







Over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend. Many of the plugin authors I have spoken with throughout the community tell me that very rarely do they ever get a donation let alone…
Are donations effective for open source projects?
The other day I came across a new initiative for funding open source development called the Bitcoin Grant. While interesting at first sight, I was wondering: How is this better than the traditional donation button most open source projects have? The Bitcoin Grant then seems to limit who can donate and how you can use those donations (you can’t pay rent with bitcoins just yet).

Why we never thank open source maintainers · Tech blog of Unicooo
Why we never thank open source maintainers - Unicooo
Response to Alex Kings Blog Post: Open Source Motivations
My response and disagreement with Alex Kings blog post entitled "Open Source Motivations" about how he feels about contributing Plugins to WordPress.org
Sunsetting Documentation
We will stop accepting contributions to Documentation on August 8 2017 On behalf of everyone who worked on Documentation, I want to thank all 15,451 users who contributed. We particularly want to
The Minimally-nice Open Source Software Maintainer
Being involved in open source software is rewarding, yeah? You start off contributing to your favorite project, and it feels so heartwarming when that project’s maintainers recognize your effort. Then a few years later you somehow end up responsible for that project, and maybe some satellite projects, and people are clamoring for your attention, and your inbox is never empty, and it’s exhausting and terrifying, and the skills necessary to cope with all the personalities involved are entirely different from the skills you used to get your foot in the door in the first place.
Scaling Open Source communities
Successful Open Source projects must transition from pure volunteerism to include paid contributions, mirroring how public goods like roads evolved historically.

Give Lively - A Free Fundraising Platform For Nonprofits
We built and support a powerful and practical fundraising platform that is free for nonprofits and intuitively easy to use for donors. Sign up today for Fundraising Pages, Text-to-Donate, Peer-to-Peer, Event Ticketing, and more!

gifthood.community — closed beta
A neighborly way to give and receive — everything free, always. Built in the open on the AT Protocol.

Is Money Useless to Open Source Projects?
In April I donated $5,000 of the ad revenue from this website to an open source .NET project. It was exciting to be able to inject some of the energy from this blog into the often-neglected .NET open source ecosystem. As I mentioned at the time, I used
How to manage casual contributors to open source projects
Try these strategies to better utilize contributions from your project's episodic volunteers.

Can One Donation a Day Keep Depression Away? Three Randomized Controlled Trials of an Online Micro-Charitable Giving Intervention
Prosocial interventions grounded in social interactions have shown limited effectiveness in alleviating depressive symptoms, possibly because of the discomfort and unease that depressed individuals experience during such interactions. We developed and examined an innovative prosocial intervention—an online micro-charitable giving intervention, in which individuals voluntarily donated at least one Chinese cent (¥0.01, or about $0.0014) daily. We conducted three preregistered, 2-month randomized controlled trials with depressed individuals (Sample 1: N = 125, Sample 2: N = 296, Sample 3: N = 462). Results showed that, compared with the waitlist group, the intervention group exhibited significantly greater improvements in both depressive symptoms (Cohen’s d s = −0.19 to −0.46) and emotional positivity (Cohen’s d s = 0.22 to 0.49), and that emotional positivity mediated the intervention’s effect on the reduction of depressive symptoms. Exploratory analysis found a slightly larger intervention effect for generous donors than for minimal donors. This low-cost, easily accessible prosocial intervention holds potential for the prevention of depression. Statement of Relevance Can donating one cent (specifically one Chinese cent, or about $0.0014) alleviate depressive symptoms? We have developed a practical and effective intervention—donating at least one cent daily on an online charity platform—and have discovered that this intervention effectively mitigates depressive symptoms in depressed individuals. Despite the nominal purchasing power of one cent in contemporary society, this act of giving has been shown to significantly enhance mental health. Our findings could be relevant to everyone in society; charitable donations promote societal harmony and, in addition, offer a cost-effective way to alleviate depressive symptoms. As the intervention instruction asserts, “Charity encompasses love, regardless of its size, as even one cent holds value.”

Gifthood — an open gifting community
Neighbors giving freely. Free things, offered and asked for by the people who live near you, on an open network you actually own. No money, no marketplace, no catch.

Moving beyond the charity framework
A healthy ecosystem for supporting open source in the long term.

The Other Side Of WordPress
HeroPress is full of stories of success and happiness. The WordPress community isn't always like that. Our family has issues too.

Stack Overflow Culture
This blog post was most directly provoked by this tweet from my friend Rob Conery, explaining why he’s giving up contributing on Stack Overflow. However, it’s been a long time coming. A…
