Sustaining webpack for the future: Part 1
In addition to writing JavaScript, each of the maintainers on the webpack core team have unique talents that allow them to fill important roles for the organization.
Besides doing my best to represent the voice of webpack and its users, I also am responsible for finding ways to better sustain the organization. When asked to join the core team, I made a promise that I would find an effective way to provide this funding and support.
There were many avenues to take and pursue, however our biggest concern was that we lacked a transparent and open way of showing the community what and how they were supporting us.
Thanks to Pia Mancini and her partners, this transparency is now possible. I’m proud to announce that webpack is now apart of open collective!
The webpack open collective
Open collective provides a transparent, sustainable, and secure way for people to support and sponsor open source projects. We are thrilled and honored to be amongst the likes of projects like APEX, Yeoman, GulpJS, KOA, Mocha, and so much more!!
What is an open collective?
An open collective is best described as (seen on their webpage):
A group of people with a shared mission that operates in full transparency
Here are the benefits of this mission:
- Open involvement for anyone
- Both individuals and companies can sponsor, fund, or back our mission (with potential tax benefits).
- Following the money is easy and transparent
- You help decide the future of webpack through your support
- Anyone can collect funds by contributing to the webpack ecosystem
What will webpack do with my sponsorship?
Up until now, we have been completely focused on our documentation efforts. Now that documentation is nearing completion, we can start focusing on releasing webpack 2.
But once this is finished, we then have some great ideas that we’d like your feedback on:
- Setting up official weekly office hours and improving our support infrastructure.
- Simply being able to spend more time contributing to the core library. All of us on the core team work on webpack on our free time and would love to be able to feasibly provide more support, communication, and development.
- Create comprehensive video series, written and narrated by the core team.
- Support for taking the time to convert the entire project to TypeScript. We believe that TypeScript allows users to better write scaled and complex code with rich APIs (like webpack). If we can make code easier for you to write, then its worth our time to invest in for your contributions.
- Create a webpack UI! We’ve had many requests to create a native application that will help you configure your build process, but never the time and opportunity to work on it.
How can I help?
To become a sponsor or backer, visit our open collective page and follow the instructions for becoming a part of our collective. Take the time to explore some of the other great collectives that people are supporting. Once we start using these donations, you can track and see how they are being withdrawn and for what.
This is just the beginning
We are grateful that you have invested the time in using webpack, but we want your investment to last. Funding and support is only one part of a sustainable open source project. And we can’t wait to share what we have in store next.
