Proposal: Dispursing Sponsorship Funds

Hi all, sorry I took so long to comment, some thoughts from my side as well. I see 3 distinct topics here:

  1. The site itself as a showcase
  2. The community around it
  3. Money and funding

1. The site itself as a showcase

  • The idea of the site was always to showcase initiatives, to serve as an entrypoint, as a hub.
  • Maybe we branched out too far, with e.g. the events we did in Berlin (and then stopped due to Covid), and maybe even with setting up the forum ā€“ although thatā€™s great to connect.
  • But the site as an entrypoint makes sense, and will continue to do so. Yes we need to update it but thatā€™s really not a lot of work and itā€™s simple HTML. If thereā€™s suggestions, please make sure to open them in the issues at Issues Ā· opensourcediversity/opensourcediversity.org Ā· GitHub and of course pull requests are very welcome (Iā€™m also happy to help if you would like to make a pull request but require assistance)
  • In a similar vein, I had also been working on collecting bibliography related to Open Source Diversity. Be it talks, publications, press etc. It is great to see the history of the issue, and the people who have been pushing for it. (Also incorporating the list which e.g. the Geekfeminism wiki has). One thing Iā€™m struggling with (which would benefit greatly from help from also a non-coder) is how to best categorize, or how/if there should be a cut-off. So far Iā€™ve been very liberal in what to include in the list and Iā€™m wondering if that is a good approach. The branch is at GitHub - opensourcediversity/opensourcediversity.org at publications

2. The community around it

  • Regarding community, it often feels like ā€œactiveā€ vs ā€œinactiveā€ is just ā€œslow and steadyā€. Often projects just exist for a year and then are not accessible, we are pretty stable compared to that. Iā€™m a bit confused by the drive to lay this project to the grave, havenā€™t experienced this in an open source community before tbh.
  • Then also, maybe it was too much to build a community around it that could ā€œbecome inactiveā€. But here again: The site itself can always have value.
  • Regarding myself for info, I was a bit out mostly because of personal reasons (difficult loss in the family). As said though I think the site is not a lot of work, simple HTML, and I am looking into it again

3. Money and funding

  • Regarding the money itself, maybe it was a mistake to ever open donations. A specific plan could help, and if we would still do events it might help as well.
  • It doesnā€™t take any actual costs except the domain costs (~15 ā‚¬ per year which Iā€™m happy to pay) to keep the site running ā€“ hosting is free via Github pages and the forum is graciously sponsored by Discourse themselves. So yes, we could totally stop donations and disburse them.
  • I am not sure about disbursing them specifically to Outreachy, because it will barely pay for 1 student, and Outreachy is already well-known so another project could benefit much more.