Hi everyone, A while ago, it was pointed out that while it's clear that Snowdrift.coop focuses on FLO, sustainability, community etc., it isn't adequately clear that we're not designing Snowdrift.coop for simply any and all FLO projects.
Specifically, we are not designing for kickstarting dream projects — in that we aren't promising major capital infusion or having people pledge for projects that may never happen. I had some thoughts about how to make things more clear without limiting us to "established" projects. The thing is: Snowdrift.coop is for the sorts of projects that would actually be appropriate and successful with our model. In other words, we're not wanting lots of projects to sign up and fail. We want projects on the site to succeed for the most part. So, the question is: how can we delimit reasonably what sorts of projects we see as a good fit and tell other projects that we're not appropriate for them? There's one big reason it makes sense to accept newer / newish projects: they don't otherwise have things figured out for fundraising etc. So, we don't want to specifically say that it's about newness, although that may be a factor. If we only supported projects with long history, they could worry that trying using us might compromise their existing donations. Of course, we can *allow* them to even reference existing donation options at Snowdrift.coop, but that's not the ideal for us. What we don't want: We are NOT for projects where: their scope is so small that donations aren't really needed. People might *like* to get tips or even to get rich when everyone loves that little quick thing they made, but we are only for funding projects that actually have lots more work to keep doing. We *could* support a "project" is the ongoing creation of many small things though, such as many songs from a songwriter. We are NOT for projects where: they are some obscure backed/upstream type of thing such that even if they affect many people in the end, there's no decent-sized audience of people who would know or want to know or think about the project. I.e. Projects at Snowdrift.coop need to be of the sort that, in principle, would actively *interest* a decent sized audience even if the project doesn't already have established substantial audience. We are NOT for projects where: There is no team or people currently wanting to dedicate serious ongoing time to it. Basically, we need to communicate and clarify what we think will make projects succeed, and we want to *curate* the site to encourage likely successes to sign up and discourage *likely* failures from wasting their time and getting discouraged. For our initial launch, we want to actively recruit and only accept projects we think have a good chance at success. Then, as we open things up more, we still want an intake process where we can do a mix of helping projects to best fit the way the system works and also explain to projects that are a bad fit that we think they are a bad fit. How much we err toward curation (aka censorship?) or just letting in whatever… we have to figure out these issues as we go. I know at this point that we want the launch projects to do well, so we want to be extra thoughtful early on. That means that our ideal *launch* projects will already have dedicated teams, large audience, tons of potential that they could reach with better funding, and reputable history — and somehow also be willing to take a chance with us. The projects I most want to *exclude* are (A) those that are really unrealistic but which sound neat — people will want them in principle but they don't actually make sense or aren't possible, they haven't shown themselves to be feasible and (B) projects where the developer/author thinks they are great but really are trivial junk that no real audience will ever care about. There's a real bias and concern about who makes these judgments and how. But I think we want some level of scrutiny, wanting evidence of project viability and good-fit *at least* for the launch projects. The primary goal is to show that the system is workable with the projects most likely to fit well, and *then* we can discuss opening it up more broadly. But this situation needs to be communicated transparently. So, thoughts? Concerns? Suggestions about how to specify these details / communicate this clearly? https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/projects is the relevant wiki page, though it hasn't been updated lately. -- Aaron Wolf Snowdrift.coop <https://snowdrift.coop> _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.snowdrift.coop/mailman/listinfo/discuss
