Ecological incentives for sustaining open source projects

Hey Sustainers,

we created a very simple incentive to attract contributors for your open source project:

It allows you to plant any desired number of trees based on various actions in your development workflow. I would be very interested in what you think about this and if you would use something like this for your open source project. What would be actions in an open-source workflow where something like this could be practically interesting?

More information about this and what we plan to do with it in the future can be found in our blog post:

I would be interested in your opinion and thoughts on this.

That doesn’t prevent the loss of biodiversity. While some actions like planting trees can be soothing for most of us, they are battling with effects and not the cause. And as such, my opinion it doesn’t worth the additional operations burden in keeping track of contributors activity and making sure they are rewarded.

It look like you have not written the blog post. We go into this topic in great detail there. It’s about emissions that have already been generated. How else are you going to bind the carbon back into the soil?

Keep track on deforestation in your area, contribute to OpenStreetMap, map forests, know which FSC zones are in your areas and make trips on weekends to see that they are still there (or at least the rules are not broken). Ask why deforestation is happening, make sure everything is traced from the source to consumers. There is a lot where Open Source can help. From requiring transparency on COP-25 fundings, to writing the Open Source tools to keep track of the balance between carbon emissions, carbon binding, forestation and deforestation.

I am not saying that planting trees is not good. I think it is an important thing, especially to find a face to face community in your area and escape “the itism”.

Or contribute to OpenSustain.tech and we plant 100 trees for every new entry. Thanks to Continous Reforestation this is now possible in an easy and transparent way.

https://opensustain.tech/

Can you immediately prove the transparency with one link?

Sure here: The Github Action Logs how we do the API call to plant the trees:

Here the our dashboard from Digital Humani of our project. Digital Humani is currently working on improving the dashboard with more information. https://digitalhumani.com/dashboard/cd7cedcd.html

You can see that we got 7 pull request this months and so we plant 700 trees this months which will cost us 700$.

We are currently working with DIgital Humani to improve the transparency and to find an open measure if a tree has been planted by the reforestation project.

Depending on the project, you will receive a world coordiante of the trees planted. Unfortunately, the evidence at this point is not standardized and different projects present different evidence.

Currently we are considering using an AI and satellite data to verify if the tree was planted and if it is still there after a few years. Ideally, we would add this to the ForestWatch, which is also open source:

Our goal is to have a complete evidence base for tree planting. It seems that you are interested in this project. You are welcome to participate.

Sure if it is a non-volunteering opportunity. I would do this for free, but everybody around is saying “Wake up, you need to make money”, yeah.

ok thanks for trolling another post from me here. It used to be possible to have really constructive discussions here. It seems that these times are also over. Maybe there is still someone who has something useful to contribute.

Maybe I should change my nick as it seems to trigger people. The only reason I have so much time to comment on this forum is because I have no job, or fail to maintain it. If you have the money, I would gladly help with the proper design of evidence based system. Hopefuly that clears misunderstanding.

If Open Source is there to provide transparency, then for the “tree plant” action buttons I’d expect a link that traces every action to a token and then how the token converts to specific tree with coordinates, with no other token is mapped to that tree.

I understand that charity needs these money for accounting and administration, but as long as this is not transparent, it is not good for Open Source, because there appear corrupted binary blobs in organization.

If these transparency bits are worked out, the incentive to contribute to Open Source will be working model. And it may gather more attention people than Hacktoberfest for sure.