# shapeware: reward free software supporters with a say in the roadmap

what would be my motivation for donating to an organization developing something free whose product i can just freely grab? it would be nice if i'd get something extra in return. i'm thinking of various non-profit organizations behind linux, firefox, signal. here's all i want: let me have a say in the roadmap, allow me to shape the software's development a bit. let me vote on features and bugs and in exchange the organization will address the top voted issues. e.g. maybe in firefox i could vote for native vertical tab support or native adblocking support.

having the short-term roadmap public helps a lot with transparency as well. and i would be more inclined to donate to transparent organizations. i think it's also fine if the roadmap is not fully public but only available for the subscribers.

this is already happening for some software. if you donate 10 euros to the free text editor vim, you can vote on the features its author should prioritize: https://www.vim.org/sponsor/vote_results.php. though it's not clear how effective this is in vim's case.

i'm not fully sure what is the right model for transforming money into votes. i want to avoid the confusion that i have with vim for instance. after thinking of various approaches, i think this has the best properties:

• the supporters pay for a monthly subscription. monthly subscriptions are much simpler for an organization to plan with than one time payments.
• votes are limited so that the subscribers think hard about the priorities.
• each vote can increase or decrease the score of an item by one.
• each vote can have a justification attached so that the organization can see why people are voting for a given item (see @/ffpoll).
• there are multiple subscription tiers. you get 1 vote for $10, 2 votes for $40, 3 votes for $100. a user can only have one account.
• users can prepay ahead in case they prefer one-time-donations. e.g. they can pay $120, vote, and have the vote count for a year.
• a user's votes stop counting when they end their subscription.
• votes can be changed only once per month to discourage gaming the system.
• these vote limits avoid the problem where some old, irrelevant issues are still at the top in the ranks because a lot of people voted for them a long time ago.
• the organization does monthly sprint planning and the most voted issues are incorporated into the month's plan.
• the organization does a short sprint retrospective or change summary at the end of the month. this way the users can stay informed about the organization's efficiency.

i am not saying that this is the only way an organization should select its priorities. if a rich donor comes and wants a specific feature (e.g. set the default search engine to a specific site) then the organization can do that without the donor having to become a subscriber. i don't even expect that donations as described above would account to a significant amount of revenue for a big organization.

but what i'm saying is that such a software organization should always address the most wanted features too. in the end a software organization needs its users. it would be shooting itself into the foot if they ignore their voice.

i wish even megacorps who don't really need donations would have such feedback mechanism for users interested shaping the company. a rich megacorp could then send all such donations to charity to decrease people's moral friction with donating to rich companies. maybe i would feel less antagonistic towards them if they would provide me with this feedback mechanism.

published on 2023-05-28

to the frontpage