Run Fund Fest 2024

[chadwhitacre]

← 2023 | Notion 🔒 | Sheet 1 🔒 | Sheet 2 🔒

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Greetings!

Welcome to Sentry's annual Open Source Fund Fest for 2024! This program takes a lot of work to run and this issue is the central source of truth for coordinating all of the moving parts. This year our budget is $750,000, which is 50% more than last year in terms of dollars per developer and in absolute terms (we have about the same number of developers). We aim to publish the blog post 🔒 announcing this year's funding on October 29 November 12.

The Pledge

The big news this year is that we are launching the Open Source Pledge to spread our funding model to other companies. We soft-launched on August 28 and our major marketing launch kicks off on October 8.

Three Components

There are three key components to this year's edition:

1. Thanks.dev—We were a launch partner for this new platform two years ago, and our pilot project went so well that last year we contracted with Thanks.dev to manage the bulk of our budget. This year we plan to do the same.

2. Open Source Collective—We plan to pilot a new feature with them aimed at scaling distributions based on data from Ecosyste.ms.

3. GitHub Sponsors—We are continuing our partnership with GitHub. Honestly the product is starting to really lag behind for at our scale, but they do have a new bulk recurring sponsorship workflow that we intend to exercise.

Feel free to comment on this issue or reach out on Bluesky with questions. Thank you to all of the maintainers who build the software Sentry depends on. 🙏

To Do

• Disburse $600k through TD.
  • Allocate to foundations.
  • Include .NET Foundation?
  • Include rrweb.
  • Remove bcoe - full audit for current employees.
  • Review TD sheet - make adjustments (boost +/-20, survey 1-10) - pick up 12 stragglers from 2023
  • Grant OC perms to TD crew (sentry fund, not sentry-team account).
• Disburse $75k through OC.
• Set up $75k drips on GHS from three orgs (getsentry, codecov, syntaxfm). #247
• Update hero with more lead time 🔒, should redraw in current style vs. reusing old w/ only year changed
• Publish a post 🔒 - "We Just Gave $750,000 to Open Source Maintainers"
• Run internal survey. 🔒
• Include https://github.com/Zalathar.
• Polar dev budgets? - product canceled
• Email dang ahead of time to avoid getting modded if possible—should we frame our post differently? - not gonna bother, hole is too deep, need to drink beers with the right person
  • e.g. “How we distributed $750k to OSS in 2024”

[bruno-garcia]

Re: .NET Foundation: I have more details on an email thread, feel free to reach out to me getting closer to the date. Thank you!

[chadwhitacre]

I have invoices from TD, OSC, and GHS. I'm waiting for final confirmation from OSC before I approve that one. For GHS there are some wrinkles because we also use the platform to pay for some marketing-based sponsorships (different budget than mine).

[chadwhitacre]

Okay let's ship this.

Invoices are queued to be paid.

I'm putting together a spreadsheet of foundations and employee input for TD.

[chadwhitacre]

I went back and updated the 2023 sheet with foundation numbers (dug out of email).

[chadwhitacre]

Payments on invoices are expected to go out today and clear in 2-3 business days.

[chadwhitacre]

GH is timing out on dependency pages:

https://github.com/orgs/getsentry/sponsoring/dependencies
https://github.com/orgs/codecov/sponsoring/dependencies
https://github.com/orgs/syntaxfm/sponsoring/dependencies

This blocks me from setting up trickles on GitHub.

[chadwhitacre]

Alright, I've got a foundation spread and employee survey up on a spreadsheet, handing those off to @anehzat @nehzata.

[chadwhitacre]

Here's the draft of foundation allocations:

[chadwhitacre]

This blocks me from setting up trickles on GitHub.

Found a way around it! It's the https://github.com/sponsors/explore endpoint that gives me what I need. 👍

[chadwhitacre]

@anehzat @nehzata A couple items to get going:

• Could we update the 2023 spreadsheet with final amounts?
• Looks like I intended to pay rrweb, 15k but I only see ~1k on the 2023 sheet. Any thoughts on what explains the discrepancy?

[nehzata]

Hi @chadwhitacre, rrweb had a balance donation of $13,916.68 made to their Open Collective on 22nd Nov 2023. Have forwarded you the email chain for reference.

Will update the 2023 spreadsheet asap.

[nehzata]

Re: .NET Foundation: I have more details on an email thread, feel free to reach out to me getting closer to the date. Thank you!

@bruno-garcia could you please share .NET Foundation contact for us to coordinate with? 🙏

[chadwhitacre]

@nehzata—Replied in email as well, what I have is [email protected].

[nehzata]

Thanks @chadwhitacre & @bruno-garcia. Confirming Armin has made contact.

[nehzata]

@chadwhitacre 2023 final amounts are available here.

[chadwhitacre]

Awesome! I've updated the spreadsheet linked from last year's post. I put a comment in there about rrweb (here's the transaction, btw).

[chadwhitacre]

We are pushing back our blog post target from October 29 to November 12, so that we have more time to distribute funds before announcing.

[bruno-garcia]

Sorry I didn't keep up with notifications but glad things got figured out! I talked to Chad on slack 🙏

[chadwhitacre]

@nehzata I think there might be something goofy with the sheet. Even if I drop the inclusion percentage to 0%, payees that are showing $0 for auto (meaning they are not detected in our deps, yes?) are still coming out quite high in the 2024 column. Am I reading this right that I should expect $0 in 2024 in this case?

[nehzata]

@chadwhitacre columns D & G are overrides. I've setting G237 to 0 to set the inclusion percentage to 0 and got the following.

Please let me know if I misunderstood the problem.

[chadwhitacre]

Ah, sorry to have been unclear: I was fiddling with the B7 knob on the vars tab. I guess I'm doing it wrong?

Intent

Thinking in terms of dollars, my intention is this:

1. Start by allocating everyone the same dollar amount as they received last year.
2. Review removals this year. Cut their allocation by half and drop entirely if below a certain threshold.
3. Review new additions this year. Allocate to them based on a comparison with other projects in terms of prevalence in our codebase and employee interest.
4. Adjust the whole up or down based on overall budget.
5. Keep an eye on ecosystem ratio and adjust as needed.

[chadwhitacre]

I'm setting up GitHub drips on the three orgs. Process:

1. cancel all previous sponsorships
2. export a CSV
3. run a script to split into multiple 100-row files
4. upload the files, copy/paste minimum errors into minimums.csv
5. rerun the script to split files with minimums taken into account
6. fiddle around to hit budget targets
7. checkout - "Pay later" - "Set sponsorship end date" of Oct 2025 (to prevent step 1 in future)

[chadwhitacre]

syntaxfm done (didn't need cancelations, working up a script for that)

[nehzata]

@chadwhitacre spreadsheet vars!B7 calculations should be fixed now.

[nehzata]

@chadwhitacre did you want us to automate the existing sponsorships cancelations?

[chadwhitacre]

did you want us to automate the existing sponsorships cancelations?

@nehzata Thanks for the offer. As far as I can tell, cancellation is not immediate. It takes effect on the next payment cycle date (Nov 11 in our case). An account in pending cancellation state cannot be updated using bulk sponsor.

[chadwhitacre]

@nehzata We're out of time. Let's go ahead and issue the payouts based on the current state of the spreadsheet (I switched the inclusion % back to 20 where you had it). Thanks.

[nehzata]

Sure thing @chadwhitacre. Will ping you once done.

[nehzata]

@chadwhitacre receipt url for the sentry "enterprise" :)

Have sent an invite for your afternoon – final sync prior to distributing funds. Please feel free to adjust if required. We're available from 8am AEDT. Thanks Chad!

[chadwhitacre]

Nice! Invite accepted. Excited to bring this in for a landing! 👍

[chadwhitacre]

I'm noticing a big discrepancy between the sponsorables discovered by GitHub and those listed on the TD sheet 🔒. What explains that, I wonder? 🤔

[chadwhitacre]

punchlist/notes from TD phonecall:

• rrweb on OC
• receipt page on td
  • add codecov/getsentry/syntaxfm org breakdown
  • specific receipt page vs. top-level at /o/sentry/
• note: td payout will be monthly (in order to deal with internal project conflicts as they arise), receipt page will update to reflect—this has happened before and should be minimal

[chadwhitacre]

My punchlist:

• preen blog post once staging is settled
• populate the GHS sheet
• create new GHS sponsorships on Wednesday when funds clear

[nehzata]

@chadwhitacre How do we add funds to the Sentry Fund on OC? Is it really hidden or do we have to email OC to send an invoice for payment?
These are the only options we see.

[nehzata]

@chadwhitacre rrweb has been paid from existing funds in the account. Just need to figure out how to add funds back in pls.

[chadwhitacre]

Is it really hidden or do we have to email OC to send an invoice for payment?

I've always emailed them for an invoice dance.

[nehzata]

• Sponsor rrweb on OC
• Add org breakdowns on receipt page
• Specific receipt page: https://thanks.dev/o/sentry-241112
• Distribute first month of funds ($29,292.00)
• Top up Sentry OC account
• OSI invoice
• Python Foundation invoice
• OpenJS $5k invoice

[chadwhitacre]

Tying up some loose ends ... I think we're all set with Python, yes?

Also, Zalathar is in the spreadsheet but not showing up in the receipt. Am I reading that right?

[nehzata]

We haven't received an invoice from Python/Loren yet. Maybe it has been sent to an @sentry email / receivables inbox? Armin sent a follow up email last week I think... We haven't heard back yet.

Got to the bottom of why Zalathar not visible btw – should be visible now. Did not impact distributions.

[chadwhitacre]

We haven't received an invoice from Python/Loren yet.

Gotcha, seeing the email thread now. Let's top it up next week (Thanksgiving holiday this week in the US).

Got to the bottom of why Zalathar not visible btw – should be visible now. Did not impact distributions.

Thanks! 👍 Were there others affected?

[nehzata]

Gotcha, seeing the email thread now. Let's top it up next week (Thanksgiving holiday this week in the US).

Enjoy the break!

Thanks! 👍 Were there others affected?

Yes – there was a handful of recent manual inclusions that got affected. All received funds – just weren't showing up on the receipt page. avaloniaui, christianchiarulli, franky47, game-ci, giskard-ai, kamijin-fanta, mattleibow, tamasfe, wslulciuc, xmonad & zalathar.

[chadwhitacre]

Awesome, thanks for confirming.

[chadwhitacre]

Funds finally cleared GitHub and drips are configured.

[chadwhitacre]

OC shipped