Yama Ploskonka wrote:
When following this thread what I saw in my mind was a "bounty" system,
negotiated between donor and coder, with Lumiera.org merely as a site
where the information gets posted. No overhead, no bureaucrateze, etc.
I believe that is what you are pointing at, Christian, and I might
follow up with that idea on my own for the project I invest most of my
time in, which is OLPC for Bolivia.
One requisite for success here is that "projects" be broken up into
small enough pieces that a single donor, or a small number of them can
make them happen, and they can be requests (I want this done. I offer
$xxx) or proposals (I think this need to get done, and I'll do it. It
will cost $xxx, can someone pitch in?), or suggestions(I think this need
to get done, can someone budget it or get it done as a volunteer).
I guess that what I am saying everyone knows, but as a noob I needed to
spell it out so _I_ could understand it...
The problem with bounty systems is that they only work well for limited
things which are *isolated* and *optional* and *directly experienceable*
by users.
In Lumiera we are working on groundwork, design, infrastructure and
backend things, all these are mandatory, bounty or not, without them it
will never work. We can't risk things like "Code Documentation" or
"Project Serialization" or "Rendering core" on a bounty, this just has
to be done (and work is underway) whenever we can communicate this to
users or not. At some point when Lumiera basically works we might setup
some Bounties for optional features. But I think there is also a danger
that bounties can be rather counterproductive, high rated user features
like "add a GUI button for X" or "add support for codec Y" might be low
hanging fruits with a good design and be cherry picked by some coder,
while the ones who done the hard (but unseen) groundwork don't benefit
from it. Bounties promote competition and not cooperation in a bad way,
the one who implements it fastest for the lowest price will take it.
That is quite unfortunate for a free software community.
That saied, bounties look bad, but indeed they are not, they just don't
work for anything and they are only one kind of tool to supplement free
software financing, while the overall goal should be to create a
community where everyone feels fair treated, developers and users.
Christian
Yama
I could imagine to set up an website where donors can make
non-obligatory 'promises' about an amount of money the would offer on
a per-project or general base. When it is forseeable that a goal
becomes realizeable the donors are contacted to acknowlege their
offering, when then enough people acknowledged it, then the thing gets
done, means people can send money in 'acceptable' ways (For me that
would be bank transfer, or maybe I could activate a paypal account, I
also need to checkout this pledgebank.com). When a donation is
recieved it is tagged as that on the website, so everyone can
transparently see how it works and how much money got donated. Maybe
it turns out this way that some 'Projects' are not realizeable because
there are not enough offerings to reach the Goal, such projects might
then stay uncompleted or withdrawn.
Does this sound ok?
And of course I would be proud if such a system works for others too
and me and my laptop won't be the only thing there. Finally it is
always cool when free software manages to feed some developers,
Lumiera is still far from that, but maybe some day this becomes true.
Christian
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