While pitching Gna! to potential members, the question was raised: since anyone is welcome to join the Gna! collective, which members will be displayed in the About | Gna!: Managed Gitea Hosting page? There should be a section that explains that these members are doing the work to keep Gna! running.
I propose a criterion to determine which members are listed: a given number of hours of work as per the revenue sharing model. For instance, if a member logged more than 100 hours in the past 12 months, they are eligible to be listed in the “about” page.
I don’t think monetary contribution should count. The “about” page should be about people who actually do the work, not about people who don’t even if they contribute financially. The long term goal of Gna! is to reflect positively on the reputation of the members who have demonstrated skills and help them sell services. They should be able to say: “see, I’m on the about page, I’m running Gna!, I have skills”. Which would not be true if the about page also listed people who have money but no demonstrated skills.
What if a service provider comes along that participates in the revenue sharing model, doesn’t have an in-house development team, so they depend on the collective for fixes and new features and is the largest source of the collective’s income?
I think it will be in the best interest of the collective to see the service provider succeed. Listing them on the about page is one way of doing it.
And what kind of service would they be selling? It would not be forge related service otherwise they could participate in Gna! by working hours instead of just financially. I’m genuinely curious because I can’t imagine a concrete case but I may be missing something.
It is forge-related. Let’s say that I start a business running Gna! and participate in the revenue sharing model. My software breaks all the time, but let’s say that the dashboard + all the components that I helped create are working fine and the only work that is being done in Gna! is infrastructure related. If my business is listed in the about page, I believe my business could benefit from the publicity from the Gna! website and the collective from the revenue my business is generating.
Hum, I’m not sure I get the example. Would you mind expanding it a little? I sense it is both an hypothetical but also something that would apply to you personally. Am I wrong?
I don’t understand why we are separating monetary and in-kind contributions. We are treating both kinds of contributions equally, when sharing our revenue with dependencies. The Gna! horizontal community, IMHO, is geared towards sharing the work of a few developers with many operators. This model benefits the both operators and the devs: operators get an expert team of devs backing the software that they sell, and the devs receive a part of the revenue, if the operator participates in the revenue sharing model.
Personally, I don’t see how/why a small organisation, like mine, can achieve 200h/year contributing towards Gna!.
I better understand your concern now, thanks for articulating it and my apologies for not seeing it clearly.
The purpose of the “About” page is to be a list of people and organizations that are able to provide services because they demonstrate skills by running Gna! As a potential customer, I want to be confident that working with any of them will yields results that are similar in quality to what Gna! provides to the general public.
This is the cornerstone of the relationship between Gna! as a hosting facility which is not, in itself, profitable. And the service providers like Libre Solutions, Easter-eggs, Webarchitects or Bearstech who provide customized services based on GitLab or Gitea that are profitable.
200 hours is about 25 days worth of work, i.e. roughly a month within a year. You already contributed more than 200 hours to Gna! this year. It is a significant undertaking but it is paid for, it is not something any member of the Gna! collective is required to do for free. As of today the Gna! collective is in debt with you for over 12,000€ and you will get it, over time.
The revenue sharing model is transparent about who contributes what. If an organization or a person contributes only financially, it will be reflected in the repository where the income is accounted for. They will not be ignored, that would be wrong.
But in the context of demonstrating the skills required to provide services base on either GitLab or Gitea, which is what the “About” page is for, financial contributions are not an indication of a particular skillset. Reason why financial contribution is not something that counts when it comes to being listed in the “About” page.
I’d like to emphasize that operators / devops / devs are workers that have skills. If an organization does no dev at all but is strictly confined to being an operator, racking servers, fixing whatever needs fixing when there is a downtime, they are putting hours and not just money. They will rightfully be listed in the “About” page.
In a nutshell the “About” page must reflect the “workers” of the Gna! collective and no amount of money can get anyone there. This is a collective of workers.
Does that address some of your concerns? Are there others that I did not understand?
I think I understand where you are coming from, thanks for elaborating on it.
Do you think we can distinguish operators and contributing operators by having separate sections? Contributors can be listed in a “Developed by” section and non-contributing operators a “Sponsored by” section?
I’m not sure how many customers will take the time and effort required to go through our revenue sharing logs to figure out the sponsors are.
Gna! is distributed with the AGPL license which doesn’t require them to participate in the revenue sharing model. The benefits of participating are very clear: Gna! will be sustained by a team of experts, but companies have overlooked this aspect before(MongoDB and Elasticsearch). A sponsor section might provide enough motivation for them to participate in revenue sharing.
Agreed. There should be a page listing every organization & member who contributed. Sorted chronologically and without distinction of who contributed more or less. Even the tiniest contribution should be acknowledged in this way.
Maybe, in the future we’ll add an opencollective-like web interface to our accountant script to make that data more accessible