100dollarpledge.org 💡🤔 #4
Description
During discussions at the ReactConf AU afterparty, I had the idea of how powerful it would be if we could get developers to pointedly bring up these increasingly specific questions during job interviews:
- Does your organization contribute to open source?
- Does your organization contribute at least $100/yr per in-house developer to open source?
- Do you allow your developers to choose how that money is donated?
What if...
What if there was a place where developers could promise to bring up these issues during interviews. Maybe they could be placed on a list of people who have promised to do so.
There's a further commitment of promising to refuse to work at an organization that does NOT give $100 to each developer to water the open source crops. This is a more aggressive step for later, maybe.
Such a website could either just be a markdown file that you can add yourself to, but it would be awesome if it could be a website with a Github OAuth login so that people's avatars could be displayed next to their names on the list. If it had a database backend, everyone could have a page like 100dollarpledge.org/erikras that looked like a document by each individual making the promise.
Employer Side
There could also be an employer side of the website (not unlike BudgetForOpenSource, or maybe even connected to the same backend) where employers could promise that they are doing this. It could be a great thing to link to on first recruiter response: "Is the company on this list?"
Conclusion
The point is that we can use devs to raise this issue with companies. We need managers and decision makers to hear these demands, and feel the pain of not making a hire due to lack of OSS funding. In the short term, I got a bunch of the top talent at the afterparty to agree to, rather than ignore recruiters, turn them down by saying that not contributing to open source is a dealbreaker.
I think this $100/developer is a great round, memorable number for this campaign.
Just some thoughts...