# Rewarding volunteer engagement in FLOSS with GNU Taler
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/rewarding-volunteer-engagement-in-floss-with-gnu-taler/313365
**Category:** Marketplace
**Created:** [June 24, 2024, 10:06am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/rewarding-volunteer-engagement-in-floss-with-gnu-taler/313365 "2024-06-24T10:06:11Z")
**Posts on this page:** 16
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Ada\_L](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Ada_L)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2024, 10:06am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/rewarding-volunteer-engagement-in-floss-with-gnu-taler/313365/1 "2024-06-24T10:06:11Z")
Cross-posted from [TALER ICH](https://ich.taler.net/t/rewarding-volunteer-engagement-with-gnu-taler/217)
Have you heard of Local Exchange Systems (LES) or Time Banks? Those community networks allow their members to receive some tokens instead of money for the service they propose. Those tokens can then be used in return to access to other services.
GNU Taler could be used as a protocol for implementing such concepts in a federated, international, interoperable way. Think of the “Like” button in most social networks. What if Taler was another option to reward publications, contributions or just to support people in general?
For instance, it could first be implemented (first as experimental plugins) :
- on Discourse;
- on GitLab/Forgejo;
- on Liberapay, Ko-fi, Tipeee…;
- on any other platform suitable for it!
Superficially, I feel like it basically requires to:
1 - interface Taler Wallet with personal accounts, thus in the user profile of the platforms
2 - implement the Reward button as a proper API call to a Taler Backend.
Is anyone already working on a similar project?
Also, FIY:
> [@Ada\_L](#):
>
> There’s an [open call by NLNet](https://nlnet.nl/taler/) ongoing. Its grants span from 5k to 50k€.
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### Author:  [@merefield](https://meta.discourse.org/u/merefield)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2024, 10:29am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/rewarding-volunteer-engagement-in-floss-with-gnu-taler/313365/2 "2024-06-24T10:29:06Z")
You’ve posted in #Marketplace. Are you putting up funding for this? If so what is your budget?
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### Author:  [@Ada\_L](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Ada_L)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2024, 11:01am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/rewarding-volunteer-engagement-in-floss-with-gnu-taler/313365/3 "2024-06-24T11:01:51Z")
There’s an [open call by NLNet](https://nlnet.nl/taler/) ongoing. Its grants span from 5k to 50k€.
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### Author:  [@merefield](https://meta.discourse.org/u/merefield)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2024, 11:02am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/rewarding-volunteer-engagement-in-floss-with-gnu-taler/313365/4 "2024-06-24T11:02:26Z")
So come back here if you win the grant and take a small % for facilitating?
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### Author:  [@Ada\_L](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Ada_L)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2024, 11:03am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/rewarding-volunteer-engagement-in-floss-with-gnu-taler/313365/5 "2024-06-24T11:03:20Z")
I’m sorry but I can’t apply for it since I’m part of the NGI TALER consortium.
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### Author:  [@merefield](https://meta.discourse.org/u/merefield)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2024, 11:04am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/rewarding-volunteer-engagement-in-floss-with-gnu-taler/313365/6 "2024-06-24T11:04:07Z")
So who in this community would qualify then?
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### Author:  [@icaria36](https://meta.discourse.org/u/icaria36)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2024, 12:58pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/rewarding-volunteer-engagement-in-floss-with-gnu-taler/313365/7 "2024-06-24T12:58:03Z")
Someone move this topic to #Contribute > Feature and problem solved? Someone might be interested in the potential bounty.
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### Author:  [@merefield](https://meta.discourse.org/u/merefield)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2024, 1:09pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/rewarding-volunteer-engagement-in-floss-with-gnu-taler/313365/8 "2024-06-24T13:09:14Z")
There’s clearly a lot of non-dev work to this up front that might not need a developer to be involved much to begin with.
This goes beyond the usual #Marketplace or #Contribute > Feature topic.
Someone needs to step up, engage the consortium, come with a credible plan, draft a proposal, draft a functional spec, win a grant and potentially engage a reliable, established entity to deliver the work.
Aside from estimation, none of that is dev work but it would be reasonable to take a % cut for all that effort.
I don’t believe there are many individual devs who would be prepared to put time in or even equipped to do all that up front, as it is not really their forte, expertise or focus.
It would require a very motivated developer if one existed that saw significant personally benefit from delivering the work. I don’t think such a person exists in the community, but delighted to be proven wrong - if there is, go for it!
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### Author:  [@RGJ](https://meta.discourse.org/u/RGJ)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2024, 1:47pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/rewarding-volunteer-engagement-in-floss-with-gnu-taler/313365/9 "2024-06-24T13:47:08Z")
> [@merefield](#):
>
> It would require a very motivated developer if one existed that saw significant personally benefit from delivering the work
That goes for 50% of the posts in marketplace, most because of the very low available budget. Now this is a more complex project but at least there is a normal budget available.
> [@merefield](#):
>
> I don’t believe there are many individual devs who
Since when is #Marketplace only targeted at individual developers?
Long story short, I don’t see why you are so negative about this. GNU TALER is an interesting and commendable project and it would be cool if there were some integrations between it and Discourse.
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### Author:  [@merefield](https://meta.discourse.org/u/merefield)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2024, 1:49pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/rewarding-volunteer-engagement-in-floss-with-gnu-taler/313365/10 "2024-06-24T13:49:07Z")
Are you volunteering? 😉
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### Author:  [@RGJ](https://meta.discourse.org/u/RGJ)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2024, 1:50pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/rewarding-volunteer-engagement-in-floss-with-gnu-taler/313365/11 "2024-06-24T13:50:36Z")
I might very well be, although probably not this quarter. And since it’s a paid project, I don’t see this as volunteering 😉
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### Author:  [@merefield](https://meta.discourse.org/u/merefield)
#### Post date: [June 24, 2024, 2:20pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/rewarding-volunteer-engagement-in-floss-with-gnu-taler/313365/12 "2024-06-24T14:20:57Z")
> [@RGJ](#):
>
> I don’t see why you are so negative about this
It was raised in the past and garnered no public interest:
> [@TALER payments for Discourse](https://meta.discourse.org/t/taler-payments-for-discourse/300406):
>
> [[GNU Taler]](https://taler.net)[GNU Taler](https://taler.net) is a free software payment system that can hold any type of currency (fictitious, local, regional, crypto-currency, or fiat money). You could, for example, use Taler payments to associate a fictitious money (e.g, KUDOS) to your badge system and reward community members for their contributions, that may be exchanged for goods, premium contents, etc., using micro-payments. [[NGI TALER]](https://taler.net/en/taler.html) Taler is currently undergoing compliance test with Swiss Francs (CHF) and is expected to be…
I’m not being negative, just suggesting a way to get this kind of thing off the ground.
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### Author:  [@hellekin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/hellekin)
#### Post date: [July 1, 2024, 5:14pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/rewarding-volunteer-engagement-in-floss-with-gnu-taler/313365/13 "2024-07-01T17:14:24Z")
You may not think you are being negative, but apparently I am not the only one thinking so, @Ada_L’s offer is much more specific and approachable that my proposal (where I suggested various approaches). I think Ada’s proposal is simpler and it is very easy to implement a reward button with a Taler payment link (it’s just a `payto:` URI that people can easily add to their custom\_fields, and work from there.)
I do not understand why you think this is difficult:
> [@merefield](#):
>
> Someone needs to step up, engage the consortium, come with a credible plan, draft a proposal, draft a functional spec, win a grant and potentially engage a reliable, established entity to deliver the work.
Since more than a thousand free software projects have been doing just that for the last 6 years and ripped off the benefits in the order of dozens of millions of euros. I think you lack insight into the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet program, and especially the very low overhead cascading funding that goes with NGI Zero (and NGI TALER). Preparation work for such a proposal is about two days work (there’s a form, and you should come up with milestones), so it’s not much difficulty “engaging with the consortium”. And I repeat that it would be awesome for The Pavilion to take this up and implement GNU Taler payments for Discourse. It can be done in several steps over a year or two, and you can get up to 500,000 € for this.
My special interest would be Discourse ↔ Solidus integration but, as you noted, there was not much traction so far.
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### Author:  [@merefield](https://meta.discourse.org/u/merefield)
#### Post date: [July 1, 2024, 5:22pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/rewarding-volunteer-engagement-in-floss-with-gnu-taler/313365/14 "2024-07-01T17:22:45Z")
It’s partly because I misread and then misinterpreted a post in haste 😊 . I’m all good now ! You are absolutely right, these are very good sources for support and it would be great for the platform.
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### Author:  [@hellekin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/hellekin)
#### Post date: [July 1, 2024, 5:30pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/rewarding-volunteer-engagement-in-floss-with-gnu-taler/313365/15 "2024-07-01T17:30:20Z")
If you, or others at The Pavilion or elsewhere, want to tackle any of this, I recommend posting to [https://ich.taler.net/](https://ich.taler.net/) and try to work collectively in a way that will enable good collaboration between Discourse and other integrations that TALER may be useful to. @Ada_L and I can help you make a proposal stronger.
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### Author:  [@system](https://meta.discourse.org/u/system)
#### Post date: [July 31, 2024, 5:30pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/rewarding-volunteer-engagement-in-floss-with-gnu-taler/313365/16 "2024-07-31T17:30:24Z")
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