[HN Gopher] Show HN: Ringer - Get and provide expert help on Ope...
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Show HN: Ringer - Get and provide expert help on Open Source
Software
Hello HN, Over the past few months we've been building Ringer, an
Experts Marketplace focussed on Open Source Software. We want to
help make Open Source more sustainable and believe that we can be a
part of making that happen. We're approaching this from the
perspective of the individual developer - if you contribute to OSS
then you can register instantly with your GitHub account and list
yourself to provide paid support, knowledge and help for the
repositories that you contribute to. We only allow those who we can
prove contribute to repositories to list themselves as experts, and
show details of contribution history for the experts in the system
so that customers can see exactly how the experts can help. We
process payments to over 100 different countries via Stripe, and
handle all of the paperwork to make the process as frictionless as
possible, including 1099s for US based experts. We're building out
tools to improve the developer experience at the moment, and have
started to work with customers to design a process that allows them
to access expertise quickly whilst working within the constraints
of an enterprise environment. For the past 3 or so weeks we have
been in an Alpha stage, so this is our Beta launch - we are really
open to fresh ideas and opinions. From day 1 I have said to every
developer that I have spoken to that whether you love the idea or
hate it, all I want to know is why and what we can do better - so
HN, please tell me what you think and want it to be!
Author : mintone
Score : 100 points
Date : 2022-09-08 12:45 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ringerhq.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ringerhq.com)
| djbusby wrote:
| What about FOSS one knows well and can support but hasn't coded
| for? Like, I'm real good at Samba and GlusterFS and Hylafax -
| and/or they may not even be on GitHub?
|
| Excellent work here, going in the right direction.
| mintone wrote:
| Hey! So this is something that we are really interested in, and
| want to support. I've had about a dozen conversations about
| this, especially where someone has created packages for a
| larger piece of software which necessitates a deep knowledge of
| the core project.
|
| I want to allow it, but I need to work out a way to do so
| whilst making sure that we don't end up with a free for all -
| that means manual review perhaps, but I agree that it would be
| very helpful if we can make it work.
|
| Re GitHub - we've built on GitHub initially but would love to
| extend to other platforms in time!
| pessimizer wrote:
| As you've built a contracting platform targeting the best
| contributors to open source projects, you're collecting a
| group of people who are looking for work and are most fit to
| judge the abilities of others in the software they're expert
| at. Why not dogfood?
|
| I would say to maybe allow verified contributors/experts to
| invite others in under their account, and let them work from
| that context until they have enough feedback that they should
| be invited to join independently of their previous sponsor.
| My only real doubt is that even being a known contributor is
| going to be gamed unless there are clear processes for
| vetting and distinguishing between even the people who are
| verified contributors to a project, because some will be
| experts and some will not be.
| mintone wrote:
| Yeah - it's all in the vetting. I will dogfood a solution
| shortly!
| pabs3 wrote:
| If you are really good at Samba, join their commercial support
| providers list. Lots of big projects have similar things.
|
| https://www.samba.org/samba/support/
|
| Edit: GlusterFS has one too:
|
| https://www.gluster.org/community/consultants/
|
| Edit: unfortunately iFAX doesn't list other companies on the
| HylaFAX support page, but probably being active on their
| community support could get customers.
|
| https://www.hylafax.org/support/
| djbusby wrote:
| I am, and do.
|
| I'm wondering what Ringer will do for these kind of case.
|
| Or if Ringer is only for GitHub libraries, or smaller
| projects or...
| pabs3 wrote:
| Ringer team: please add Software Freedom Conservancy to the list
| of open source foundations people can donate their fees to.
|
| https://sfconservancy.org/
| bragr wrote:
| How do you ensure that people aren't asking bad/sub-expert
| questions and burning out your experts? From the perspective of
| being an expert, I'm not sure how many basic introductions to
| docker compose [1] I'd want to do without any advanced questions
| before it would get tedious. Or worse, the questions boil down to
| "I'm struggling to install docker on my laptop" or "help me
| complete my homework exercises". You almost might need some level
| of expert level routing of people's questions, e.g. "this seems
| less like a problem with docker compose than a problem with your
| app so go talk to the gin experts"
|
| >We process payments to over 100 different countries via Stripe
|
| You'll want to make an PO process + credits model for big
| companies ASAP. That's where the money is.
|
| [1] https://www.ringerhq.com/i/docker/compose
| pessimizer wrote:
| > How do you ensure that people aren't asking bad/sub-expert
| questions and burning out your experts?
|
| These are people who are being paid, right? I mean, I'm sure
| that plenty of adults get sick of hearing questions about
| subtraction and multiplication from 6 year olds, but as
| teachers it's their job and pays the rent. A platform
| facilitating paying for expert help seems like the ideal place
| for shitty questions to be asked, rather than cluttering up
| forums begging for charity.
|
| edit: Assuming no cheating is involved, what's wrong with
| paying an expert to help you with your homework? I think that a
| marketplace for expert help is flawed if you can't use it to
| find tutors.
| bragr wrote:
| >These are people who are being paid, right?
|
| It is well documented that people are not that money
| motivated past a certain point. After that job satisfaction,
| respect, recognition, etc are much better motivators. You can
| only have a successful experts platform if you're able to
| recruit and retain those experts, otherwise you've just built
| a new Fiverr.
|
| >I mean, I'm sure that plenty of adults get sick of hearing
| questions about subtraction and multiplication from 6 year
| olds, but as teachers it's their job and pays the rent.
|
| Considering the teacher crisis right now, that's not a
| compelling example IMO.
|
| >edit: Assuming no cheating is involved, what's wrong with
| paying an expert to help you with your homework? I think that
| a marketplace for expert help is flawed if you can't use it
| to find tutors.
|
| Nothing wrong with it per say, but a site oriented towards
| tutoring is a different product IMO with a different kind of
| person you need to recruit. I don't think most experts want
| to be tutors or would make good tutors in the first place.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > After that job satisfaction, respect, recognition, etc
| are much better motivators.
|
| I don't think that all people will inevitably be
| disappointed, disrespected, or go unrecognized for
| answering someone's simple question for money. I also don't
| think these things can be disentangled from pay: if you pay
| me what I want you to pay me in order to ask a basic
| question, I will be pleasantly surprised, feel like the
| questioner really values me, and build up recognition as it
| leads to more work.
|
| > Considering the teacher crisis right now, that's not a
| compelling example IMO.
|
| The teacher crisis is about not being paid, and being
| abused.
|
| > a site oriented towards tutoring is a different product
| IMO with a different kind of person you need to recruit.
|
| If I have a team that needs to know a particular package
| that there's no established training for, a contributor who
| knows it well could be a lifesaver. I'm no professional
| teacher (and honestly pretty impatient) and I've given
| talks/classes to both teams that I have been on, and other
| teams who needed expertise that was locked in our team.
| There doesn't have to be some caste system, and there's no
| reason to think that all contributors to a FOSS project
| would either be terrible at or reject work that requires
| their expertise rather than their line count.
| FiberBundle wrote:
| Love the idea.
|
| How exactly do you validate experts? Are you just going by merged
| PRs (this might be somewhat exploitable though minor PRs, if
| you're successful I'd assume)? I imagine checking for the quality
| of PRs would be way too time-consuming to do manually... Do you
| consult the maintainers of a repo?
| mintone wrote:
| We check contributions, but have a slightly more nuanced system
| planned and in testing. It's a difficult problem, but we do
| have thoughts on ways to ensure quality of experts remains
| high.
| pbronez wrote:
| Very cool. Once you have the devs in place, there are a bunch of
| extras you could build in to attract the big boring enterprise
| customers. Personnel level things like background checks, work
| location, quality certification would allow devs to get into
| smaller, more expensive pools that some orgs want to pay for.
| Technical solutions to make it safe & secure to have short-term
| contractors collaborate on your infrastructure would also be
| helpful.
|
| There's probably a content marketing side of this as well. If you
| really have the experts on a wide variety of open source
| projects, you could write high quality "when to choose X" blog
| posts. You could back that up with various measures of project
| health, host round tables where people discuss competing projects
| they have experience with, etc.
| mintone wrote:
| Great ideas. Trust is at the heart of what we're doing here, so
| I'd love to see this come into fruition.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I sincerely wish you well on this. I guess I'll sign up as a
| "ringer" for my repos. I'd suggest some way to do a bulk add (may
| already be there, as I haven't had a chance to explore). I have
| over 40 public repos, and I know of people with hundreds.
|
| We'll have to see if this gets abused. I wonder if folks will
| sign up as "ringers" for repos that they want to sabotage? That
| could be awkward. I do know that kind of spitefulness exists
| (I've had people do some _really_ petty swipes at me).
|
| Also, we may not be as useful for some repos, as for others. For
| example, I was the original author of a project that I turned
| over to a new team, a few years ago. I could answer some basic
| "why?" questions, but would be useless for current stuff.
|
| Would there be some way to "score" for that? Also, maybe some
| folks would only be useful for subsystems of an aggregate
| project, that might be in a monorepo.
| mintone wrote:
| Thanks! Yes, you can bulk add, we pull in the data as you sign
| up.
|
| We're looking at thresholds to stop malicious behaviour but at
| the moment will manually police it until it becomes too much.
|
| We are also rolling out a way to show which skills you have in
| a project - so perhaps you want to mainly support architecture
| or training rather than code review - that will come soon,
| which may help with the original author point.
|
| I'd love to make our scoring system really robust, and that is
| the plan, eventually!
| elefantastisch wrote:
| Is this right? Experts in software like Jest and Storybook think
| an hour of specialized consulting in the software is worth only
| $116? There's definitely a market opportunity if this is true,
| but it seems too good.
|
| I do think there's a challenge in that... as a developer, paying
| $58 for half an hour that may save me 8 hours is a no-brainer,
| but this feels like a difficult thing to ask "the boss" to pay
| for. It gives off Fiverr vibes, and usually there's much more
| ceremony around billing contractors/consultants.
|
| But if you pitch this to big business needing big support (a
| context in which this feels like a stupidly good deal), it may
| also drive up the price by changing the expectation from the
| ringers as to what they are providing.
|
| I'm rambling, I know... I wish you luck. I'm definitely watching
| this space. It seems like you've found a definite potential
| market, but I think it's going to be hard to capture it.
| mintone wrote:
| OK - this is something that I am going to work on.
| Traditionally marketplaces have been a race to the bottom, and
| I think (in fact know, through conversations) that many
| developers don't necessarily know the market rate for their
| skills. Some absolutely do (Shout out to KrauseFx
| https://www.ringerhq.com/i/fastlane/fastlane).
|
| I do think there is a balance, especially when the request
| comes from an individual vs a business and we're actively
| looking into ways to solve this. I have partially realised that
| educating developers on value driven pricing is going to be
| part of my job now!
|
| Thanks for the well wishes!
| verdverm wrote:
| While TopTal shot themselves in the foot, they did have a
| good model.
|
| Basically, they curated both sides of the market and it
| worked really well and removed them from the bottom feeders
| race
| ddown24 wrote:
| Congrats on what you've built so far. I'm curious if you have
| ideas or plans on how to gauge and communicate demand for experts
| for an open source project you don't have listed yet. It would be
| cool as a project contributor to know where unmet expert needs
| are in the community.
| mintone wrote:
| So we are logging requests and will reach out manually. Not
| today, given the Hacker News traffic load! But we are intending
| to put in a more scalable solution - what we don't want to do
| is spam people, which would be the result if it were fully
| automated.
| jtmarmon wrote:
| I found myself wanting this recently (on the consumer side) so
| really excited to see this!
|
| edit: One suggestion - maybe have a discord server that people
| provide support through, that way there's already an (IM-based)
| comm channel setup. Would def reduce the friction for me (and
| increase the chances I become a repeat customer)
| mintone wrote:
| Very interesting. it's been brought up in the context of the
| wider community, so definitely something we are considering.
| pabs3 wrote:
| Looking at your ToS:
|
| https://www.ringerhq.com/terms-of-service
|
| Why won't you notify about changes to the terms? At minimum a
| notice at login would be a good idea.
|
| Maybe add some links to Wikipedia for the (presumably USA?) laws
| users are prevented from using the site when affected by the
| laws.
|
| Wow, it is long. Please add a summary to https://tosdr.org/ :)
| mintone wrote:
| Hi pabs3, thanks for your comments! We already have an improved
| "clear English" version of the ToS, which you will be glad to
| hear includes updates on changes going through review now -
| getting the legals right has been a really big deal for me,
| especially to make sure they are fair to everyone!
| [deleted]
| icon_zm wrote:
| I'm definitely excited to see this succeed.
|
| As a long time open source developer, I find that the managing
| payments part takes up way too much time.
|
| Also I've been told that it is very difficult to find/connect
| with expert developers. I don't get this but hey if Ringer can
| help here, that's great too!
| pabs3 wrote:
| I note that the SourceHut folks are working on a similar thing,
| except its focused on hiring folks to work on open source
| projects directly, rather than paid support helping folks use
| projects within something else.
|
| https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/hire.sr.ht
| https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-08-23-how-does-our-consultan...
| dvarrazzo wrote:
| As someone who is trying to make a living out of free software, I
| would love to see this project succeeding.
|
| The other remotely similar service, Tidelift, has unacceptable
| terms and conditions: for the compensation they decide "at
| [their] sole discretion", "[i]f you do not satisfactorily provide
| the Services, Tidelift may, at its option and without limitation,
| (a) require you to immediately re-perform the applicable Service
| at no additional charge; and/or (b) reduce the fees paid, or due
| to be paid, to you for the applicable Service in an amount
| commensurate with the cost to the Subscriber to cover the breach
| and/or the cost to Tidelift to assist its Subscriber with
| covering the breach." Quotes taken from the May 2022 "Lifter
| Agreement", which I was asked to sign for the monthly equivalent
| of what a professional charges for 30 minutes of work.
|
| I hope that Ringer will prove a real contact point between Free
| Software professionals and professional users.
| mintone wrote:
| Hey dvarrazzo - we're making a real effort to talk to the
| developer side when we're structuring contracts and at the
| moment (until it's unscalable) will be manually involved
| (behind the scenes) in each one to make sure it fits. Getting
| this right is absolutely vital - a balanced contract that
| serves both parties equally is the only way I see of retaining
| good customers and incredible talent. If you have any other
| thoughts or want to discuss at length I'd be happy to hear -
| email in my bio!
| turkertunali wrote:
| I believe that open source developers present themselves better
| with Ringer. Users will also receive assistance from capable
| hands. So it will be a win-win situation.
| adamdecaf wrote:
| This looks like a cool project. It's handy to require
| contributions before allowing someone to be an expert, but is
| there a minimum level of contributions needed? I have ~141
| projects that I'm an "expert" in but some were contributed to
| years ago.
| mintone wrote:
| Hey! We're working on the thresholding - it's hard because some
| projects have 20 contributions _total_ but we 're looking at
| ways to balance contributions vs length of service vs age of
| commits vs lines of code. For now, contributions and Rank for a
| repo is a simple enough way to understand but I'd like to make
| sure we don't end up with Experts with 1 commit in 100 repos!
| pabs3 wrote:
| The FOSSjobs wiki tracks various resources for getting paid to
| work on open source. I added Ringer there just now, in the
| freelancing section, which has several other things, but nothing
| as general as Ringer.
|
| https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources
| mintone wrote:
| Thanks you!
| oneplane wrote:
| I really hope this works out well, it's a very difficult problem
| to solve with a chance of making a huge impact. If this is one of
| the major ways in which we can get FOSS contributors funded, get
| FOSS users 'paid support' and solve the 'who is the expert on
| subject X' problem all at the same time, everyone will be better
| for it.
|
| The danger of success in this case might be a slow creep in
| requirements to 'be on Ringer or we do not want it' for FOSS
| projects, or if ringer gets bought by LinkedIn or something like
| that, that would be bad as well.
| foxhop wrote:
| I recently moved my open source projects from github to a self
| hosted gitlab server. Would I need to make a github mirror to
| take advantage of ringer?
| mintone wrote:
| Hi foxhop - at the moment, yes. We've had conversations with
| people about GitLab, Gitea, BitBucket, SourceHut and others and
| we'd like to support them, and self hosted, in time. For now
| we're constrained by resources though so I can't put a timeline
| on other services!
| mxuribe wrote:
| > ...We've had conversations with people about GitLab, Gitea,
| BitBucket, SourceHut and others and we'd like to support
| them, and self hosted, in time...
|
| I would guess that *when* you achieve support for those other
| (and especially self-hosted), then you'd up your game
| massively in the eyes of the open source software community.
| Of course....i acknowledge that this is not a small nor easy
| nor fast thing to achieve. ;-) Best of luck, and i really
| love this idea that you have! (I'll be joining soon)
| mintone wrote:
| Thank you! I enjoy the big and not easy things, it's where
| the magic happens!
| verisimilitudes wrote:
| It's nice to see this taking the e-mail whitelisting approach,
| that is _be aligned with one of these large corporations or we
| don 't care_.
|
| What's to stop someone from purposefully giving bad advice for
| his amusement?
| danielvaughn wrote:
| I was just in an exact situation that called for something like
| this. About a month ago, I was trying to implement a
| collaborative text editor for a freelance client. This was my
| first time working in the CRDT/conflict resolution space, and I
| was completely unprepared for how complex it was.
|
| I was using a few open source packages - TipTap, YJS, ProseMirror
| - but I had a particular use case that the docs simply didn't
| address (long story). It was the kind of help that would really
| require at least an hour sit-down with a very experienced
| developer to brainstorm with me on a solution, but there's not an
| obvious marketplace for that kind of touchpoint.
| mintone wrote:
| Now there is! ;-)
|
| Yeah - this is where I see us fitting well. It's not really the
| standard install/import and you're done issues that docs deal
| with. It's the niche problem <> niche expertise area where I
| believe we can excel - these tend to be very competent teams or
| developers who would be willing to take that hour and pay for
| it because the value is high enough.
| adigau31 wrote:
| Hey danielvaughn, I was curious if you ever considered
| Liveblocks for CRDT/conflict resolution?
|
| They released an example for a block based text editor here:
| https://liveblocks.io/examples/block-text-editor-advanced/ne...
|
| And as for CRDT and conflict resolution they have the Storage
| Block that's handling all of this. You can do offline/online
| and undo/redo quite easily.
|
| I keep sending you example cause I'm a visual person :P, but
| look at that interactive article and let me know what you
| think: https://liveblocks.io/blog/how-to-build-undo-redo-in-a-
| multi...
| danielvaughn wrote:
| Wow, this is very cool. I had not seen this before.
| Bookmarking for later. Are you affiliated with them?
| smashah wrote:
| Cool project. I signed up to be an expert on my repos however I
| think I don't show up to potential clients until I add my stripe
| details.
|
| I've tried platforms like this and have secured basically zero
| revenue from any of them so I'm hesitant to go through the whole
| stripe setup process unless I get some confirmed work out of it.
|
| So my suggestion is to allow maintainers/dev to show up to
| potential clients before having them go through the whole stripe
| process.
| mintone wrote:
| Hmm on this [1] page there is a link which should allow you to
| appear as an expert without completing the Stripe process. I
| think we might not be routing everyone through that page
| though!
|
| You can stay that way until you receive a request, which you
| cannot accept until you have set up payments.
|
| [1] https://www.ringerhq.com/u/become-a-ringer
| smashah wrote:
| ok my bad, I completely overlooked the "skip" part.
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