Bounties for security vulnerabilities are definitely quite publicized. Particularly, when people get thousands of dollars from Facebook if they find some really bad ones. But note that these big ones are not open source, so they are restricted to vulnerabilities only.
Bounties for features are common too. Check out the link I shared above, for Neovim. It’s in early dev stage, and they are using the money for feature development. Ubuntu and others are similar.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BountyProposals
We already decided not to spend time on part time contributors due to the amount of training required, so no interns, etc. This would be a good middle ground where we can get external people to contribute, without spending too much time in training them.
We can start with our existing v0.4 help list and see how that goes, before we look for help in the most core part of Dgraph.
Btw, Jeff Atwood’s post on Bounties:
Update: Based on Jeff’s post, providing money for development can also attract wrong kind of people. They’re more willing to fight with you to accept their change because they only get money when they get accepted.
This is something I’ve also seen happening in Question Answering services like Mahalo. That’s why Quora stayed away from providing any monetary incentives to the best answers.
This is something we’ll have to figure out if we want to go down this path. One way to probably tackle this is to have only one person work on one task at a time, and only if they fail to achieve the results in a given time, does the task get reassigned. Also, we can ask the contributors to explain their general approach on discuss, before we okay them to do the task. But, once assigned, the contributor is sure to get the bounty and hence can put in more effort towards a successful completion of the task.
Update
Opening this up for Users category, to see if our users have any advice / suggestions in this regard.