We founded our company to bring modern, agile ways of working to a broader diversity of teams. We believe to make differentiated products, you’ve got to be a different kind of company. That’s one reason why we're developing Parabol as free open-source from its inception.
Shortly after we began, we announced a program we called “Equity for Effort” to entice developers outside of our organization to contribute to the creation of our application in exchange for the possibility of equity in our company.
You can read our latest blog post on our Equity for Effort program here.
To get started, simply follow these steps:
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Find a project: review the projects listed under the “Help Requested” list on the Equity For Effort Projects Board and select one you're interested in working on.
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Bid on it: leave a comment on the project saying how many points you’ll do the project for and we’ll move the project to the “Bid” stage (see: Points and sizes) – if a project is unclear, you can ask for more clarification at this stage
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Do it: once we've received your bid, we'll reach out via email and verify you're qualified to participate in the E4E program. When that's out of the way we'll accept your bid and move the issue to the “Building” stage. You can then go ahead and perform the work. Once you’re done, submit a pull request and we'll move the project to the “Reviewing” stage.
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Collect points: After the work has been reviewed and merged into the source tree, we’ll update our public scoreboard and credit the creator(s) with the agreed upon number of points. Once you accrue more than 100 points we issue options for equity in Parabol, Inc.
- Fork the repository on GitHub.
- Create a feature branch from where you want to base your work (this is usually the master branch).
- Make commits of logical and atomic units.
- Make sure your commit messages are in the proper format.
- Keep the git history as clean as possible (no extra merge commits).
- Use
git pull --ff-only
orgit pull --rebase
if you are working on some feature branch with someone. - Use
git fetch upstream && git merge upstream/master --ff-only
to update the feature branch with the base branch.
- Use
- Submit a pull request (or PR for short) with a clear list of what you've done.
- Follow the Code review policy:
- A PR needs to be approved by a Reviewer initially and then by a Maintainer.
- For the initial review, you can request a review from anyone except for Maintainers.
- If you use
git blame
, you can see who previously worked on the code that you’re working on. That would be a good person to request an initial review from. - Use GitHub mention to notify the reviewer of your choice.
- If you use
- Once a Reviewer approves your PR, they’ll request a second review from the Maintainers.
- If you haven’t heard anything from the reviewer after one week, feel free to ping them again on GitHub.
For giving us a hand and helping the broader Parabol community, your qualifying contributions may be converted into equity in Parabol Inc. Here’s how it works:
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When we've verified your eligibility to participate within the E4E program and you've had an issue is merged into the Parabol Inc Repository by one of the project maintainers, we’ll tally up the points for your work.
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We’ll add a row to the Parabol Contributors Scoreboard. If you’re working as a team, we’ll divide the points among you equally unless your team has requested an alternate distribution in the issue comments.
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Once you’ve accumulated more than 100 points, we'll put an Options Grant proposal before our Board of Directors to convert your points to options in Parabol Inc. (see: Conversion rate) and issue these options to you (subject to board approval). The vesting clock will be backdated to the date we received a signature on the consulting contract for your first mission.
Before you begin working on an issue, you size it. Most issues will have a SWAG sizing from one of the Parabol maintainers, but it’s up to you to adjust it to what you think is fair.
Points | Individual or team effort required |
---|---|
11 | Less than a single day |
12 | One or two days |
13 | Three or four days |
15 | Five to seven days |
18 | Less than two weeks |
23 | Two to three weeks |
30 | Three to four weeks |
50 | Four to eight weeks |
110 | Too big! Let’s break it down… |
At present, 100 points convert to options for 1,250 shares in Parabol Inc. With 24,737,564 shares outstanding, that’s roughly 0.005% of the company.
We'll convert for you every time you hit a new 100 point threshold. That is to say, 200 points, 300 points, and so on.
We currently will reevaluate this conversion rate once per calendar quarter at our board meeting.
Want to collaborate? Have questions about our stack? Please don’t hesitate to reach out. You can reach us at [email protected].