Announcing the Comunica Association, and a Bounty Program
Monday, June 21, 2021
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In this post, we announce the creation of the Comunica Association, and the introduction of a new bounty system using which organizations and companies can fund development of new features and the fixing of bugs, and through which developers can take up these bounties and get paid.
The need for an association
Comunica started out as a small software project to drive query-related research. By now, it has grown into a project that is being widely used not only within research, but also within companies and organizations as stable software.
The original research-driven development approach is running into its limits, since features and bugs are reported regularly that do not fit into a strict research agenda. Therefore, there is a need to broaden the development scope of Comunica, which is the purpose of the Comunica Association.
Short-term goals
As of now, the Comunica Association is a non-profit organization (activity within Open Knowledge Belgium) that as a first step will act as an intermediary between people in need of development, and people that want to offer development at a price. For instance, a certain company may be in need of a specific feature in Comunica, but may not have the required expertise to implement it. Via the Comunica Association, this company may place a bounty on this issue, so that other companies or freelance developers (that do have this expertise) may take up this effort for the bounty price.
Via this bounty program, we intend to grow a network of organizations and individuals that can offer services to each other around the topic of Web-scale querying of Knowledge Graphs.
Several bounties have already been placed on issues! So if you're a developer willing to take up such work, have a look at the list of bounties. If you're an organization interested in placing new bounties, have a look at the bounty procedures.
Long-term goals
This bounty program is a first step in the creation of the Comunica Association. As a next step, we intend to bring this network of interested organizations and individuals even closer by allowing everyone to collaboratively determine the future roadmap of Comunica through memberships.
The Association will be as open and transparent as possible. This will mean that important decisions will be shared on this website, and that all finances will visible for everyone via the Open Collective platform.
Even though the Comunica Association is a non-profit organization. It will raise funds through the bounty program and memberships in order to secure funding for hiring dedicated developers. Such developers can then become dedicated maintainers of Comunica, in order to make the open-source development of Comunica and related RDF/JS libraries more sustainable in the long-term.