Continuing Our Support of the Lottie Open Source Community
Lottie is an open-sourced Android, iOS, Web, React Native, and Windows library that renders After Effects animations in real time, allowing apps to use animations as easily as they use static images.
After years of working with open source contributors to create new features, fix bugs, and maintain the issue backlog, we are now announcing the Lottie Open Collective. The Lottie Open Collective is a platform to help manage groups of contributors transparently. Lottie joins projects like webpack, Babel, Mocha, Preact, Jest, Vue, and many more in supporting the open source community through the Open Collective platform.
This is our way to help support the efforts of the open source Lottie community, and we’re also kicking it off with some funding from Airbnb. Airbnb employees cannot benefit from the Lottie Open Collective. The collective’s sole purpose is to support the open source side of the Lottie community.
In this post we’ll outline what the Lottie Open Collective is, its structure, and our goals.
What is the Lottie Open Collective
The Lottie Open Collective is a group of open source contributors who operate in full transparency to:
- Receive funds from backers and sponsors
- Approve expenses submitted by the community
- Give everyone visibility on the budget
What is the structure of the collective
The Lottie Open Collective will be managed by three non-Airbnb core contributors from the open source community:
Gabriel and Brandon are the original engineers who created Lottie Android and Lottie iOS when they were engineers at Airbnb in 2016. They have since moved on from Airbnb, but continue to be the core contributors to Lottie. Hernan has been an active Lottie contributor since 2015, and created bodymovin, the original inspiration for Lottie, which eventually became Lottie Web. They’re responsible for setting the budget, approving expenses, and managing admins of the collective. We have elected to include Laura Skelton of Airbnb as an adviser.
There are a few contribution tiers that can be found on the Lottie Open Collective page.
Airbnb’s commitment
Airbnb will kick off supporting the Lottie Open Collective with an initial $12,000 contribution, followed by $1,000/month for the next 12 months.
What is the goal of the collective
The goal of the collective is to support contributors to Lottie who make building performant, rich animations straight from motion designers’ tooling delightful and trivial.
To achieve that goal, we will use the funds for things such as:
- Covering speaker travel expenses
- Hosting events and meetups
- Printing and distributing swag
- Major code contributions
This is just the beginning, and we’re committed to getting this right. If you have ideas on other ways we can support the community, or feedback on the structure of the collective, please reach out to us at lottie@airbnb.com.
Alternative ways to sponsor
Lottie can also be supported via GitHub Sponsors. To Sponsor Lottie on GitHub instead, head over to the sponsor button on each repo.
Thank you!
Finally, thank you to everyone who contributes to the Lottie community and open source in general. We are incredibly grateful that we get the opportunity to work on improving animations together.
Also, thank you to Rick Hanlon II for allowing us to use his Jest blog post as a template.
