Mozilla’s Community “Loaner” Program: A New Twist on the Community Giving Program
December 4th, 2007 by seth bindernagel
Believe it or not, the Community Giving and Empowerment Program has been distributing resources to our community for just over one year. In that time frame, we have distributed several hundred thousands of dollars in grants, hardware, software, and other services to the Mozilla Community.
As part of the 2007 Q4 goals planning, Mike Shaver and I began to think about ways in which we could be more experimental with providing resources to the Mozilla community, while remaining (in fact, stressing!) leverage. It’s a bit of the same story, how do we do more strategically with what we have?
Here’s the new idea.
We collectively envisioned a program where, in addition to purchasing hardware for contributors who have been around the project for quite a while, we could create a limited pool of resources that could be distributed to the community on an as-needed basis. The rationale follows:
- We want more contributors accesses resources from the program: Sending resources to long-time contributors may have seemed like a reward for those who have been around a long time and have done superb work…unintentionally excluding some contributors who thought they didn’t qualify because they were either “too new” or on the cusp.
- We want to experiment: In the first year of the program, we’ve tried very hard to make sure that our contributors have the resources they have needed. But, many contributors who may not be contributing directly to Mozilla’s code base might be working on very interesting projects and might need resources. Why can’t we touch them, too?
- We want to stress leverage: As always, we’d like all resources we provide to amplify the work that our contributors are doing. Sometimes, it’s as easy as providing a new machine with updated software for testing purposes. But, in every case we’ve examined and in everything we’ve sent out to contributors, our team at Mozilla has always tried to answer the question, “Does this provide support in a leveraged way?”
Our proposed solution, and part of the 4th quarter goals, is to launch the Community Loaner Program. We’ll start small, making a small pool of hardware and funding resources available for people to use. We envision participation to look something like the following steps:
- Individual or group of individuals contacts Seth about the Loaner Program.
- Seth and that person work on articulating what is needed and for how long. Perhaps someone is working for 3 months on the next release of software for a specific module of code or a certain project. Or, another example might be that a group of individuals needs a new machine for 6 months to use as a tinderboxen. The ideas will have to come from the community.
- The individual then submits a simple proposal (based on a template that Seth provides) sketching out a timeline, need, and deliverables.
- Loan idea is discussed among the team with the individual and a decision is made.
- At the end of the term of the loan, the deliverables are evaluated and any of the following could happen:
- Extend loan of the resource for more deliverables (the case would have to be made);
- Permanently gift the resource to the individual or group based on leverage, contribution and ongoing need;
- Return resource (hardware or whatever) for use by another individual in the community.
We’re looking to have a few test cases in place by the end of Q4. If you’d like to apply or have questions, please comment here or email me. Yes, we are in the formative stages of this program, so we can amend it if something looks illogical or wrong.
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Does this actually end up saving money? It seems to me that, for items worth less than $1000 or so, the cost of shipping from the storage facility, tracking who has what, administration, depreciation, shipping it back at the end of the loan period, checking it’s still all in working order before shipping it to the next guy and so on, would end up as being about the same as if you just sent the guy the money and told him to go to Best Buy and keep the result.
To put it another way: how much extra leverage does this actually give you over giving away the resources?
Hi Seth,
Gerv has some good points that I await seeing your response to, but I see all of the great possibilities of this program.
I am interested in applying for the program both as a case study and for practical purposes that could help to promote the Access Firefox project.
Thanks Ken and Gerv for the comments and questions.
To Gerv’s points regarding cost savings: You mention tracking who has what, administration, and making sure it is all OK after the loan. I think those cost are pretty minimal. I’ve been doing that already since the beginning of the program, so I think the present system we have will take care of that.
Shipping costs: we’ll start by shipping from a local purchaser to the first round of participants. Ongoing shipping costs may be a concern, but if it adds a relatively small percentage to the total costs, but is offset by not purchasing another piece of hardware (or whatever resource), then I think it is a fine tradeoff.
Depreciation: Is this purely an accounting question? Or are you concerned that the hardware will degrade to unusable in the 1 or 2 years? There is a sample of contributors who I have in mind who have been using their hardware for quite a while, in some cases as long as 5-10 years. I wouldn’t want an accounting technique that’s used to reduce taxable income that is paid by companies to get in the way of a leveraged idea like this.
The big point is this: For over one year, we have been sending out resources to key contributors. But, we have been trying to find people who are not only contributing, but have been around the project for quite some time. This new approach allows us to experiment by loaning hardware to someone who is doing great work, but may have been “around Mozilla” for, say, 6 or 9 months. Will that person stick around forever? Who knows, but it doesn’t mean we can’t try to make his or her lives easier by giving them some support.
The loan program allows us to find individuals working on great, high impact projects, ask them to write a proposed set of deliverables, loan them some resources, and then track their progress at the end of the term. As I mentioned above, if after the proposed loan, the individual has done such critical work that it is essential for that person to keep the resource, then by all means, we’ll let them have the machine. But, if after the short period, that person has accomplished what was hoped for, but does not have the time to continue working on it, or is moving on to something new, then we’ll pay the cost for shipping to retrieve whatever was given and try to give it to someone else to use.