Hi everyone, I have been working for several months (after years of general research and interest) on founding a new fundraising system dedicated to Free/Open works: software, data, research, art/music, etc.
There are several things which distinguish our proposed system from the existing platforms: 1. We will require all listed projects to accept approved Free/Open licenses 2. We are not doing one-time fund drives. We are looking to slowly build broad communities of donors for long-term support of projects and authors. 3. We have designed a novel mechanism to address the problems with encouraging as many people as possible to join the community. A simplistic explanation is: each pledge starts near zero and increases only when more people pledge as well. Essentially, each donation is contingent on everyone else donating; like matching funds but achieved geometrically across everyone in the system, growing further with each new donor. Furthermore, we are going all the way with our ideals on this project. It will be run cooperatively, it will have an honor system, and it will focus on duty, freedom, and common good over calculated rewards to individual donors. We have a detailed proposal, a website and system in progress, and many partially-formed ideas for how the whole thing will eventually look and function. At this point, we are recruiting a steering committee to help us see the project through. We will have online discussions about the precise policies, the details of the site, and more. There is room for anyone supportive to be involved even if you cannot consider joining the committee. Feedback is appreciated. We're going to get the code on GitHub soon and are looking for extra contributors to that. We're also networking and trying to connect to anyone sympathetic to our values who could play any helpful part in the process. Please let me know if you are interested in even just learning more about the project at this stage, potentially to be involved in some way. The site is http://snowdrift.coop but you'll need to have me send you a personal invitation code to access anything right now, since we aren't public yet. We'll add a publicly accessible contact form ASAP, but until then you could let me know how to reach you by posting here or writing to me at [email protected] Cheers, Aaron Wolf Ann Arbor, MI, USA -- Aaron Wolf wolftune.com
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