Faster issues resolution

[PavolRepisky]

Goals

I’m exploring ways to make it easier for open-source maintainers and companies to get issues solved faster.

Non-Goals

This is not about replacing sponsorship, donations, or existing funding models.

Background

Often, important issues stay open for a long time because contributors don’t have the bandwidth. It would be great if we could pay for some of the issues to be solved. I came up with an idea for how to do this and would like to validate it.

Proposal

Open-source maintainers could create bounties on some of the issues for contributors to solve for money. The bounty creation process would be integrated right in GitHub issues, and the bounties would be listed on an external platform for contributors to pick and work on.

Could something like this work?

[nazmul609]

This is a great idea and would definitely help prioritize important issues that often get overlooked due to bandwidth limitations.

Integrating bounty creation directly into GitHub Issues would make it frictionless for maintainers to signal which issues are worth external help, and for contributors to find paid opportunities without leaving the platform.

A few thoughts:

Would the bounty be escrowed on creation to avoid trust issues?

Could maintainers set custom criteria for payout (e.g., merge + N days without bug reports)?

How might this integrate with existing platforms like BountySource or Gitcoin?

I’d love to see a lightweight prototype or pilot project—this could be a real game changer for open source sustainability.

[PavolRepisky]

Hi @nazmul609,
Thank you very much for your reply.

1. Could you please clarify what you mean by “be escrowed on creation”?
2. I wouldn’t worry about this for the first version, it’s better to see if it works at all before optimizing.
3. I’d like to create a new platform, as I don’t really agree with how they’re approaching this.

I’m glad you like the idea. My concern is that open-source projects might not have the funding for this or be interested in it. That’s what I’m trying to figure out right now.