I’ve been noticing the payments via thanks.dev, possibly because I’m an owner of the pypa org. I was a little surprised when I noticed the payments were going to gh/pypa and not the individual projects, especially since the donations are based on project popularity (usage).
I’d prefer to see these funds distributed to the maintainers of the individual projects (and proportional to their usage), but as it is, the funds are in the custody of the org.
When we created PyPA, we hadn’t established any legal entity or other governance around receiving or distributing funding.
I did reach out to Thanks.dev to see if the funds for individual projects could be directed to the maintainers of those projects (similar to how it’s done with Tidelift), but they said that’s not possible. I know in [withdrawn] Amending PyPA Governance to permit for use of PyPA funds , we discussed options for distributing some funds to some projects and creating an administrative process to manage that.
I propose that instead of pooling the funds and then fighting over how to distribute them, we distribute them pro-rata to the relevant projects and let each project utilize the funds as they see fit, with an option to donate that to the PyPA.
That said, I’m not even sure we have the data to know which projects generated which donations. I’d have to look into it more and we might need support from Thanks.dev to facilitate the accounting.
Can we consider a less involved administrative process that directs the donations to project maintainers before pooling it at the org level?
My understanding of the situation is: The funding goes into a PyPA bucket under the PSF’s fiscal oversight. I believe virtualenv has an arrangement along the lines you mentioned, except it’s managed by PSF accounting as I understand it.
@bernatgabor likely knows the details of how that came about.
I think pinging accounting@python.org to ask for this for the projects you’re involved in (ideally, with buy-in from the relevant projects’ maintainers on that aspect) is the best way forward on this.
I can explain my situation just so it’s clear to everyone. As you might be aware, I maintain quite a few projects in the ecosystem, and I would say around 2020 I was looking into getting some financial support in doing it. I came upon Tidelift as someone offering financial compensation for some of the packages maintenance, and security fixes. I was able to become a lifter for all packages by communicating directly with Tidelift, minus the virtualenv, as when I tried to claim that, I’ve been told that that has already been claimed by the PSF.
At this point, I reached out to the PSF and found out that so the funds don’t go to waste the PSF claimed the money for the entire PyPA at a project level. It is an important distinction that while thanks.dev operates at the GitHub organization level the Tidelift does project instead. After some conversation, we reached the agreement that the PSF will pay me the remuneration they are getting from Tidelift (minus a 10% handling fee) on a monthly basis; and that the PSF will remain the owner of the financial remuneration claim.
This agreement has been in play ever since, with just a few small delays here and there.
I want to note that the PyPA is a fiscal sponsoree of the Python Software Foundation, so there is a legal entity to handle our funds. It is largely left to us how we want to manage that though.