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Created January 3, 2020 15:26
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stackoverflow question
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readme.md

StackExchange has a culture. Meta.SO has its own culture. This is complex and I know more about the former than the latter.

Over ten years ago, SE announced that they would donate advertising space to open source projects with the intent to help those projects recruit new contributers.

Volunteers from the SE userbase make the ads and then the users vote on which ads should go live, then they go live.

I have previously submitted an ad for the FSF and it was rejected. The reason it was rejected was that the FSF itself is not a software project. That's what the comments that the downvoters left said.

So, this year, I'm asking them to amend their policy to allow organizations such as the FSF to participate in the open-source-advertisment program.

My proposal has received one upvote and six downvotes so far. (That's bad.) Here is my proposal. It is online now, but it may be deleted for getting too many downvotes at any minute.

There are statistics available publically that describe how many eyeballs get exposed to SE ads and there are specific line items about the "open-source" ads. As you can see, my link doesn't lead to all such statistics.. I don't know where that user got those links from.

How do I improve my proposal?

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comments.md
  1. Some moderator said in a now deleted comment something like "You appear to be proposing we make a change without suggesting how that change would benefit the site.
  2. I said: "The same way the original open-source-advertising policy benefited the site. I wasn't privy to that conversation, but I presume that it was because the site is made of of users, many of whom depend on and enjoy free software, and the site lives on the internet, which itself depends on and benefits from free software. (Any time I say "free software", I mean free-as-in-freedom, not necessarily free-as-in-beer.)"
  3. A moderator said: "I suggest editing the question to include this info"
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question.md

Wow, it is 2020, already. I'm sure the mods will soon make a post with the community-ads tag.

Here is a snippet of 2H 2019's policy regarding what kind of ads can qualify (the emphasis is in the original):

It must be an advertisement soliciting the participation and contribution of programmers writing actual source code. This is not intended as a general purpose ad for consumer products which just happen to be open source. It's for finding programmers who will help contribute code or other programmery things (documentation, code review, bug fixes, etc.).

I propose amending it to something like this:

It must be an advertisement soliciting the participation and contribution of programmers writing actual source code or soliciting membership in organizations that themselves encourage such participation and contribution. This is not intended as a general purpose ad for consumer products which just happen to be open source. It's for finding programmers who will help contribute code or other programmery things (documentation, code review, bug fixes, etc.).

Here are some examples of organizations that would become included:

Note that all those Foundations are independent organizations. They are not branches of one organization.

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