CIDER: Community Impact
Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.
– Helen Keller
I’ve started CIDER’s Open Collective some 7-8 years ago and over the course of time it became of the main donation channels for the project. In good years it would raise somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000. While my initial plan was to use the money to fund my own work on the project, I wasn’t in a rush to withdraw them as I had a pretty stable job, that managed to cover our family’s expenses. So, I felt it was better to let the money get accumulated for a time when we could fund the work of other developers, or I find myself out of a job and could focus my entire attention on CIDER for a few months.1 One can dream, right?
Last year, one of CIDER’s long-time contributors V. (a.k.a. vemv) was between jobs and I he offered to work on a long list of problems and improvements if we could fund his work with money from the collective. I was excited, as with me juggling so many projects it’s hard to find enough time to go in “the zone” and work for an extended period of time on one particular project. I’ve noticed that over the years my responsibilities as maintainer shifted from “writing all (most of) the code” to things like:
- building a long-term strategy for the projects
- evangelizing the projects (with blog posts, presentations, etc)
- providing support for the end-users
- writing user and developer documentation
- reviewing bug reports and feature requests
- “recruit” contributors
- helping contributors and reviewing their submissions
I guess you get the idea. It’s not very different from the professional transition I had in the past from a software engineer to an engineering manager. Anyways, the role of the maintainer is a very big topic that I plan to expand upon in the future, and I’m not going to dwell too much on it right now. What’s relevant for today’s article is that the primary role of the maintainer (at least the way I see it) is to make the right decisions for the health and future of the project.
In this case it seemed prudent to fund the work of a trusted contributor, who happened to have the time and the energy to work on complex bodies of work. We started our collaboration in May 2023 and I hope you’ll agree that the results have been impressive:
- 6 CIDER feature releases (1.8-1.13)2
- Massive improvements to error handling, Java documentation rendering, the indentation logic, the test runner and the data inspector
- Many (obscure) long-standing bugs were finally addressed
- Countless releases of related projects (e.g.
enrich-classpath,orchardandcider-nrepl) - Increased bandwidth for user support (as V. provided a lot of support himself over Slack and GitHub)
So much was done last year that I’m certainly forgetting something. At any rate, I’m quite happy with the outcomes, and I believe they showcase great how additional funding can help FOSS projects. The total funding our collective contributed to V.’s work was about $65,000 and while that’s a lot of money, I think it was money well spent. I’ve opted to fund his work at actual market rates, so he’d be most incentivized to deliver the best possible outcomes. That’s the only way to do OSS work sustainably.
CIDER had a great 2023 and it had it because of its awesome community! You rock!
Now our collective is drained and it’s not clear when we’ll be able to do something like this again. If we assume a budget of $10,000/year that would happen 7 years down the road. Sadly, with the economic downturn that affected heavily the IT industry the amount of donations my projects have been getting has plummeted. Lots of companies and individuals pulled out and donations across GitHub Sponsors and OpenCollective in 2023 are down about 20% compared to 2022. I recall there was a smaller drop from 2021 to 2022. Sadly, donations remain a very unstable and unpredictable source of funding.
It’d be great if we had 20+ companies supporting the project with something like $500+/month (which is a drop in the pond for most businesses), but I doubt this will ever happen. Donating to OSS projects is a hard sell in general, and a plugin for Emacs is probably a sale that is as hard as it gets. Perhaps down the road we’ll try some focused fundraisers for specific features/improvements, although I have some reservations about such an approach as well.
CIDER’s success with funding some development via OpenCollective is not an isolated case, of course. Clojurists Together is another great case study for the positive impact funding can have on FOSS projects. I guess no other organization has done more for the Clojure community, and I’m extremely grateful for all the support the members of Clojurists Together have had for CIDER and friends over the years.
I write this article in the hope that seeing how donations get translated into real impact (e.g. productivity gains) more companies and individuals will be willing to help out. CIDER is all of you, the amazing Clojure community. Clojurists together strong!
P.S. I really struggled with the name for this article. I considered options like:
- “The Impact of Community Funding to CIDER”
- “CIDER: A Community-funded Success Story”
- “Making a Difference for CIDER”
In the end I probably went with the most vague, but shortest title I could think of. Somewhat typical for me.