This file describes our initial proposal for an APInf bounty program.

Purpose of the program

Using bounties for development tasks can help APInf to kickstart community involvement and get more developers interested in contributing to APInf. It can also serve as a recruitment path, if we get regular, good quality contributions from a developer or several developers. It also allows us to solve issues for which we don't have the resources ourselves, when either the priority or urgency is not high enough. Or solve them before we would have time for them ourselves.

At first our goal would simply be to learn the process and to see if there any benefits of using the bountyprogram.

Criteria for selecting tasks

The bounty tasks could be either small low hanging fruits to attract more developers and for them to get an initial understanding of APInf more complex, high priority tasks - a real (customer) need, but not urgently needed

They must be tasks for which we can define a clear deliverable. We should describe the task, estimate it to have an idea about the bounty sum and write a definition of done.

Service to be used

Bountysource is targeted for open source projects. It has over 38 000 community members and it's used by IBM, OwnCloud, Facebook.

A registered user can add a Github issue to the service as a bounty task and backers can add a bounty sum for a task. It is possible to register a team in the service (roughly equivalent to Github organization).

Bountysource takes a 10% fee for withdrawing money from the service. There seems to be no fee for adding a bounty or paying for bounty.

Promotion and outreach

We need to create a bounty label for Github and use it for tasks that have been added to the Bountysource service. Bounties should also be promoted. One option is to post automatically to Twitter every time a bounty label is added.

Initial tasks

Here are some ideas for potential first bounty tasks: https://github.com/NREL/api-umbrella/issues/38 https://github.com/apinf/platform/issues/2068 https://github.com/apinf/platform/issues/1786 https://github.com/apinf/platform/issues/1941 * https://github.com/apinf/platform/issues/1102

Tracking and measuring impact

We should track at least the tweet about bounties and the click through using tinyURL.

Other ideas for tracking?