Thanks for your questions. There are no project requirements to join the waitlist. Right now we’re working with maintainers of more popular projects. We’re measuring popularity in terms of users. We expect maintainers to be able to replace their current full-time salary if they want to work on their projects full-time. Some maintainers only want to allocate a percentage of their time to open-source, so the expectations for how much money they can make are different in those cases.

The primary maintainer input is getting us up to speed on their project goals, work preferences and existing communities. After we have a good understanding of their preferences, the maintainer can choose their level of involvement. Maintainers can be as involved as they like after we begin our campaign. We provide a weekly update detailing who we’ve reached out to and the status of each communication. We can provide this information on a daily basis as well.

As far as tactics, we start by collecting publicly available GitHub information related to the maintainer’s repo. This includes looking at who has engaged with projects by doing things like submitting issues, pull requests, and stars. We also use social media and any community channels the maintainer has created (Slack, Gitter, Discourse, etc.). Then we act as the maintainer’s sales team by reaching out to these leads via a variety of different channels (email, social media, phone, real-time messaging). We find the right people within an organization to discuss how the maintainer can add value to the company, and we negotiate contracts based on the custom plan we’ve developed with the maintainer.