Paying Contributors
Background information
In 2020, the Mautic Community launched on Mautic Open Collective and GitHub Sponsors, providing an opportunity for individuals and organizations to financially support the Mautic Project.
This policy sets out how Mautic plans to use the funds raised through these channels to support the development of Mautic.
Sponsoring contributors
With a largely volunteer-driven community, it can be difficult to have a reliable cadence of resources available both to support the ‘keep the lights on’ activity, such as reviewing pull requests and answering forum threads, and to ensure that Mautic is able to proactively respond to bug reports and issues that require timely attention.
While many organizations financially support individual contributors to work for or on behalf of them on Mautic, a large body of people can’t consistently contribute unless the Mautic project compensates them.
There are also situations where the Mautic Project requires expertise and skills that aren’t found in the community, therefore needing to seek freelancers to work on clearly defined tasks.
This policy provides a guideline on how Mautic uses the funds available for use in this context.
Proposing sponsored contributors
Team Leads can propose that the Mautic Community sponsor any contributor from their teams who are in good standing within the community. The Community Council reviews these, and the Project Lead approves the final decision. It’s important to note that the Mautic Community is unable to pay people who live in certain countries for legal reasons. Please read the Financial Policy for further details.
The community makes a clear proposal that outlines the benefits to the Mautic Project from sponsoring the individual. This proposal includes examples of the person’s previous contributions and a plan for what they work on during the first three months.
The proposal should include clear outcomes that are demonstrable. For example, they refactor the top three sections on the developer documentation and publish the work via pull requests on the new developer documentation repository, or they work on reducing the backlog of open pull requests by 20% by testing and code reviewing outstanding pull requests.
Mautic supports sponsored contributors for an initial three month period, and the community conducts a review at the end of this period.
Rate of remuneration
Finding an hourly amount which is appropriate worldwide for all levels of experience is always going to be a challenge.
At this early stage, the Mautic Community has taken into consideration information from salary surveys from Stack Overflow and other sites such as Glassdoor alongside insights from other open source projects such as ESLint and Drupal, who have implemented similar policies.
The Community Council agrees that, from the date of this policy, an hourly rate of $40 is the standard rate for sponsored developers who contribute to Mautic. The Community Council reviews this rate annually. The Project Lead agrees on an ideal range and an agreed maximum weekly limit of hours that sponsored contributors work.
Contributors won’t be able to claim any incidental expenses without explicit approval from the Project Lead in writing, in advance of incurring any costs.
All sponsored contributors need to raise an invoice on Mautic Open Collective at the end of each month for the hours worked the previous month, or have a regular monthly sponsor tier on Open Collective, which Mautic can select to sponsor them for ongoing agreements.
Contracts
When the Mautic Community hires a freelancer, it uses the UpWork team account to post roles, interview candidates, and hire the candidate.
If the Mautic Community sponsors a contributor outside UpWork, Open Collective’s HR provider draws up a contract. All contributors the Mautic Project pays in a freelance consultant capacity, as opposed to when it employs them, are responsible for managing their tax and insurance obligations in their locality.
Terminating an agreement
Generally speaking, Mautic agrees to sponsor a contributor subject to the delivery of expected performance and outcomes, whether an ongoing or project-based agreement.
The contributor or the Mautic Project may decide to end the agreement with four weeks’ notice for any reason in the case of an ongoing agreement, or one week’s notice in the case of a project-based agreement. The final invoice includes payment for all work completed up to the end of the contract.
Initiatives and new feature development
The RFP process outlines how contributors propose projects and Strategic Initiatives. Mautic manages these as individual projects on Open Collective.
Credits
The Mautic Community drew inspiration from numerous sources, including: