E-Money #1: Funding the Web Commons, Or, How Do You Fund Crowdfunding?

Hmm. Normally you click on the little triangle icon next to the page title, and click 'edit'. You ought to be able to edit both the title and the content of the context box. I guess the coordinators of this Loomio group have limitd the ability to do that in this group?

Best part of your article IMO. "But seriously, figuring out which of these are honest, and viable, is a high-stakes research project in and of itself. With real money involved, there’s no kind of software more attractive to bad actors, idealistic incompetents, and venture capitalists. They all take time to set up and learn to use well, and you can’t get any benefit out of them without giving them real personal details and banking information. "

-- My thoughts: Also, most of them require you to create private exclusive content that you don't share freely elsewhere. This is the same problem I have. The current systems seem to be using the difficulty of being proficient at their tools as a quality filter. The economics of running a site for new ideas to become big ideas seems to be that any site delivering attention minutes to your idea should require more time of your to set up then you receive. The optimal marketing strategy for these sites seems to be that they require to you invest a significant amount of your time as part of their screening and filtering system to eliminate jokers and those not dedicated. So you have to pass their dedication and determination tests before they will start making money for you. But maybe not after that either. I tried patreon and a few others and they sucked more of my time then they gave back. But I didn't try really hard or dedicate myself to mastering promotion on their platform, so maybe it was just a case of me not trying hard enough. I've tried getting attention in other venues and getting published in articles and blogs, but mostly people aren't interested in a good idea from a non-professional publications producer like a lone inventor or lone creative. There's a lot of creatives with great presentations skills, but lame ideas who suck up all the media and funding attention. IMO. I suspect a sort of money filter is present to prevent people without large money sums for advertising buys from being heard. If you think about competition and how it works, then it seems like Patreon, for example, has an interest in flooding the market to try to corner the market and gain monopoly advantage for Patreon. So Patreon or other business models like gofundme have a market incentive to increase barriers to entry for others who don't use their systems and they can increase barriers to entry by sucking up all the attention and funding supply.

I was once investigating using wordpress crowdfunding plugins like Galaxy Funder, but there are many which are reviewed in this article https://kinsta.com/blog/crowdfunding-options-wordpress/

I have also considered Startsomegood https://startsomegood.com/
A social enterprise and non-profit crowdfunding platform?

But I have been looking for a solution for not only crowdfunding but I also want something for creating user owned and governed platforms, which are crowdfunded by users and member fees.

I proposed a design for a platform for multi-stakholder cooperatives, to fund and govern them, by users, customers, workers/contributors, investors. It is called us.OS the cooptocracy platform and is outlined at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ezwXQL4Dt1-9xRtiIQV6gNi2QDaxcZInEQS09ZDMt74/edit#heading=h.o9hfbtermhg9
I am not sure how much this aligns with your needs, but it maybe relevant.

I can't read your design without visiting a Goggle domain, which I choose not to do (and can't do if my VPN isn't working). It would be great if you could post this piece on a non-datafarm host and post that link here. But from your description, it sounds like you might be able to achieve your goal by working with Liberapay or OpenCollective, or perhaps by forking their software.

Thanks for sharing these resources. I like your website. It is becoming more important everyday to avoid these exploitive extractive business models. You have a lot of collab document editors listed in your collection there, but which would you recommend if I want everyone to see the document and offer them a way to comment on content or suggest edits, or give them permission to edit directly. I have a wordpress website at sustainy.org with a web host provider with cpanel. I guess I could host it somehow, but what would you suggest, so that I can share it with you and others independent of datafarm hosts. In the mean time I pasted it on wikimedia ether pad. https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Us.OS

"a design for a platform for multi-stakholder cooperatives" sounds like some of the work that Trebor Scholz and Michael McHugh are engaged in. https://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Current+Work+-+Platform+Cooperative+Development+Toolkit

On the crowdfunding front, I'm a co-founder of the Platform 6 Development Cooperative which is an attempt to use a platform co-op approach to deliver crowdsourced support and development services for new cooperatives and like-minded initiatives. As part of that work we've set up a cooperative host on Open Collective - https://opencollective.com/platform6-coop (every collective on OC needs a host) and we're aiming to provide that service at a very low cost as a service to pre-start and early stage cooperative projects that don't have stuff like a bank account to enable them to receive and spend fiat money accountably. Might be of interest here.

Thanks Jonathon.

You have a lot of collab document editors listed in your collection there, but which would you recommend if I want everyone to see the document and offer them a way to comment on content or suggest edits, or give them permission to edit directly.

Etherpad is a good choice. It's a mature free code project that has been maintained by an open source community for many years (originally developed by engineers at Goggle). All edits are versioned and colour-coded according to who made them, see the comments I added to your Etherpad. If you want to control who can edit your working documents, rather than making it open to anyone who visits, you could try something like Cryptpad, or the online version of LibreOffice, or even just a wiki engine like Wikimedia or Ward Cunningham's experimental federated wiki project.

every collective on OC needs a host

Intriguing. From what I read in its early docs, I thought the whole purpose of OC was to be that host, doing exactly what Platform 6 are doing. Did I misread or misremember, or did something change during OC's development since then?

As I understand the model, there is OC the platform sitting at the bottom, providing the tech to make it all work. That entity takes 5% of all transactions incoming through the platform. Any collective choosing to use the platform can set itself up, and if it has its own bank account, it can effectively be its own host organisation. If it doesn't have a bank account - and for me the whole point of OC is to allow groups/collectives to come together and make things happen quickly without having to worry about stuff like banks accounts, legal structures, etc. - it needs to identify what they call a 'fiscal host' organisation which is willing to have the income for the collective arrive in its bank account, and to facilitate payouts as and when. Now OC the platform has set up some default host entities itself so that there is always a host available for any collective that arrives, but the stated aim of OC is to do away with these, and rely on third party orgs, like Platform 6 for example, to fulfil this role. The default host entities charge a further 5% commission on income received through the platform (Platform 6 has opted to charge only 2% at this stage, because we see our involvement with OC more as an outreach/marketing activity and so we're willing to invest time and energy there and not expect revenue to cover costs or generate net income.
This approach may be a relatively new move on the part of OC, and I think it makes sense, enabling a diversity of host organisations to engage, and perhaps offer different approaches and some added value. For our part, we're keen to see OC evolve into something a little more than just a money tool. I've been in dialog with Alannna about the of offering some governance services alongside the financial stuff - which I labelled as 'co-operation as a service', and spoke briefly about this time last year at the Open 2018 event in London. There has also been some exchange about OC supporting some co-op fundraising, which in the UK is called a community share issue. We're also considering offering a service on that front.
For what its worth, I see Platform 6 as much more than simply a fund or a financial service, although that's clearly part of what is emerging. My vision for it is as a rich soup of resources that a co-op startup can immerse itself in, and be nourished by all kinds of support (expertise, advice, tech support, money, investors, customers, co-founders, etc.). It's very much early days, but you are very welcome to get involved - we're co-creating the thing in the open.

Hey @graham2 ,

I have recently started putting some ideas for the development of peer_protocol in Rotterdam. I found a number of paralels - cooperation as a service and te use of OC. At this stage, I have applied for funding from the local government for a 6 month pilot. Going well, I would know the answer in November and start it around May.
Would you be able to share more about your initiative, including its development stages and where and how you plan to develop it?
Here's my draft website: https://sites.google.com/view/peerprotocol/home. Would be great to share experiences!