Attribute individual sponsorship to my organization?

[Elchi3]

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Can I set up GitHub sponsors on my personal GitHub profile and attribute (or even just link) sponsorship to my organization?

I see that it seems to be possible to attribute from organization to organization per https://docs.github.com/en/sponsors/sponsoring-open-source-contributors/attributing-sponsorships-to-your-organization, I would be interested in this for individual to organization.

Thank you in advance! :)

[anjuan]

Hi @Elchi3, I'm the Engineering Manager for GitHub Sponsors. As you stated, yes, you can attribute from organization to organization, but you cannot attribute from individual to organization. Can you help e understand why you want this functionality?

[Elchi3]

Hi @anjuan, thanks for looking into this!

My team and I are maintainers for various GitHub repositories at different GitHub organizations. We are funded by an open source collective and we use the @openwebdocs organization to organize ourselves. We also host some code under our organization but on an everyday basis we are heavy contributors to repos elsewhere (most prominently mdn/content). We've set up GitHub sponsors for @openwebdocs and the entire team benefits from the donations we receive there. We like that the GitHub sponsors program supports our organization and its mission rather than us individually.

However, when other contributors on GitHub interact with us, they interact with our personal profiles and not with our organization as the repos we work on are elsewhere in 90% of the cases. And so, if potential sponsors wonder how they can support us, they don't see a sponsor button on our profile directly. Instead they will need to find our main organization and discover that it is @openwebdocs that collects donations for the work we are doing. I'm also mentioning this in my profile readme, but the "Sponsor" button in the UI would be more powerful for discovery, I reckon!

Also, at the end of a calendar year, we usually give a shout out to everyone who supported us. I would love to pull from a single list from our org and not from several lists from all of my team's individual GitHub sponsors. Further, I think it just looks nice if sponsors can find themselves listed next to all the other GitHub Sponsors of the organization and not spread across the profiles of our 5 team members. They would also have to decide which team member of @openwebdocs they like the most, I guess :)

Does that provide enough context? I'm happy to talk about more about this if you like. Let me know!

[Elchi3]

I can also recommend to look into this paper if you haven't already: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.13323.pdf

"We studied who obtains more sponsorships and found that the social status of the maintainer in the community correlates most strongly with this outcome (the more followers, the more sponsorships a developer acquires)." So, I think it would be worthwhile to also have Sponsors set up for my team's individual accounts to benefit from this correlation.

[anjuan]

This is really helpful context. I can see how what you're asking for would be useful. Thank you!

[ShaneCurcuru]

To add my +1: This could definitely be a useful feature, especially for the many maintainers who work on different key projects - or who work on different projects over time. It's common in established FOSS communities that key maintainers move around or are known for multiple projects, so I can definitely see other people using this.

Given the xz CVE recently, there is going to be a LOT more interest at large organizations and governments in all the ways we can help sustain maintainers like this.