Cooperation with techcultivation.org to support community based Nexctloud development

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An additional and independent structure could be helpful to make it easier to support the development of Nextcloud financially and put a stronger focus on the needs and wishes of the community.

I recently spoke with Susanne from the Center for the Cultivation of Technology and they are open for a partnership with the Nextcloud community.

What is it about?

The Center for the Cultivation of Technology is a charitable non-profit host organization for international Free Software projects.

It is a "backend provider" for the Free Software community: Affiliated projects use the legal entity to collect donations and to manage their budgets and assets, while we take care of organizational matters such as accounting, reimbursements and financial reporting.

The Center aims to become a lightweight scalable fiscal sponsorship "host", much like a "payment processor for unincorporated projects".
But in most cases, we work closer with projects to identify funding opportunities, provide additional services (together with partner organizations), exchange knowledge about sustainable organizational development, and allow developers to focus on what they do best: write code.

So what could it look like?

A group of members of the Nexctloud community (and the GmbH?) could develop the agreement and serve like a council to manage it.

The center covers the financial side, receives donations and pays developers. They prefer bigger donations starting with 500 €, but smaller amounts could be aggregated through www.betterplace.org. Their share is capped at 10 % either way.
What’s left is to decide what to priorize and find developers…

A constructive cooperation between the GmbH and this community structure is crucial. First and foremost regarding the development of Nextcloud and of course we need access to funds, where the support of the GmbH could be helpful.

Obviously funding is a big challenge, we could start a “pool” for Nextcloud to collect funds and then decide on how to use it effectively.

So far. I’m looking forward to your opinion.

edit:
Tails and Qubes cooperate with them.

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I think this is a good idea. Surprised that there wasn’t a single reply so far =)

Currenty, there are only three ways to influence development:

  1. as a company: get Nextcloud enterprise contract
  2. as an individual: develop it yourself in your free time
  3. as individual: pay a developer

I think we need a fourth way. Individuals who cannot code, but want to contribute financially, get together, donate, find devs, set priorities collectively.
Many small donations make big sums and can improve Nextcloud.

As I said in another thread, I think https://opencollective.com/ is another good way to achieve this.

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The 500€ is a rather large contribution which is done by a few companies perhaps. But mostly it will be small contributions, from bountysource we typically had a few or a few tens of $$$.
Or having a “community developer” that can auto-finance through patreon or something like that. Or Nextcloud could hire this person for the rest of the time, so this person has a full time job.