Hello Tea team,
I wanted to provide feedback on my experience with TEA as a full-time open source maintainer. I also previously worked for the French government as part of a team whose mission was to make the OSS ecosystem sustainable, so I’m particularly interested in what you’re building.
I have two observations:
First, I have projects like minimal-polyfills and scripting-tools that are eligible for rewards when they really shouldn’t be. These projects have 0 stars, 0 forks, and no one is using them besides me. They have a large number of downloads because I use them in other projects that are actually successful, namely denoify and evt. I think only EVT and Denoify should qualify for rewards; otherwise, TEA creates the incentive of splitting a successful module into multiple little pieces to be eligible for the reward.
Another issue is that Keycloakify is not eligible for rewards despite being a successful OSS project by all metrics: stars, forks, contributions, and downloads. It even has two sponsors. It’s just that it doesn’t have other packages depending on it because it’s an “end of the stack” project, not meant to be used as a dependency by other NPM modules.
Anyway, good job on this initiative!