Contributor Resources

This page is the contributor-facing reference for what the Nano Collective offers to the people building under it. It catalogues what is genuinely available today and what is being built toward, with no flattery.

If you are thinking about proposing a project (see How a Project Comes to Life), thinking about taking on a substantial piece of work on an existing project, or thinking about contributing in some other way and wondering what is available to you, this page is the answer.

It deliberately matches the posture of the Economics Charter and the public sponsor page : honest about state, not aspirational, no promises from an empty pool.

Available today

The things below are real right now. They are what a contributor or project proposer can actually point at, use, or ask for.

Brand, audience, and distribution

Identity and reach. The @Nano-Collective GitHub organisation, the nanocollective.org domain, the docs site at docs.nanocollective.org, the existing community on Discord, and the audience of the four projects already shipped.
NPM scope. Packages can publish under @nanocollective/<name>.
Docs surface. Project documentation is hosted at docs.nanocollective.org via the shared docs site, with consistent navigation and presentation across every project.
Website project surface. Projects under the collective appear on the nanocollective.org homepage and the project lists.
Release pipeline. The conventions in Creating a New Project give every project a working release path on day one (CI, badges, GitHub releases, npm publishing, optional Homebrew / Nix cascades).

Infrastructure defaults

CI workflows. Reference implementations for pr-checks.yml, release.yml, and update-badges.yml exist in Nanocoder . Mirror them rather than building from scratch.
Stack suggestions. See Stack Suggestions for per-language recommendations.
Documentation conventions. A docs/ folder in your repo gets picked up by the docs site automatically once the project is registered.
Brand defaults. Tokyo Night palette, Poppins + Lora + Fira Code, the canonical project tagline. See Brand Guidelines.

Governance commitments

These are commitments, not perks, but they matter when you are deciding whether to invest your time:

No retrospective term changes. The financial and procedural terms in force when you start work continue to apply to that work, even if the docs update later. The Economics Charter and the governance page hold this.
No sponsor influence over what gets built or who gets paid. Sponsors fund the collective; they do not direct it. This is in the sponsor page and enforced as a hard rule.
No opaque decision-making. Stage 3 build decisions are made by the founding core team today, recorded publicly on the relevant whitepaper page with rationale.

A defined process for funding work

The mechanisms below exist. Funded balance and live sponsor / partnership deals do not yet exist. NC is pre-sponsor, pre-partnership, pre-bounty-pool. The structures below are how funding will reach contributors as donations, sponsorships, partnerships, and operating revenue come online.

The community fund. A ring-fenced pool fed by donations and sponsorships, used to pay scoped bounties to OSS contributors. All inflows and outflows are visible on the public Open Collective ledger in real time. Today, the balance is essentially zero. See the Economics Charter for the full mechanics.
Designated donations. A specific piece of work, scoped and agreed with the core team before any money changes hands. Nothing open-ended. Nothing retrospective. Delivered work is reported publicly. This is the most likely shape that paid contribution takes today, but it requires a donor willing to fund the specific piece of work in question.
Bespoke partnerships. Larger arrangements with infrastructure companies, hosting providers, or aligned foundations. By arrangement, terms agreed and published before the relationship begins. None signed yet; outreach is active.

A contributor or proposer who wants to know whether their work could be funded should ask. The core team will be straightforward about what is and is not fundable today.

How to ask for support

If you are taking on a substantial piece of work (a new project under the collective, a large feature on an existing project, sustained maintenance), and you want to discuss whether support is available, three routes:

Open a Stage 0 conversation if you are proposing a new project. See How a Project Comes to Life.
Message a maintainer or the core team on Discord for substantial work on an existing project.
Email hello@nanocollective.org for anything else, or if you would prefer a non-public conversation first.

We will tell you honestly what is available, what is not, and what the realistic path is.

Building toward

These are things the collective is actively working to make real. They are listed here so contributors can see what is coming, so prospective sponsors and partners can see exactly what their support enables, and so the page changes over time as items move from this section up to “Available today”.

A funded community fund balance. Capacity to pay bounties on scoped work without needing to find a donor for each one. Grows as donations and sponsorships come in.
Live sponsor relationships. Brand placement, sustained funding, and the contributor benefits that flow from it. Outreach is active. The first sponsorships, at every tier, are open.
Bespoke partnerships with infrastructure providers. Free or discounted credits for compute, model APIs, hosting, and other resources that NC projects depend on. Each partnership is intended to translate into something contributors can actually use, not just a logo on the homepage. Outreach is active.
Pass-through of partner-provided resources. When a partnership lands, the resources it provides (credits, API access, compute, model access) are made available to NC projects and, where applicable, individual contributors working on substantial pieces of NC work. Each partnership will be listed here as it lands, with what it provides, who can access it, and how.
Long-term contributor coordination. Including the possibility of token-based or other coordination mechanisms as the community grows. See the Economics Charter “What’s coming” section for the current framing.

What this page is not

To be clear about what sponsorship and partnership do not buy, mirroring the constraints on the sponsor page :

No influence over the roadmap, prioritisation, or which contributors get paid.
No early access to unshipped projects.
No exclusivity. No slot caps. No hidden perks.
No targeting of specific contributors for sponsor-directed work.

These are hard rules. They apply equally to every channel listed above.

Questions

Open an issue on the docs repository , or email hello@nanocollective.org.