# What Is A Contributor? ### What is a contributor? A contributor is anyone that applies their time and effort towards supporting, maintaining or improving an ecosystem. Contributors will apply their skill sets and effort towards areas they are interested in, most passionate about, that helps support the ecosystem or in areas that they believe will produce the most impact. ### What is a contributor funding model? A contributor funding model is when people are incentivised to work in an ecosystem to support, maintain or improve the systems and processes relevant to that ecosystem. Funding contributors is similar to how a company will pay for employees. Instead it is the ecosystems that pays for contributors. Ecosystems will often have a set of tasks and responsibilities that need to be performed for that ecosystem to correctly and effectively operate. The more important and high value the systems and processes are for an ecosystem the more likely that there is a reason to consider using a contributor funding model to support, maintain and improve that ecosystem. ### Why is a contributor funding model important? Funding contributors is a simple funding approach to allow people to professionally work for an ecosystem. A contributor funding model provides an alternative to idea based proposal funding. Idea based proposals focus on funding ideas that people want to execute. Contributor based proposals focus on funding individuals based on the skills they have that can create impact for the ecosystem. With contributors the person looking to participate does not need to think of and articulate an idea for what they want to work on. Instead they are able to highlight the skills they have and how those skills would effectively benefit the ongoing support, maintenance and improvement of the ecosystem. A contributor funding model offers a more simple and recurring incentive structure that helps to better align incentives to increase collaboration and flexibility across those who are working in the ecosystem. The differences between idea vs contributor proposals are covered in this documentation in more depth. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.catalystcontributors.org/contributor-categorisation-analysis/what-is-a-contributor.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.