OpenCollective Payment Process

OpenCollective Donations / Payments

With the 2.14 release of AnkiDroid we have set up an OpenCollective where users may donate money to us if they like

This means that we now have money available to pay for either one-off bug fixes (like a bounty to fix a bug) or for longer-term commitments people might make for maintenance and large architectural changes or release management etc.

Project Financial Goals

1. Peace: The most important goal is to avoid politics, or drama, or even suspicion of mis-handling money etc. So I (Mike Hardy) am saying this first thing: if you have any doubts, ask first so we can work it out. Everything else about the policies here is designed to avoid politics and drama and suspicion and I expect everyone to keep that in mind and behave accordingly. We're still hacking on this code for fun after all.
2. Fun: that is up to you, but never forget you contribute to AnkiDroid for fun. It is a hobby and will not replace salary from a real job. Please do not get caught up thinking of any possible payment, though if it adds motivation and you to spend time making the app better for everyone, fantastic.
3. Sustainability: Long-term contributors should be able to count on generally stable payments over a timespan of years, so the amount of money distributed every month will be less than the total amount available. As a rule, we are going to start by distributing 10% of the balance available at the end of the month, every month. As we learn over time, we may be able to increase this.
4. Fairness: This one is hard. Casual contributors should be rewarded, as well as long-term core contributors. The best way I have seen to balance this is to cap the amount of hours compensated per month. Core contributors will certainly be capped, but they submit every month so they will see rewards, and that will leave reasonable resources available for casual contributors.
5. Transparency: OpenCollective makes every single transaction public, so this is handled for transactions / income / expenses. I [Mike Hardy] discuss all my thinking on Discord prior to making policy, and then it is documented here so hopefully that is satisfactory for process transparency as well. The goal is that all decisions are made with full consensus of core contributors
6. Legality / Accounting: OpenCollective handles all of these aspects as well. There are exactly zero obligations for any future project maintainers in order for the taxes and legal filings etc to be handled on behalf of the project. Any personal legal or tax consequences related to any payments received by you personally are your responsibility and the project will make no attempt to handle them.

How to get paid

1. At the end of the month, go to our opencollective expense form and follow their process to file an expense
2. For the first month, we have no information on how many people will submit expenses so we don't know what the total will be. As mentioned in "sustainable" above, we are trying to distribute about 10% of the total balance each month but we are just guessing right now. Please limit your first expense to a maximum of 10 hours claimed working on AnkiDroid, and I believe we can support 0/hour for those hours, making a maximum expense claim 00. Please include your github or discord name in the notes so we may verify your contribution
3. We will look at all the expenses and approve all the reasonable ones, at which point payments are processed twice a week.
4. We may if the total looks much above or below our 10% of total balance goal, reject all of the expenses with specific instructions to raise or lower the amount of hours you may claim to better match our goal

What if this is not working, for the project or for you?

As mentioned in "Peace", please please please let us know. Hop on our Discord channel or send mail to Mike Hardy (if it is sensitive), and I'm sure we can work it out. We are open to any ideas to make things better, and we won't hesitate to make changes. That said, please be open to accepting changes as a contributor as well. This is all new to us, but hopefully it will work well

Cheers!