Over the last few years I’ve been trying to find ways to fund some of the work that we do so that we can continue to grow the community. A few years ago we added OpenBoxes to opencollective, an online funding platform that allows us to raise and spend money transparently. Their mission is to make it sustainable to maintain open source communities. It’s pretty dope. Check it out.
Since joining opencollective, we’ve received one donation from a nice gentleman who apparently took pity on our fledgling community. 
Kidding aside, having one person take the time to contribute $20 to a not very sexy open-source project that I’ve poured my heart into to was an overwhelming experience for me. We’ve had organizations pay for services (i.e. development, implementation, etc), but no one has just given money to the project with no expectations. It’s pretty awesome.
I’m a little shy when it comes to asking for help. And I’m not asking anyone to donate to me. I don’t need funding for myself. But in order to grow the community and build really effing good software, we need to attract a mix of talented developers, project managers, technical writers, usability experts, and designers. And what better way to attract that talent than to have a huge pile of cash to swim in pay them for their hard work.
Ok, Justin … focus. What’s your point?
On June 10th (oh shoot that was a few days ago) we’ll be participating in FundOSS, a new way to support open-source projects like OpenBoxes. And you can supercharge your contributions through a $75,000 matching pool.
So if you’ve ever felt shame for not donating to an open-source project that you use on a daily basis then this would definitely not be a good way to assuage your guilt. Just stop. We don’t want you to feel guilty. But if you think it would be really cool to see a $1 turn into $10 … then this would be a good opportunity.
The money donated would go to our opencollective fund and we would use it to transparently pay for the development of a sweet new feature or to improve our documentation or for some other community-prioritized activity … like maybe a huge party in the DR. Kidding I don’t think that would legal.
/me checks with his lawyer
Nope that’s not legal. But, anyway. Check it out. FundOSS dot org slash collective slash openboxes.