Issue Funding Workflow

Review Backlog

Polar synchronizes all of your issues during onboarding & keeps them up-to-date in near real-time (thanks to GitHub webhooks).

Combined with offering some powerful additions such as...

Progress overview

• Showcases PRs referencing the issue & their statuses
• Commits referencing the issue
• Funding progress & backers

Sort by community impact

• Most wanted (Default): Thumbs-up reactions & funding.
• Most reactions: Total count of positive reactions, e.g thumbs-up.
• Most engagement: Combintation of reaction & comment count.
• Pledged amount: Issues by total funding amount.
• Recently pledged: Issues by when they last received funding.
• Newest: Newly submitted issues.
• Relevance: Relevant issues by search term.

... and of course the ability to seamlessly embed & manage the Polar Badge, funding & contributor rewards across them.

Badge Issues

In case you did not opt-in to badge all issues automatically in your settings you can easily do so manually. You can either:

1. Label the issue on GitHub directly using the label Fund (case insensitive)

2. Click Add badge for the desired issue in your Polar dashboard

   This will automatically open the customiztion modal below.

Almost instantly the Polar Badge is embedded at the end of the GitHub issue description by the Polar GitHub App you've installed 🎉

The issue will be marked as badged within your Polar dashboard too.

Customize

You can customize funding & badge settings for individual issues to override your default settings. Just click the Badged button next to the desired issue on the Issues page within Polar.

This opens up the customization modal. Let's go through each tab below.

Funding

Badge Description

You can easily tweak or even completely change the default description you setup during onboarding for a specific issue.

1. Click Edit to enable editing
2. Make your changes (markdown supported)
3. Click Update to save your changes

Funding Goal

Displays a specific goal to backers combined with a progressbar towards it within the badge.

1. Enter a custom funding goal in USD
2. Click Update to save your changes

"GitHub caches the badge for ~30-90 seconds" We set no-cache headers and GitHub does support this. However, their proxy CDN seems to have a minimal Cache TTL nonetheless, but it's very short-lived (with no headers it's cached for much longer).

Rewards

Want to setup contributor rewards upfront & promote it publically (optional)? Awesome, let's do it - it's incredibly easy.

1. Switch the Public rewards toggle to on (highlighted in blue)

2. Customize the split in percentage you want to allocate to contributor(s) vs. yourself

   Default is 50/50, but you can offer contributors anything from 1% to 100%. Did you end up doing everything yourself? Don't worry, you can adjust this once the issue is completed before payouts.

You're done. Changes are saved automatically.

Boost reward

Have some prior funding you want to offer yourself to contributors? You can easily make your own pledge in the modal (invoice sent once issue is completed).

1. Enter the funding amount in USD you want to pledge yourself
2. Click Pledge

Promote

Promoting the ability to fund an issue to your community is a great way to drive more funding towards it.

GitHub Comment

You can post a new comment on the GitHub issue directly from within this view and the badge will be embedded at the end of the comment.

This has a couple of benefits:

1. Subscribers of the issue receives a notification via GitHub
2. An additional opportunity to capture impressions from new viewers (who might scroll quickly to the end)

Direct Link

1. Click Copy to copy the direct link to the issues funding page
2. Share it 🙂

Embed Badge Elsewhere

The Polar Badge is an SVG (dark & light mode) that you can bring elsewhere too.

1. Select mode: Dark, Light or Auto
2. Click Copy to copy the SVG embed code
3. Paste it wherever there is HTML

Complete Issues

Polar is deeply integrated with GitHub and your usual workflow. Draft, merged or active PRs and commits referencing your issues are automatically detected and showcased upfront. Updated in near real-time.

So you can focus on making progress with contributors vs. tracking it.

Mark as Completed

Once an issue is closed - in case it has received funding - we'll prompt you via email and in our dashboard to mark it as completed. We require this manual step to avoid triggering the actions below prematurely or by mistake.

• Invoicing. Backers who made pledges receive their invoices due within 7 days
• Review. Backers who paid upfront are notified and have a 7 day dispute window.
• Rewards. You can split funding with contributors during the 7 day waiting period.

Reward Contributors

The modal above will appear once you've marked an issue as completed. Polar will automatically suggest contributors from merged PRs referencing the issue. Making it super simple to share funding with them.

• It's optional
• You can reward contributors even if you didn't setup a public reward upfront
• We highlight whether a public reward was set and if so...
• Automatically distribute the contributor split evenly across all contributors
• You can adjust the shares freely

Once you're done and click Confirm you can easily share the great news with the contributors in the form of a GitHub comment. You can edit the suggested comment freely. Just make sure to keep the username pings & instructions 🙂

Receive Funding

Great. You've setup funding, received it from your community towards a few issues & hacked away to complete one of them. Now what?

Once an issue is closed, you'll be prompted by Polar to mark it as completes. Backers will then receive an email notification about it and have 7 days to either:

• Dispute. In case they paid upfront and want to dispute the completion.
• Pay invoices. In case they made a pledge to pay on completion.

Polar then reviews and approves transfers from our platform account to your balance on Polar. In case of disputes, we review it to make a fair decision.

Once completed, the funds will be available on your Polar balance and you can manually withdraw it at anytime.