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Bounties

Open Collective bounty program

Get paid to contribute to Open Source!
The Open Collective engineering team is small, and we're always looking for new contributors to our Open Source codebases. Our Bounty program is an opportunity to solve issues that could be neglected otherwise. Contributors who fix these issues will be rewarded financially.

Principles

With money, but not only about money

Our bounty program is about creating opportunities for our community to contribute to Open Collective, to make it their own. It also gives us an opportunity to get to know developers who we could potentially work with more in the future. We celebrate making open source contributions more sustainable by paying, but money alone shouldn't be the primary motivation for participation.

No compromise on quality

We're not able to accept pull requests that aren't completed to a high standard in a reasonable timeframe. Please only pick up bounties that you are confident you can complete at your current knowledge and skill level. We will not accept pull requests or pay bounties for code that's not up to the standard we need to maintain for the Collectives who rely on this platform.
Our dev team is happy to answer questions and provide some limited support, but we don't have capacity to mentor junior developers through the bounty program.
For general guidelines about what's expected in the code, see more info here.

How it works

For reference, until July 2020, we used the following model:
  • $100: minimal or unknown complexity
  • $200: simple complexity
  • $500: medium complexity
Note: we are not able to pay bounties to people based in countries sanctioned by the United States, or countries where US sanctions are so widespread that our payment processors no longer serve them.
But since then we have moved to a more flexible one. Based on the importance of the issue and its complexity, we attach a bounty between $100 and $1000 to the ticket.
We want to attract quality contributions. The issue will only be considered complete and approved for payment if the Pull Request is merged by an Open Collective Core Developer.

Workflow for Bounty Program Contributors

  1. 1.
    Search for issues with attached bounties:
  2. 2.
    Express interest by commenting on the issue and ask to be assigned
  3. 3.
    Open a Pull Request and ask for feedback and review
  4. 4.
    Incorporate feedback from Core Developers, if applicable
  5. 5.
    PR is reviewed, approved, and merged by a Core Developer​
  6. 6.
    Get paid:
    • If you can issue an invoice, submit it as expense to Open Collective Engineering​
    • If you can't issue an invoice, ask to be rewarded with an Open Collective Gift Card
See more info about getting paid through Open Collective
Issues tagged as "bounty candidate" are issues that we are considering to add bounties for, but that are not bounties yet - either because they lack proper specifications, a team consensus, or because we don't have the bandwidth to review it at the moment. Feel free to comment on such issues to ask for a bounty to be added if it's something you're willing to work on.
Financial compensation can only happen if the issue has a "bounty" tag with a pre-defined amount. In other words, completing a bounty candidate that didn't receive the "bounty" tag will not make you eligible for the bounty program.

Workflow for Core Contributors

  1. 1.
    Make sure the issue is understandable for newcomers and expectations are clearly set
  2. 2.
    Tag issues with the "bounty" label and amount (e.g. "$100")
  3. 3.
    Add a comment with a basic explanation of the Bounty process and link to BOUNTY.md
    A $100 bounty was attached to this issue. Anyone submitting a Pull Request will be rewarded with $100 when the Pull Request is reviewed, accepted and merged. More info.
  4. 4.
    Make sure the issue is understandable for newcomers and expectations are clearly set

Contributor Ladder

  1. 1.
    First Time Contributors
    • Not part of the Open Collective GitHub organization
    • Fork our projects on GitHub and push changes on their forks
    • Have access to minimal or simple complexity issues
    • Should comment on bounty issues to get assigned (limited to one at a time)
  2. 2.
    Contributors (at least 1 completed issue)
    • Added to the "Contributors" group in the Open Collective GitHub organization
    • Can push branches to the Open Collective repositories
    • Have access to minimal, simple or medium complexity issues
    • Can assign themselves bounty issues (limited to one at a time)
  3. 3.
    Recurring Contributors (3 or more completed issues)
    • Added to the "Recurring Contributors" group in the Open Collective GitHub organization
    • Can assign themselves two bounty issues at a time
  4. 4.
    Confirmed Contributors (3 or more completed issues including at least 2 with medium complexity)
    • Added to the "Confirmed Contributors" group on the Open Collective GitHub organization
    • Become candidates to work on complex issues or projects on a negotiable per-project or hourly rate
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Last modified 6mo ago