Material Issue: Funding for programmer (not me) to continue work on this?

[marxzuckerburg]

How could we raise money to hire a programmer, ideally an out-of-work/poc/queer/otherwise-marginalized programmer, to continue work on the app?

How do we raise money? Kickstarter? Some kind of cryptocurrency donation bin? I don't know the first thing about it. But starting October I need to take a step back from programming this and would like to think about how to start funding it long term.

I guess I can imagine two paths:

1. We raise money to pay someone a stipend, like $1k or $2k, to do as much as they can with the app in the time they have to give it. Upside is that it's sensible and respectful and non-exploitative. Downside is, who picks the person? How do we find this person? etc.

2. We grit our teeth and give in to the gig economy, and try one of these "bug bounty" platforms, where we can raise money as "bounties" for specific features and bugs and things we need done. Downside to this is it's kind of dystopic and deprives programmer of more creative input. Upside is it's probably easier to setup.

Thoughts?

[gary-host-laptop]

Do you think making some sort of event or conference would help to raise some money? Like, a live privacy tutorial through Jitsi where we teach people the basics, or something like that.

[marxzuckerburg]

This is an interesting idea. Related: we could have 'hacking hours' (like office hours but cooler) where we hang out online and help people with their coding projects and talk about ours?

[gary-host-laptop]

Could be, but that would imply that I have to learn to code to help them, and have time for that, too. But yeah.