The contributions you guys bring to the platform are very valuable. We see a lot of potential in the community platform and it will be a crucial piece of infrastructure for our future projects from One Army. (For us the Precious Plastic community is just the first prototype) That said, we come from a maker background. We are used to working in workspaces, making machines, in real life with materials. Our team has many makers, engineers, designers etc. Coding is a skillset we are not very familiar with. And on top of this it generally means more remote work and contributions. We love it, see a lot of potential in it and see the Open Source software systems as big inspiration for our hardware.

Long story short. We at One Army are beginners in web development.

We need to organise ourselves, grow a steady team and make releases more regular.

💰 The bounty system.

We started using (internally) a bounty system, to pay contributers for the work that is done. We set out specific tasks and issues and rewards developers that take them on. This works quite well, but currently, we manage ourselves in a spreadsheet. Not very smooth or transparent. We are intrigued by Open Collective, so we are giving it a try :)

⚙️ Maintainers

This is a big bottleneck for us. When external people push commits or want to contribute they often need help. Guidelines, reviews and tips for improvements. Currently @chrismclarke is taking on this task. However this is a lot for him to handle especially with a growing amount of developers contributing. He works in the backend to make this process smoother, setting up live builds and previews. But in general, we could use more long-term maintainers for the platform. People that understand the code, libraries and structure. A complex task, we haven’t got a solution for this yet, just throwing it here so you are aware of the issue :)

💻 Monthly calls.

We started doing monthly dev call. Every first monday of the month at 6PM GMT. We list out problems, new versions and just to catch up with the team beyond a keyboard. Well still kinda on a keyboard but we add a screen. If you are interested to join let me know below.

This topic is mainly to share where we are currently at and the direction we are thinking about. But always up for suggestions from some real devs ;)