Give the people who are building tools like Mastodon:

1. Training in user-centered software design and how to make well-founded product decisions quickly
2. Training in go-to-market and business skills
3. Training in trust and safety and community management
4. A network
5. Money

@ben @Mulderc that sounds way too small. Mastadon is already earning $35k USD / month on Patreon. That's $420k/year

You're talking about a one-time grant for like one "rich world" engineer salary. And the output of these accelerations are just more features that need to be maintained by the core team.

Now I don't object to contributing the 100k once. But if we want Mastodon to be a forever tool, It needs forever funding as well.

@ben @Mulderc

So $100k is like one skilled senior white collar worker (with healthcare and benefits).
Maybe 1.5 to 2 junior people.

How exactly are you allocating 12 to 18 months of work to cover all of your five points? Will this still allow staff to complete the existing job they're already doing?

If I wrote you this $100k cheque tomorrow and we fast forward to June 2024, how would you know it was successfully deployed?

@ben @Mulderc

Again, I have a $100k cheque in my hand.

How do you know that those $100k have been spent appropriately? We can use Mastodon as an example.

@gatesvp @Mulderc Off the top of my head:

The idea has been researched, validated, and potentially adjusted if the team’s research showed it originally wasn’t right.

The team has been established and has a strong, empathetic, open culture and norms.

An early prototype, suitable for further testing, has been coded.

And the team has a strong idea of who to reach out to for funding and why, and has ideally already started (after intros from the accelerator maybe) with expressions of interest.

@gatesvp @Mulderc I’m heavily basing this off an for-profit accelerator but I do agree that it would need to be different metrics for success.

Key: it’s meant to teach them to fish as an independent entity.

@ben @Mulderc you successfully pumped out a pair of toots without providing a single measurable metric for 100k investment.

And yes, you sound like they're driven by for profit orgs that intend to grow even more. You want to teach them about UX, but they're actually just going to need a UX person forever. And today, Mastodon is less than a dozen people. You can teach them all you want, they don't have that human.

You want to accelerate them, but accelerate to what?

@gatesvp So, a few things:

Software that is built code-first is more likely to fail. It’s not about having a UX person; it’s about baking a culture of research and fast iteration into the team, which I believe gives them more of a chance to succeed. A more entrepreneurial approach to open source.

I want these projects to be able to pay for themselves and have the nfp business skills to be sustainable, in addition to plugging into a network of people who can help.

@gatesvp And I want to make sure these projects are built in a human centered way rather than people just buckling down and hacking. We’ve got plenty of open source that does that and it’s full of people just scratching their own itches.

Other approaches are available. But having built a couple of large open source projects, and advised a bunch of non profits, that’s mine.