Summary of business and financing models -planning session Tromsø 2024

Discussing possible business and financing models for CodeRefinery

Summary of business and financing models -planning session Tromsø 2024

• Summary of business and financing models -planning session Tromsø 2024
  • Financing CodeRefinery - from reality to expectations

Financing CodeRefinery - from reality to expectations

CodeRefinery is receiving funding from the parent organisation NeiC. That covers two half-time personnel and some operational costs, like travelling. Apart from those two project people, the activities and products of CodeRefinery are largely run and produced by people from organisations who see the value of letting their employees to spend time on CodeRefinery activities. This in-kind model has made all CodeRefinery work possible.

CodeRefinery is a project, not a company or organisation (situation Feb 2024). This means we cannot invoice for our work. If some company would like to have tailored training form us and is willing to pay forit, we have no way to handle the transactions.

During our meetup at Tromsø Feb 2024 we held a session to brainstorm possible ways to let CodeRefinery operations continue.

• We would need a way to invoice.
• We would not want people to work for free
• We should be able to accept grant funding
• Many CodeRefinery team members would like to continue in-kind work
• People would like multiple different ways of working: in-kind, freelancer, direct employment to name a few

Open source – open core?

CodeRefinery is an open project and the outputs are openly licensed with distributed copyright. If we are to introduce paid products and/or services we need to be very transparent of the guiding principles and the business model. One example is the open-core model in software industry, where basic functionality is offered open source and free, but premium features are behind a paywall.

Our warm-up exercise in the workshop session was to gather ideas what CR should offer for free, and what possibly could be behind paywall. This is not a definitive list, but something to start the discussions with.

CR could offer for free:

• General or introductory course and lesson materials, possibly without integration
• General CR workshop in some format
• Tutorial videos eg. in YouTube

CR could charge a fee for:

• Advanced courses
• Customised training
• Courses for private sector
• Training for organisations that do not contribute to CodeRefinery but want the training
• In-person events like summer schools
• Workshop collaborative notes access
• Technical consultation for research

Towards a business model

For a business model one needs to consider for example the following questions: "Who are our customers?", "What services we offer?", "What are the potential sources of income?", "Who are the other operators in the field?". We filled in a flowchart consisting of Customers, Service Providers and the flows of value in both directions.

Potential customer segments

• Organisations that want to build the employee competence eg. in version control
• PhD students and researchers
• Universities that want to include our topics in their curricula
• Research projects that want to outsource training work packages
• Small SaaS startups

Potential services

• Courses, workshops or summer schools
• A lecturer for an university course
• Bootcamps for companies' new employees
• Consultation of technical support for research teams or companies
• Consultation for individuals eg. a monthly zoom call

Potential service providers

• A freelancer trainer or RSE
• An in-kind employee from a partner organisation

Potential income/resources

• A partner organisation lets people to work for CR = in-kind contribution
• Funding from EU or a funding agency
  • Funding agencies could require projects to get training in reproducible research
• Subscriptions eg. Patreon
• Course/workshop fees
• Service fees (from eg. consultation)
• YouTube ad revenue
• Sponsorships: we advertise a product we think is worth it to our target groups and get paid to do it

Next steps

Some of these listed items have more potential than the others – and some of them might have synergies together. Then it comes to the decisions about our vision and guiding principles. Those can indicate whether some of the options listed here don't represent what we want CodeRefiery to be. We (CodeRefinery) could formulate a business plan as a tool to refine the ideas and find out the most feasible solution.