Explore how Ecosyste.ms Funds can help support WordPress community initiatives, working groups, and teams

[gusaus]

Summary

Building on the discussion from ecosyste-ms/packages#660, we'd like to explore how Ecosyste.ms Funds can align with WordPress' Five for the Future program and help support community initiatives, working groups, and teams.

Context

• Five for the Future encourages companies and individuals to contribute back to WordPress core and community initiatives. It currently lists organizations on a static page: Five for the Future Sponsorships.
• Ecosyste.ms already has a dedicated WordPress Fund that could be leveraged to distribute funds directly to contributors—without requiring management by the WordPress Foundation.

Options We're Exploring

1. A dynamic leaderboard of funders/contributors, potentially replacing or supplementing the current Five for the Future sponsorships page.
2. A separate fund via Ecosyste.ms or Open Collective to specifically collect and distribute contributions tied to the Five for the Future program (focused on sustaining core and community initiatives).
3. Creating a top-level WordPress collective (see WordPress/sustainability#24) that would centralize funds for core, community initiatives, working groups, and teams. This would be a key component in allowing collective admins to allocate funds manually, addressing the limitations of usage-based funding models.

Goals

• Encourage financial contributions aligned with Five for the Future.
• Provide transparent and scalable funding mechanisms for both core and community initiatives.
• Increase visibility and recognition for sponsors and funders through a dynamic leaderboard or dashboard.

Next Steps

Would love to hear thoughts on:

• The feasibility and benefits of having a separate project/fund.
• Whether a top-level collective seems like a good approach.
• How best to integrate on WordPress.org (ecosyste-ms/funds#236).

[sereedmedia]

Perhaps The WP Community Collective can serve as an intermediary for distributing funding to WordPress. Partnerships are a big part of our program vision.

[gusaus]

@sereedmedia Thanks for chiming in here!

I’ve been trying to think through scenarios where there might be a need for a nonprofit like The WP Community Collective to serve as an intermediary for distributing funding to WordPress—especially since Ecosyste.ms Funds is already set up to do that directly.

The one case that comes to mind is if the owners/maintainers of WordPress community repos under the WordPress GitHub org don’t enable or allow things like GitHub Sponsors and/or Open Collective WordPress/sustainability#24, which are typically needed to distribute funds to individual contributors on those projects.

Curious if you’re thinking about other situations where a nonprofit intermediary would make sense?

[gusaus]

A separate fund via Ecosyste.ms or Open Collective to specifically collect and distribute contributions tied to the Five for the Future program (focused on sustaining core and community initiatives).

Following up on this option (mentioned in the issue description):

@andrew confirmed it’s technically possible to set up a dedicated fund on funds.ecosyste.ms, but wasn’t sure why it would be necessary or how it would work in practice.

To clarify: Five for the Future is focused on sustaining WordPress core and community initiatives—not the broader contributor ecosystem or downstream dependencies. Most of these initiatives (aside from core) don’t have the usage numbers to qualify for funding via the current algorithm.

Andrew also mentioned that while the WordPress plugin API provides plenty of data, projects hosted on GitHub—including many of the community projects under github.com/WordPress—don’t provide the usage metrics needed to make the algorithm work for them. Related: #152.

Given these factors, I think a separate fund is the only way we can:

• Collect contributions tied specifically to Five for the Future.
• Credit funders (see #236).
• Allocate funds to the projects and programs the initiative was intended to support.

We’d still need leadership involved in evaluation, approvals, and initial setup, but once it’s live, we’d have an automated and transparent way to fund critical programs and ensure the long-term health of WordPress core and its community.

@andrew Apologies if I’m misunderstanding or misstating any part of our conversations from Open Collective Discord! Feel free to chime in with corrections, additional points, or questions.

[gusaus]

This upcoming Open Source Pledge campaign could provide a compelling opportunity for organizations looking to financially support WordPress contributors. While the existing WordPress Fund offers a streamlined way to fund the broader ecosystem, many organizations might prefer a more targeted approach for funding core and community contributors—such as the stand-alone "WordPress Community" fund proposed in the previous comment.

[gusaus]

Quick update: the proposal to create a dedicated Five for the Future fund on Ecosyste.ms is now being evaluated by WordPress project leadership. You can follow or join the ongoing discussion here: WordPress/five-for-the-future#339