD reserve which could cover, for example, a year of CI and hosting services, 1-2 months of full-time maintenance work, or contracting a consultant for a specific need.
We will first summarize how administering of funds works today, and then discuss how to make this process more efficient and transparent.
Currently, the project funds are held by NumFOCUS in a dedicated account. NumFOCUS has a small accounting team, which produces an account overview as a set of spreadsheets on a monthly basis. These land in a shared drive, typically with about a one month delay (e.g., the balance and transactions for February are available at the end of March), where a few NumPy team members can access them. Expense claims and invoices are submitted through the NumFOCUS website. Those then show up in another spreadsheet, where a NumPy team member must review and approve each of them before payments are made. Following NumPy bylaws, the NumFOCUS finance subcommittee, consisting of five people, meets every six months to review all the project related transactions. (In practice, there have been so few transactions that we skipped some of these meetings.)
The existing process is time-consuming and error-prone. More transparency and automation are desirable.
Transparency about project funds and in decision making
**To discuss: do we want full transparency by publishing our accounts,
transparency to everyone on a NumPy team, or some other level?**
Ralf: I'd personally like it to be fully transparent, like through Open
Collective, so the whole community can see current balance, income and expenses
paid out at any moment in time. Moving to Open Collective is nontrivial,
however we can publish the data elsewhere for now if we'd want to.
*Note: Google Season of Docs this year requires having an Open Collective
account, so this is likely to happen soon enough.*
Stefan/Inessa: at least a summary overview should be fully public, and all
transactions should be visible to the Steering Council. Full transparency of
all transactions is probably fine, but not necessary.
*The options here may be determined by the accounting system and amount of
effort required.*
.. _numpy-funding-history:
NumPy funding – history and current status
------------------------------------------
The NumPy project received its first major funding in 2017. For an overview of
the early history of NumPy (and SciPy), including some institutions sponsoring
time for their employees or contractors to work on NumPy, see [1]_ and [2]_. To
date, NumPy has received four grants:
- Two grants, from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Gordon and Betty
Moore Foundation respectively, of about $1.3M combined to the Berkeley
Institute of Data Science. Work performed during the period 2017-2020;
PI Stéfan van der Walt.
- Two grants from the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation to NumFOCUS, for a combined
amount of $335k. Work performed during the period 2020-2021; PI's Ralf
Gommers (first grant) and Melissa Mendonça (second grant).
From 2012 onwards NumPy has been a fiscally sponsored project of NumFOCUS.
Note that fiscal sponsorship doesn't mean NumPy gets funding, rather that it
can receive funds under the umbrella of a nonprofit. See `NumFOCUS Project
Support <https://numfocus.org/projects-overview>`__ for more details.
Only since 2017 has the NumPy website displayed a "Donate" button, and since
2019 the NumPy repositories have had the GitHub Sponsors button. Before that,
it was possible to donate to NumPy on the NumFOCUS website. The sum total of
donations from individuals to NumPy for 2017-2020 was about $6,100.
From May 2019 onwards, Tidelift has supported NumPy financially as part of
its "managed open source" business model. From May 2019 till July 2020 this was
$1,000/month, and it started steadily growing after that to about $3,000/month
(as of Feb 2021).
Finally, there has been other incidental project income, for example, some book
royalties from Packt Publishing, GSoC mentoring fees from Google, and
merchandise sales revenue through the NumFOCUS web shop. All of these were
small (two or three figure) amounts.
This brings the total amount of project income which did not already have a
spending target to about $35,000. Most of that is recent, from Tidelift.
Over the past 1.5 years we spent about $10,000 for work on the new NumPy
website and Sphinx theme. Those spending decisions were made by the NumPy
Steering Council and announced on the mailing list.
That leaves about $25,000 in available funds at the time of writing, and
that amount is currently growing at a rate of about $3,000/month.
Related work
------------
See references. We assume that other open source projects have also developed
guidelines on spending project funds. However, we were unable to find any
examples at the time of writing.
Alternatives
------------
*Alternative spending strategy*: not having cash reserves. The rationale
being that NumPy is important enough that in a real emergency some person or
entity will likely jump in to help out. This is not a responsible approach to
financial stewardship of the project though. Hence, we decided against it.
Discussion
----------
References and footnotes
------------------------
.. [1] Pauli Virtanen et al., "SciPy 1.0: fundamental algorithms for scientific
computing in Python", https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-019-0686-2,
2020
.. [2] Charles Harris et al., "Array programming with NumPy", https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2649-2, 2020
.. [3] https://remote.com/blog/remote-compensation
.. [4] https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/compensation/#how-do-you-decide-how-much-to-pay-people
.. [5] https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/help/student-stipends
.. [6] Jurgen Appelo, "Compensation: what is fair?", https://blog.agilityscales.com/compensation-what-is-fair-38a65a822c29, 2016
.. [7] Project Include, "Compensating fairly", https://projectinclude.org/compensating_fairly
.. [#f-pay] This cap is derived from comparing with compensation levels at
other open source projects (e.g., Babel, Webpack, Drupal - all in
the $100,000 -- $125,000 range) and Partner Institutions.
- Nadia Eghbal, "Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital
Infrastructure", 2016
- Nadia Eghbal, "Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open
Source", 2020
- https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand
- Daniel Oberhaus, `"The Internet Was Built on the Free Labor of Open Source
Developers. Is That Sustainable?"
<https://www.vice.com/en/article/43zak3/the-internet-was-built-on-the-free-labor-of-open-source-developers-is-that-sustainable>`_, 2019
- David Heinemeier Hansson, `"The perils of mixing open source and money" <https://dhh.dk/2013/the-perils-of-mixing-open-source-and-money.html>`_, 2013
- Danny Crichton, `"Open source sustainability" <https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/23/open-source-sustainability/?guccounter=1>`_, 2018
- Nadia Eghbal, "Rebuilding the Cathedral", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VS6IpvTWwkQ, 2017
- Nadia Eghbal, "Where money meets open source", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjAinwgvQqc&t=246s, 2017
- Eileen Uchitelle, ""The unbearable vulnerability of open source", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdwO3LQ56oM, 2017 (the inverted triangle, open source is a funnel)
- Dries Buytaert, "Balancing Makers and Takers to scale and sustain Open Source", https://dri.es/balancing-makers-and-takers-to-scale-and-sustain-open-source, 2019
- Safia Abdalla, "Beyond Maintenance", https://increment.com/open-source/beyond-maintenance/, 2019
- Xavier Damman, "Money and Open Source Communities", https://blog.opencollective.com/money-and-open-source-communities/, 2016
- Aseem Sood, "Let's talk about money", https://blog.opencollective.com/lets-talk-about-money/, 2017
- Alanna Irving, "Has your open source community raised money? Here's how to spend it.", https://blog.opencollective.com/has-your-open-source-community-raised-money-heres-how-to-spend-it/, 2017
- Alanna Irving, "Funding open source, how Webpack reached $400k+/year", https://blog.opencollective.com/funding-open-source-how-webpack-reached-400k-year/, 2017
- Alanna Irving, "Babel's rise to financial sustainability", https://blog.opencollective.com/babels-rise-to-financial-sustainability/, 2019
- Devon Zuegel, "The city guide to open source", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80KTVu6GGSE, 2020 + blog: https://increment.com/open-source/the-city-guide-to-open-source/
GitHub Sponsors:
- https://github.blog/2019-05-23-announcing-github-sponsors-a-new-way-to-contribute-to-open-source/
- https://github.blog/2020-05-12-github-sponsors-is-out-of-beta-for-sponsored-organizations/
- https://blog.opencollective.com/on-github-sponsors/, 2019
- https://blog.opencollective.com/double-the-love/, 2020
- https://blog.opencollective.com/github-sponsors-for-companies-open-source-collective-for-people/
Copyright
---------
This document has been placed in the public domain.