Pondering the sustainability question

(Exporting a discussion @jezdez and I had on https://github.com/orgs/jazzband/teams/members/discussions/2 in late 2017 to a public location)

Jazzband is wonderful, but from a sustainability perspective, it's primarily a risk mitigation approach: we avoid the "single point of organisational failure" problem by ensuring that someone other than ourselves has permission to publish new releases of our projects.

maintainer.io is an interesting service that puts a price tag on what's essentially ongoing "front line support" for an open source repository: USD$50-100 per month (so $600-1200 per year). (Based on their rates at https://plasso.com/s/RMPMGYmBER)

They also offer one-off contributor experience audits (with resulting PRs) at prices similar to a single month of one of the maintenance plans.

At the same time, https://opencollective.com/learn-more is an interesting approach to pooling funds that essentially operates as a completely transparent set of accounting books - everybody can see exactly what money is going in, and what money is going out.

What I'm wondering is whether or not it might make sense to register Jazzband on OpenCollective, with a view to funding service subscriptions that take some of the stress of open source project maintenance off both the roadies and off the maintainers of individual Jazzband projects.

Doing that would no doubt introduce new kinds of stress (like creating and maintaining a list of "approved expenses" for the OpenCollective funding pool), but it could still be an interesting experiment to try.

No project files, tests, or implementation entry points are identified. Start by reading the linked Jazzband discussion and the OpenCollective and maintainer.io references; the work would be complete only after the sustainability proposal and any funding and expense-management approach are decided.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.