Why GitHub Sponsors is bigger than we think
College isn’t always an easy path for many of us, especially for those living in developing countries. There are not many accessible ways for students to practice their craft. In many developing countries, students have to get a job while neglecting classes to at least gain some experience in the field. College for me was the place where you ate and even sleep. I spent many days in the library reading books that I couldn’t afford even though I had a job. For many of us, it was the only way to get through the college experience. However, the internet came giving birth to a different way of how to practice and learn, in the form of OSS (OpenSource Software).
OSS wasn’t born in 2003, as many might think, it is much older than that. However, the idea was shared and understood across the globe. We were all aware of the need to build and share our software mainly as a way for students to get better at some practices and for self-improvement. The incentive here is to get better at the software development craft. Enter a new ear of incentives GitHub Sponsors.
GitHub Sponsors offers a platform to support professionals that can potentially help an OSS project with the distinction that apart from your passion and curiosity you also can receive funds as an incentive. It connects communities that depend on an individual’s OSS work by providing an easy way to provide funds to support their efforts. On top of that GitHub Sponsors Matching Fund will match contributions up to $5,000 during a maintainer’s first year on the program and it is a 100% match which will go to the sponsored developer. This means that if a GitHub sponsor decides to donate to a developer with 50 dollars per month, GitHub will match another 50 dollars and the maintainer will receive 100 dollars; quite cool and generous.
While Github initiative sounds brilliant, it can achieve far more than it is perceived. I believe that It can strongly help developing countries to empower students to gain real-life experience while learning and developing strong resumes with monetary incentives, how awesome is that?
Imagine that as a GitHub sponsor you could help a student in need to achieve their career goals and learning paths, imagine that a student getting paid to learn and practice new and exciting technologies while interacting with professionals in the software community in the real world. Take a second to imagine the huge impact this could have on a student’s struggles to achieve career success. Getting help to cover maybe books, travel expenses to conferences, new hardware to experiment or even a meal.
Of course, the student needs to become a maintainer to get to the program, here are some suggestions to get to that status:
- Create a project
The only caveat is that the student will have to make it useful. What does useful means in this context? In my experience, a successful OSS project is not the one with the most amount of stars on GitHub, but the one with good documentation, vibrant community and a solution that solves a problem that affects several people. This is what I think makes an OSS project useful. While everyone can have a different definition, you need to find the things that you value in a project and make them shine.
- Become a maintainer of an established project
Define what useful means for you and help out others. Well established projects normally label issues with Good First Issue, Help Wanted, etc. Those could be entry points to become a maintainer.
There are caveats to both of these approaches though. For instance, making a new project useful could take months or even years and we need to get to the maintainer status to be part of the Sponsorship’s program. Becoming a maintainer of a well establish project could take less time because you just need to find a project that you like and work on it every day to make it. However, both approaches do not guarantee sponsorship.
These two proposals are self-evident. I would like to propose a third option; create a SponsorsWanted profile. It occurred to me that there’s no way for a potential sponsor to identify people willing to help out with an incentive. One way to help sponsors in need is by creating a contract within GitHub. Just create a repository with an easily identifiable name for such purpose something like sponsors-wanted. This makes it easier for sponsors to do a quick search on GitHub and find the help they need. The README.md file could be the contract, I went ahead and created a template that anyone could use but of course, you can always do your own. You can find the template here:
https://gist.github.com/cored/388cd1fc9134cfbcffd2e2c5b54b5010
I definitely would like to know what people think about GitHub’s Sponsorship program and if the idea of connecting providers with consumers through the same platform will lead to an entry point to the new OSS Economy in the GitHub’s era.
