Bug bounty programme

[Simon Steinbeiß]

Hey everyone,

I'd hereby like to discuss a bug bounty programme for Xubuntu.  This proposal should also be discussed at our next community meeting (reminder: May 26, 20UTC).
A bug bounty programme enables the community to place financial incentive on bugs in order to motivate developers to fix them.


POSSIBLE IMPLEMENTATION
I've looked at how other projects, specifically elementary OS and Midori, handle this. They use launchpad in combination with bountysource.com

Here are a few illustrative examples of how this can look and work in practice:
 * An overview of launchpad's side of it: a list of bugs with bounty (https://bugs.launchpad.net/elementary/+bugs?field.tag=bounty)
 * A single issue with discussion, current bounty status etc (https://www.bountysource.com/issues/357765-load-foreground-tab-from-cache-when-restoring-session)
 * Midori's list of open issues, including some with bounty, some without (https://www.bountysource.com/teams/midori/issues)
 * A contributor to Midori who fixed a bunch of bugs (https://www.bountysource.com/people/23735-evfool)


THE ROLE OF THE TEAM
The Xubuntu team has to register the project and somebody from the team should be the administrator/contact person for the site/programme. Other than that, there is no extra maintenance involved for the team: issues that are closed are detected automatically and the chance for veto and claiming money all can be done by anyone involved.
Basically it's the same process as regular bug management.
If we ever happen to have funds as a team, we can obviously also pledge them on bugs.


WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?
Ideally, this is an additional incentive for new contributors to step up and fix bugs, for regular contributors to get some financial recognition and motivation and for Xubuntu to get more bugs fixed. There being little to no extra overhead, this seems like a low-risk venture.


I hope we can have a good discussion about this here on the mailinglist and at the meeting.
(Note that there previously was a discussion on IRC on this subject, which led me to put together this proposal.)

Cheers
Simon