I would love to hear community and contributor thoughts about a bounty system for GrapheneOS.
This would be a system that mirrors the GrapheneOS Issue Tracker, but allows users and community members to contribute to bounties for specific issues. Upon closure of an issue, the bounty for that issue would be paid out to the developer(s) that contributed to it.
This idea is inspired by Monero Bounties. You can check that out here to see how it works, and read more about it here.
There have been past examples of users expressing a willingness to pay for GrapheneOS to implement specific features.
This system has many potential benefits, such as:
- Encouraging new developers to contribute to GrapheneOS
- Encouraging funding from a likely non-trivial amount of users that otherwise would not donate to the general GOS fund
- Allowing users that desperately want specific features to incentivize development of those features
- It may be possible to re-use a large portion of the code from Monero Bounties, if Monero were to be the only accepted payment method.
However, it also has several potential drawbacks:
- Users who currently contribute to the general GOS fund might cease those donations in favor of increasing bounties, leading to potentially inefficient usage of funding
- The system would likely need to be moderated by a few core contributors, taking up some of their time
- Keeping track of funds may be complex, depending on the funding method(s) used
- Uncertainty as to how bounties are split when multiple contributors work together to solve an issue
Those are just my thoughts about it. It doesn't necessarily have to work in the same way as Monero Bounties, but given that that project inspired this post, I thought it'd make a great example.
Very interested to see what you guys think of the concept!