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Paying for Volunteers? 71

Posted by Cliff from the is-it-really-volunteering-if-you-pay-them dept.
A user asks: "As the Head Producer of a moderate/early OSS game project, one of the constant questions is how to get quality people to volunteer time. One idea I've come up with is the concept of paying someone a small sum ($100/week?) to volunteer to work on the project. [Offering money will] make volunteering their time easier for them. I know that some projects, like Freenet, that already do this to some extent. However, I'm not sure on exactly how to go about it. I can't just advertise on Monster or Dice, can I? Does anyone have any advice they could offer on this subject? Has anyone gone through it?"
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Paying for Volunteers? More

Paying for Volunteers?

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  • umm.. (Score:3, Redundant)

    by shaitand ( 626655 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2003 @11:16PM (#6229212) Journal
    umm you just got your game slashdotted with your message, what better advertising do you need? $100/week, I'm so there.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • If you have $100 a week you are NOT a poor college kid. That's half my mom's salary, i dont have a father, and my allowance is zero. Anyway if you're paying that much I'll do anything for you. Part-time salaries in my country are a lot less than $100 per week.
        Need your floor scrubbed mr. E1ven? :)

        • Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) * on Tuesday June 17, 2003 @11:33PM (#6229398)
          Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Re:umm.. (Score:3, Interesting)

            by eggstasy ( 458692 )
            Do it informally. Someone joins your project, they do a little work for a month, and if you're happy with it you send them $100, or a gift for that amount of money. I could really use a new graphics card, for instance, and I'm sure you could work something out with whoever you're going to pay.
            $100 a month still sounds good to me. What kind of programmer/designer do you need? I'm good with bryce and stuff, I know C, Java, ASP, PHP, XML/XSLT... lots of other stuff. I've won writing contests, both poetry and p
          • You could offer the $100/month as a prize to the most helpful person. That would get more effort coming out of more people for less. Of course, you would need to do something about the occasional belief that may arise that certain people can't compete.

  • Is that legal? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by RalphBNumbers ( 655475 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2003 @11:23PM (#6229291)
    In countries with a minimum wage law, wouldn't you be required to pay more it you pay at all?
    • I absolutely agree - there are minimum wage laws to consider. Check out this article [nwsource.com] . This Pizza place is paying homeless people to advertise - but they're almost definitely violating labor laws.

      You don't want one of your "volunteers" suing for back wages, do you?

      Maybe giving them non-monetary gifts would be a good workaround?

      • Maybe giving them non-monetary gifts would be a good workaround?

        Like a check for $100?

      • i think (and i could be full of sh!t) that they don't apply if you hire them as contractors (or something like that). if you give them a specific task to be completed in a specific time, you could pay them less. i think...
    • Eh, there have to be concessions for this sort of thing. Honourariums are rather common.

    • Not to mention overtime, workers compensation, unemployment compensation, etc. You better be really really careful about how you phrase things to make sure this person really is an "independent contractor."

      Sucks that we have to have such stupid laws in the first place.

    • This page [dol.gov] seems to indicate there must be at least 2 employees and the business must make in excess of $500,000 in order for minimum wage laws to apply for all employees. OR the business is involved in interstate commerce OR the employee is a domestic servant... (baby sitter, yard worker, etc.)

      I see two ways around this... Pay by job, not by the hour. Then you are not paying a wage persay, but paying for a product or service. Another way around it would be to gift the $100 to the person.

  • Solutionstap (Score:5, Interesting)

    by new-black-hand ( 197043 ) <nik@techPLANCKcrunch.com minus physicist> on Tuesday June 17, 2003 @11:37PM (#6229442) Homepage

    We (Solutionstap) will have a labor-sourcing portal thing specific to paid open source projects shortly:

    http://www.solutionstap.com [solutionstap.com]

    /pimp

    $100 a week is a bit too low (within the US and most Western countries, at least)

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Solutionstap (Score:4, Insightful)

        by new-black-hand ( 197043 ) <nik@techPLANCKcrunch.com minus physicist> on Tuesday June 17, 2003 @11:52PM (#6229568) Homepage

        Sounds like you are asking for business advice, you should of framed your question more like that (Judging by the offers to work for $100 a week, I guess it just didn't come across right). If your game is popular, you might be able to attract a sponsor, and using sponsorship money pay developers. But the days of high-advertising money are over. Have you considered contacting Sierra (developers of the original series)?

        It usually also works the other way around, that you are first semi-popular, and then sponsored, as opposed to seeking sponsorship at an early phase. To get your project semi-popular, use some initiative to get the word out (you obviously are, by asking slashdot).

        I cant really see any other source of revenue from such a project. Other projects that are applicable to business or consumer use have potential for support, customisation and other revenues (eg. MySQL, Snort, PHP, etc. etc.).

        I would go into this more, but feel free to email me.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Re:Solutionstap (Score:3, Insightful)

            by shaitand ( 626655 )
            Colin, whether you know it or not, your project has just reached the point of trial by fire (I was kidding earlier about taking $100/week, if I like a project I will contribute to it.). Regardless of your $100/week question, the project has just been seen by tons of slashdotters. If they approve, they will contribute to your project, $100/week or no.

            Whether you can afford $100/week doesn't matter, some may contribute just magically expecting it. Snicker and mumble "suckers" to yourself. But slashdot is

          • Re:Solutionstap (Score:3, Insightful)

            by saden1 ( 581102 )
            Say you get 5 developers contributing extensively to your project, would you then pay each one of them $100 a week? That's $500 a week out of pocket. The more developers you get the more costly it becomes. Unless you are some millionaire, you can't afford to pay people. What you need to do is find people interested in your project and that in itself is a challenge. Sourceforge is your best bet.
    • You forgot to mention that it costs every person that signs up $30 a month. So basically people are paying themselves to work on your project.
  • I don't think it is appropriate to use the word "volunteering" when in fact you are just hiring freelancers for an extra-low wage.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • I think your best bet is the "gift" system, mentioned elsewhere

        Basically, set a realistic monthly budget. Doesnt matter if its $20 or $2000. Doesnt matter where the money comes from. Then decide who the best contributers to the project are (include yourself in the running), and distribute the money as gifts. Someone working on the graphics end? Get them a new ATI 9700 or whatever is in fashion. Someone crunching numbers? A processor upgrade might come in handy. Pay someones DSL bill for the month.

        You coul

      • I don't see it as morally wrong, I'm not sure that its, what I see as the "theme" of OpenSource.

        Volunteers are people who are willing to do things, what they lack in skill/talent is secondary to the fact they will do it for no price. They get something else out of it than money.

        An employee, is a person who you pay to care about the company/project/work and is skilled in doing it.

        If you start to dictate what an person who is qualified as doing and want them to care about the work, then you are really ver
    • Except he isn't trying to hire freelancers. He wishes to give an honourarium to volunteers, which is an entirely different situation.
  • At hundred dollars a week, you could probably hire a programmer in India to work for you full time.

    The average income for a programmer over there is about $5,850 [bizjournals.com], might be worth a shot.

  • Paying won't work (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @01:02AM (#6230117)
    You can't pay enough. Even if you had enough money to pay someone, you'd get better, lovingly written code if you used that money to pay rent and food and worked yourself.

    This is true of most Free Software. Big and famous projects may have one or two full time guys; the donation sponsored ones like freenet are much less common than the company that has someone assigned to work 1/4 of their time on something they consider critical.

    Here is my belief in how Free Software comes into existence:

    1) FSF hiring people. I doubt the FSF would be interested in paying someone to work on this project, especially giving that you don't own the trademarks.

    2) Someone writes something for their own use, and releases it because it feels like a waste not to, and they want to see where it will go, and they feel proud of it.

    3) Some projects have businesses that pay an employee to make some contributions.

    You fit into none of these, and $100 a week won't get you anything either.

    If you want to spend some money paying people, you should save up until you have $500 to several thousand, and then pay as a lump sum contract to have someone write a particular interface other chunk of code you feel is beyound you.

    But, your real problem is that Free Software authors tend to like to work on reusable stuff. You are mainly working on the actuall game itself, someone who wanted to work on the game engine woudl go over to that other project.

    So what can you do ?

    I suggest that you take what you have now and make a demo, one level or a short story completely separate from the plot of your larger game but in the same universe with the same characters. It can take as little as 5 minutes to play. Then distribute that as a way of attracting people who want to do art and plot work and coding onteh actual game. If you can bring some computers to a game or sci-fi convention of some sort to attract people that might work well also.

  • Paid Volunteers... bah (Score:4, Insightful)

    by metacosm ( 45796 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @01:15AM (#6230211)
    I am a "paid volunteer" at my company. I volunteer to provide services, and my company is wonderful enough to pay me for it.

    Some people label this an "employee".

    Volunteer: A person who holds property under a deed made without consideration. (Payment is consideration for those not in the know)

    Employee: A person who works for another in return for financial or other compensation.

    You are looking for very cheap employees, not volunteers.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • It is not like he is actually trying to pay someone's living, he just wants to promote his game and make it a successful project! (If it were Leisure Suit Larry, I'd volunteer myself! ;-) )

      And $100/week (or even $10/week) sounds more like a token of appreciation that any kind of financial reward (at least here, in the US. I bet there are many programmers, say, in Russia (my home country) who would not mind playing with the code AND making $100/week! ;-) ).

      Look at it this way, if you'd get a check for $10

  • Managing a volunteering proj is an art. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mnmn ( 145599 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @02:05AM (#6230544) Homepage
    Volunteering is when someone wants to support your cause. If youre profiting from the game and youre name alone is stamped on it, dont expect real Volunteering.

    Now Volunteering is very much a community thing. Say you have a project for a cause that needs work and you know sincere programmers are out there. It will be best to advertise to local programmers since interacting with your neighbors and meeting them face to face increases sincerety to the cause. It can also bind them to work longer on the project. Ideally, setup a place where developers can physically come and sit on some workstations and develop. They will love the interaction with other developers from around and coke/chips offerings will complete the volunteering setup, getting the work done. Just dumping the work on someone remotely doesnt work on the sincerest of volunteers.

    Now opensource software programming can be different. If it is something like gcc or the Linux kernel, the desire is globally strong enough for people to flock to it and submit patches regularly from 8 time zones away. And then, theyre working on a HUGE project with huge effects in the (computer) society. Their code will be used on tens of millions of computers. Thats the real motivation and the real itch. If you can duplicate that, or show the importance of your project to the community, you can expect help. Samba is pretty important. Everyone is using linux along with windows, and linux better look good. KDE is important. It shows the power of Linux on the desktop. Next are games projects like SDL, crystal space and mesa3d. Games are among the last remaining reasons to keep a windows partitions and is attracting a lot of volunteer programmers now. Keep a clean structure, an open environment, good responsive mailing lists, make great demos, always keep complete documentation and build 3d model/image/map import filters. Do not stamp your name all over the place (geeks are more egoistic than the rest), and that should entice a threshold number of developers.
  • Okay, you don't seem to be getting the information you're really looking for. So, here are my observations (with the caveat it's from the outside looking in).

    A friend of mine (who may post here, if he finds the time) is a lead developer on a successful open source project. The project has a donation button both on its website and in the installation. It's a subtle message (end users don't see the donation message, but administrators do). The project has a great product, so the donation model works.

    My friend gets these donations, and shares them with the people that help make the product, and there are a lot of them: programmers, graphic designers, technical support (answering questions on the project's forums). The donations don't provide a lot for any one person, but they make a pleasant thank you (when you volunteer expecting nothing, and get something, it's nice).

    Now, how did he build up this successful project where he can pay various volunteers? Slowly. He created a product that he himself would use, then released it to the world. At first, just friends used it, but then it grew. The WOW factor helped.

    After a while, when the load became too big (programming, tech support, website development), he sent a message to users mailing list asking for help. People volunteered. Not all stuck around, but there has been enough volunteers to sustain the development and help it grow.

    So, here's my suggestion: create something with wow factor that people can use/demo/play with. It can be small, that's fine, but give them something to play with, get excited about. Create a user mailing list. Make it really easy to join the list (and don't spam it). Pay attention to what the users say (address concerns if you can). When you need help - ask the list, see what happens. People who are interested will help. If you get revenue (donations, sales, grants), share a bit. Doesn't have to be a lot.

    The trick is to get people excited about the project. Actually, that sentence sums up marketing pretty well.

  • In short, I think you should share more plan. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Art Popp ( 29075 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @02:13AM (#6230595)
    I hit the web-site, and as other posters pointed out there is no download link, and there is no license.

    People who make Free/OpenSource software happen want some kind of guarantee that their contribution will go back to the community. The sincere promises that you're considering several licenses won't cut it with many folk. Once you have the license in place you can post your stuff. Till then you can't really post much because you can't specify the conditions underwhich it can be downloaded/used.

    One of the best ways an author knows what he might contribute to a project is downloading things and taking a look at the state of them. Whatever you've got will help this process along. Judging by the âoeStatusâ page at your site:

    We're going through, one scene, one act, at a time, to get the job done. This aren't going to change much from month to month, but I'll try to keep you posted.

    How about posting 2 completed scenes. I know it seems out of order to put finishing touches on 2 scenes when you have 70 to go, but it will let you share your vision with the gaming world and perhaps attract coders that didn't play the previous SpaceQuests.

    Regardless, give'em something, anything, and don't make them sign up as developers to get to it.

    Share the plan. Software development is a fairly quantifiable task these days. One thing that very much benefits a project is a clear development plan. I would suggest a unit of four hours resolution or better. If you make up a plan that starts with a list of features, and your story board, you should be able to map out the units of work needed to get it done. Miscellaneous tasks can be lumped together into four hour blocks but all the other coding tasks that bring about your story in an engine with the desired list of features should be included. This is a kind of super TODO list that will bring you three important advantatges:

    Parallelism: code and artistry that might not be necessary till the end scenes can be started by those with the talent early rather than waiting for the herd to get that scene.

    Progress indication: when you have the project mapped out into work units you can see/display/prove you're making progress even on weeks where all the progress was infrastructural, and didn't make any difference to the "scenes completed" counter. With the âoejust the end goalâ definitions, it's hard to see and share (as your status page would indicate).

    Basis for reward system: Completing blocks of work can both decide where the author's name appears in the credits, and place him/her properly in the reward system.

    As for the payment. I would highly recommend that you avoid letting money change hands in this. There are copyright/contract/wage/tax/underage/descriminatio n issues that you just don't want in your life.

    If the reward system were mine to structure first off I'd make sure that everyone knew that their code was freely contributed under the chosen license. The $100 a week you have available is more than enough to inspire some help. Over the next 3 months that's $1200. If your income is steady and you can put that aside, I would set up a reward system like this:

    The top 4 contributors get:
    --A Radeon 9500 128MB card. (totals 548)
    The next 4 get:
    --A CL Audigy Platinum card (totals 264)
    The next 4 get:
    --A Razor Boomslang (totals 168)
    Big reward totals: $980

    And everyone else who completes at least one âoeacceptedâ unit of work gets a free âoeI made Space Quest 7â t-shirt.

    I've helped plan a number of mediums scale software projects and would be glad to lend a hand. Cheers.
  • I don't think something like a fixed amount/time period or something would work, people have different productivity levels. It's hard enough to determine for an employer wether an employee delivers his moneys worth, and they (supposedly) see each other quite often.
    I think there are two types of reward policies that will work for this type of problem:
    1. A user of the program oor someone interested in what it could become puts a "reward" on the implementation of a certain feature or squashing of some bug.
    2. S
  • Getting paid to volunteer? Huh? That's a bit of a non-sequitor.

    How can it possibly count as volunteer-work if you get paid for it?

  • Bounties (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pete-classic ( 75983 ) <hutnick@gmail.com> on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @09:41AM (#6232608) Homepage Journal
    You can avoid the whole labor laws thing that others have brought up by using bounties.

    Just post on the project page things like:

    • Model for garbage masher monster - $30
    • Fix for bug 421 - $25
    • Code for opening crawl - $60
    • Etc, etc.


    -Peter
  • "$100 a week is a bit too low (within the US and most Western countries, at least)" I disagree. I play with stuff all the timel. I usually don't care too much about what it is I'm playing with (gentoo, hardware, etc). If I was provided direction and paid $100 a week or a video card or RAM, I think it would be well worth it!

  • We have talked to Vivendi (The current owners of Sierra) about using their trademarks, and we're hopeful that we will be able to reach an agreement. In the meantime, the project will continue, in the hope that by its completion a deal can be forged.

    Yeah, 'cause once you get all those volunteers knocking down your doors to code for $100/week, Vivendi is going to hand over the license to their trademark for another $100/week.

    I went to the site because I was thinking about volunteering. Then I saw the cop

    • I agree with the post above; this is scary.
      "by its completion", you "hope" to have a deal?

      The obvious worst case in that scenario would be horrible... what happens when the game is finished, and the developers have been paid, and Vivendi says actually, no, we talked about this with our lawyers again and decided we can't license this to you; sorry about that.

      I won't say the project is doomed, since you still can work this out... but I do agree that I would never contribute to this project until that issue
  • They make the SliMP3 player, which is run by an open source perl program (and some open source firmware). If a developer contributes a significant amount, they can get a free player, which is worth about $200-$250.

    And it works... I got one.
  • If it's affordable to you (I'm still in college so it is for me), accept paid "volunteering" or true volunteer, whichever appeals more to you. I am currently helping out the local school district clean 26 schools of PCs. I spend a few hours a day helping them out, and (for me, at least) their gratitude more than makes up for the lack of pay. It might even open up job opportunities in the future. Right now, doing work I enjoy (and probably will end up doing later in life) is far more important than doing a p
  • i like the code bounty approach, but it hasnt been used much, yet. it seems promising. basically, tack on a bounty anyone can add funds to for each bug report and whoever makes a working patch to solve it, gets the bounty. i guess.
  • because I live in Argentina, and I am currently working as a senior programmer for US $222 per week.
  • No, you can't go to monster.com, but what you could do is try an employment agency and see what they could do for you. You did get free advertisement here at slashdot, but if you would have put in an Email address I would probably help you out for a C-note a week. Another way you can go about this is to pass out flyers at your local college computer department. College kids really fiend for things like that -- they're the way to go! They can always use the beer money and it would look good on their resumes.
  • I believe that the technical term for paid volunteers is "escort service".

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