Sponsorship/FAQ

General

Why SMW sponsoring?

SMW is offering several sponsorship opportunities in order to bring our open-source-community to the next level and secure the future of SMW!

The goals of the sponsorship program are

• to give contributors incentives to contribute more and regularly
• to give companies who are contributing time of their staff visibility
• to give users of SMW the opportunity to contribute without the need to have someone who can code
• to make the overall SMW community broader, more active and more visible

Is this the start of commercializing SMW?

No. The goal is to make SMW a sustainable open source community. Since freelancers, paid companies, NGOs/univeristies, freelancers are involved, this is not easy to achieve. We do not want to monopolize anything, but give as many players as possible the opportunity to contribute in a way they can.

How will you track if time sponsors really do what they promise?

Each sponsor gets a public sponsoring page. There they can either link developer profiles on github or user accounts on semantic-mediawiki.org, so everybody can see what is being done. Alternatively, they can just add a little journal on the page, where they put e. g. “May 2023: creation of 5 videos showing how to setup SMW with ElasticSearch” This way everybody can look if the sponsors are indeed active. If they are not, their logo will be removed. The logo can be put up quickly again as soon as they document their efforts or re-establish their promised work.

Can we still contribute without and money involved?

Of course! We welcome any contributions, technical or non-technical any time. For occasional contributions, nothing more it to do than contribute. If you can devote time regularly, you have the following options

1. contribute, and put yourself/your logo as sponsor as other freelancers do
2. contribute, and put someone else as sponsor. Maybe you want some NGO like Greenpeace or the Red Cross to show up with their logo? Just talk to them first if they are fine with it and declare that all the work you do for the project should make them visible, not you
3. contribute and do nothing. You don't have to show anywhere. Nobody has to pay anybody. Contributing for money is just an opportunity, not a must.

For companies with developer resources

How can we profit from the sponsorship.?

You basically have two options which can be combined

1. If you have staff with SMW knowledge, you can devote some of their time to SMW tasks with the benefit of the sponsorship visibility. It also can help you to keep your staff busy and get better ant SMW programming. Starting with just 1 hours/week you can contribute regularly and be a sponsor already.

1. If you have staff with SMW knowledge and others approach you about sponsorship opportunities, you might be able to devote even more time of your developers to the project, because another sponsor can pay for it which helps to pay the salary of your developer.

As an example a combination could look like this: you become a bronze sponsor by devoting 4h of dev resources. Someone without dev resources approaches you (maybe an outsider or a customer of yours). This person or organization wants to donate to SMW as well, but does not have dev resources. Say you agree to devote an additional 4h/week of the same (or different) developer to SMW to the terms you agree on. Then you can both decide if this will be a secret (meaning that the sponsor remains invisible, but your organization becomes a silvers sponsor because now you devote 8h/week. Or you want to stay secret and the sponsor wants to be visible as sponsor. This means that the sponsor would put their logo and state on the sponsoring page, that they have contracted you to work 4 hours/week on a certain SMW task.

Do we have to donate our time every week? Can I distribute the time differently?

Not necessarily. An example: You want to become a Silver Sponsor, but are not sure if you can donate 3-4h each week. Then you can declare a time period (let's say 6 months) where you want your sponsoring to be active. 4 hours per week, times 4 = 16h a month, times 6 = 96h for the 6 month period. This means that you can setup your sponsoring today if you know you will be able to donate ~90h in the 6 month period, but don't (yet) exactly know when.

What you should to in this case is write about this on your sponsorship page/blog, so others can see what your plan is. Otherwise they could wonder why you added the silver sponsorship and for some weeks no activity was visible.

Can we also donate money instead of time?

Of course! If your resources are too busy, but you can donate money for others, just go ahead and be a money donator!

We have a large customer project coming up and cannot provide what we promised. What now?

No problem. Just remove your logo from the website, add a little note on the sponsoring page and put it up again once you can resume your promised efforts.

For SMW users

Why should we participate?

Finally you have the opportunity to give something back to the community! You don’t have to hire staff yourself, but can choose among offerings on the sponsoring section or pay contributions to one of the two organizations who care about SMW. You will get a receipt for your taxes and can donate the amount of your choice.

For freelance programmers

How can I profit from this as a freelance programmer?

If you are new to SMW, feel free to contribute as you would to any open source software. If you feel comfortable and knowledgeable enough to work for money, you can add yourself to the list of potential contributors (see table) who offer their time to contribute regularly. We hope that someone who wants to contribute money will contact you and fund the devoting of some of your free time to SMW. The negotiation and contracts are between you and the sponsor, nobody needs to know any details (e..g. how much money you get). After you have agreed with a sponsor, say to work for 4 hours / week on one of the SMW repos, they can put up their sponsorship logo and you will work to fulfill their sponsorship obligations.