I'm interested in taking time off to learn programming. Surviving while doing that is a challenge. One concept I've bounced around is an investment approach. For example, people could make donations (e.g., $10), with each increment being "a share" of my future earnings (e.g., 0.1%), potentially for a limited amount of time (e.g., 10 years).

During the year, I would make blog updates, maintain on open github of learning projects, and contribute to open projects; and my investors could make suggestion of things to learn or projects to work on.

As much as I want to do this, I would feel guilty if I did it personally (I want others in my situation to be able to have similar opportunities), so I've been trying to figure out how to scale such an approach.