FreeCAD News

TL;DR: the FreeCAD Project Asso­ci­a­tion stud­ied best prac­tices of oth­er orga­ni­za­tions that have grant pro­grams and is now work­ing towards improv­ing its own program.

In 2022, the FreeCAD Project Asso­ci­a­tion announced a grant pro­gram and issued sev­er­al grants to peo­ple active­ly con­tribut­ing to the well-being of FreeCAD and its ecosys­tem: to RealThun­der for his work on the topon­am­ing prob­lem mit­i­ga­tion, to Ajinkya Dahale for his work on Sketch­er, and to Adrián Insaur­ralde Ava­l­os for man­ag­ing FreeCAD releas­es. Sev­er­al more grants are in process or are cur­rent­ly being discussed.

How­ev­er, the orga­ni­za­tion would like to expand the pro­gram and is unsure how to go about it. Here are the key pain points.

Small pay­outs. The FPA doesn’t have expe­ri­ence man­ag­ing grants, thus so far, we’ve been stick­ing most­ly to “hon­orary” sin­gle-time $1,000 pay­outs. The orga­ni­za­tion has a much larg­er bud­get than that, but we want to spend mon­ey respon­si­bly and with max­i­mum effi­cien­cy, so we feel that we need a bet­ter plan for man­ag­ing the program.

Lit­tle inter­est from the com­mu­ni­ty. There have been very few pro­pos­als for grants com­ing from the com­mu­ni­ty. The FPA admin board is not sure why that is the case.

Lack of clar­i­ty on pro­gram super­vi­sion. On one hand, the FPA would rather issue grants to devel­op­ers who know their way around FreeCAD code, can come up with a sen­si­ble plan, and will exe­cute on it. On the oth­er hand, it’s unclear how many poten­tial con­trib­u­tors match that descrip­tion, plus either way, this would put extra bur­den on main­tain­ers doing code review.

Thus anoth­er grant was issued to Alexan­dre Prok­ou­dine to study the expe­ri­ence of oth­er orga­ni­za­tions that issue grants to free and open-source soft­ware devel­op­ers. The objec­tive was to find answers to the fol­low­ing questions:

• What to do to start increas­ing engagement?
• How to find tal­ent and bring them to the project?
• If peo­ple think this looks too much like work, do we want to change how it looks or do we find devs who don’t think like that?
• How do oth­er orga­ni­za­tions and appli­cants struc­ture grants? Too spe­cif­ic or too open in scope? How much speci­fici­ty to do? Is it like GSoC project ideas?
• Do we do small/medium/large projects?

To do that Alexan­dre stud­ied what the FPA has done so far with its grant pro­gram and how the pro­gram was com­mu­ni­cat­ed to the FreeCAD community.,He then iden­ti­fied orga­ni­za­tions whose expe­ri­ence could be applic­a­ble, con­duct­ed inter­views and stud­ied what they’ve been doing and why, then sum­ma­rized main take­aways and came up with a list of action­able recommendations.

You can read the full report on the research here. Let’s briefly dis­cuss its key findings.

FPA’s activity

So far, most grants have been more like gifts to peo­ple who were already doing great work for FreeCAD. There was nei­ther plan­ning, nor bud­get esti­ma­tion, and no super­vi­sion was done.

All pay­outs were $1,000 sin­gle-time ones, done 100% upfront, no strings attached. Mean­while the FPA accu­mu­lates close to $8K a month and is pre­pared to spend between $50K and $75K a year on devel­op­ment grants and supervision.

The pro­gram com­mu­ni­ca­tion has been rather scarce so far: very few posts in this blog and on social media, not much dis­cus­sion on the forum. The devel­op­ment fund page has a num­ber of ambi­gu­i­ties that are easy to fix.

Over­all, the research finds that the FPA “hes­i­tates to go big on its grant pro­gram while hav­ing suf­fi­cient funds to do so”.

What other organizations do

The research focused on QGIS, GRASS GIS, Cesium, Blender, Godot, and Open Tool­chain Foun­da­tion, with hon­orary men­tions of Google Sum­mer of Code, Kri­ta Foun­da­tion, Epic Mega­Grants, Python Foun­da­tion, NLnet Foun­da­tion, and Pro­to­type Fund.

Gen­er­al approach to acquir­ing tal­ent. Most orga­ni­za­tions grav­i­tate towards giv­ing grants to devel­op­ers who have already proven their worth in the com­mu­ni­ty — either by active­ly con­tribut­ing as vol­un­teers or by suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ing a GSoC project.

Rolling sched­ule vs batch­ing sub­mis­sions. There is a strong bias towards batch­ing pro­pos­al sub­mis­sions and mak­ing annu­al runs of the grant program.

Project ideas. Just one orga­ni­za­tion, GRASS GIS, pro­vides a list of top­ics for poten­tial grant appli­cants. Orga­ni­za­tions most­ly expect appli­cants to be peo­ple with hands-on expe­ri­ence, capa­ble of com­ing up with a sen­si­ble pro­pos­al of their own.

Paper­work. Pro­pos­als are gen­er­al­ly expect­ed to have a gen­er­al project descrip­tion, expect­ed com­ple­tion time, timeline/milestones, a list of deliv­er­ables, and a bud­get esti­ma­tion. Inter­im reports are encour­aged. A final report is com­mon­ly expect­ed as the last pay­out usu­al­ly depends on it.

Project super­vi­sion. Orga­ni­za­tions most­ly expect appli­cants to be expe­ri­enced enough to not require much super­vi­sion. Except for GRASS, men­tor­ship is not pro­vid­ed except for the usu­al code review pro­ce­dures or com­mu­ni­ca­tion in chat rooms for developers.

Scope and size of projects. Orga­ni­za­tions typ­i­cal­ly allow small, medi­um, and large projects even if it only shows through project descrip­tions and allo­cat­ed budgets.

Pay­out sched­ule. Orga­ni­za­tions most­ly pay 50% before the project and 50% after suc­cess­ful com­ple­tion of the project.

Pub­lic com­mu­ni­ca­tion. This is one aspect where orga­ni­za­tions dif­fer the most. Some active­ly post about the pro­gram on social media and pub­lish announce­ments and recaps in their respec­tive blogs, oth­ers don’t even have a sin­gle place of entry for peo­ple will­ing to learn more about the program.

One ques­tion that the research was unable to answer direct­ly based on study­ing oth­er orga­ni­za­tions was how to increase the amount of grant appli­ca­tions. This is in part due to a rel­a­tive­ly small sam­pling in the study, but also because FreeCAD has very spe­cif­ic chal­lenges. How­ev­er, Alexan­dre point­ed out that, so far, there hasn’t been a lot of pub­lic com­mu­ni­ca­tion about the pro­gram. And while this blog posts updates on dona­tions, it’s pos­si­ble that poten­tial appli­cants are most­ly unaware that the FPA does have a sub­stan­tial bud­get for grants.

What’s next

Based on action­able rec­om­men­da­tions pro­vid­ed at the end of the report, Alexan­dre will design an updat­ed grant pro­gram and revamp the approach to pub­lic com­mu­ni­ca­tion about it.

One of the main chal­lenges here is that the FPA is a non-gov­ern­ing body that can­not direct­ly med­dle into devel­op­ment affairs. There­fore the FPA is inter­est­ed to work with a group of active con­trib­u­tors who are will­ing to spend time review­ing grant appli­ca­tions and doing code review. We’ve just made a post about that to the ‘Devel­op­ers cor­ner’ sec­tion of the forum. If you are inter­est­ed and you think you qual­i­fy, please respond to that post.