We are really excited to launch an experiment that we believe will benefit the greater good of the web community. We are talking about our Open Prioritization experiment. If you haven’t heard about it yet let me give you a little history, an overview and a glimpse into what we are talking about.

The history of the web has really consisted of the popular browsers all beginning as closed source systems. Of course, this has now changed and they have become open source but because there are still a very small number of browser vendors, the majority of the financial support for browser development is provided directly by them. Like any company, browser vendors are limited by both budget and resources. Even if they would like to implement every feature that is asked of them, it is impossible, so they prioritize what is important to them. So what can the community do about getting things implemented that are important to them but are, perhaps, not currently high on the vendors’ lists? That is where our experiment comes into play. Open prioritization is an experiment testing whether web developers, designers or web benefiting companies are interested in having a say about what is being developed and implemented by pooling resources toward completing specific work.

To facilitate this idea, we have collected a short list of things that can be completed in the very near future. These things are related to a variety of areas of the web platform, in various browsers, with different implementation statuses. They also require different amounts of investments and promise different types of payoffs for developers.

Open Prioritization is different than just crowdfunding a single idea. It will be a two-phased experiment. For the first phase, we have partnered with Open Collective to allow developers to make a “pledge” towards any of the things on the list that they are most interested in. A pledge is a non-binding statement of monetary support. In other words, if we were to crowdfund this effort, you would donate X amount towards it. The second phase is the actual collection of funds and this will only happen once the “pledge” goal is reached. Because the effort is a first funded, first delivered type effort, the first to reach the pledge and funded goal will enter our work queue to be completed.

Now that hopefully your interest has been piqued, you should go to https://igalia.com/open-prioritization to learn more about the effort and make your pledge.