it does actually look like you can sponsor projects too already, but the payments are not handled by github in those instances, it just links off to another pat

it does actually look like you can sponsor projects too already, but the payments are not handled by github in those instances, it just links off to another patreon style provider - for example https://github.com/react-spring/react-spring https://github.com/react-spring/react-spring. I think managing the direction and budgets of open source projects that have many contributors in a fair, effective way is a really interesting problem. There are some blockchain DAO projects where this is handled by voting. Each participant's vote could be weighted by different things - contribution activity, seniority within the project, more traditional board/council structure, whatever. The voting results can also be automatically executed. Or you could pre-determine and automate how funds will be paid out to contributors - ie. bounties for new features/fixing bugs