Snowdrift.coop: Funding for free projects
lwn.net
lwn.net
I also like to see more people moving into the Patreon-style market - Patreon has probably figured out a lot of the pain points and will probably rightfully hold some permanent market share for being first, but I think the ability of nonprofit/coop projects to be more agile and respond better to user needs due to the general lack of ulterior motives will be valuable for this specific business model in the long run.
In the Snowdrift.coop review of hundreds of existing sites, they even list a handful of other subscription-style sites https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/othercrowdfunding#su... (most with no real success, but many of which were around before Patreon).
Onarbor, https://onarbor.com, is one such site. Its precisely for funding "soft" goods: videos, music, research, as mentioned by the OP.
I gave a while ago. For me, it isn't that I necessarily 100% believe this is guaranteed to work, it is that it is good enough to be worth a try. My long-term hope is that this takes off enough and attains enough credibility that I can go to my employers and say with a straight face that we ought to be participating to a significant degree, but with life and the world working as it does, the project is first going to have to bootstrap the credibility to do that before I can even bring it up, let alone get it approved.
So I had a look at their site — and apparently they're building their own forum, wiki, blog, and issue tracking software. This seems like things that can take a tremendous amount of time, and derail them from their main mission. And I'd guess the results would be average at best in comparison to what is produced by other teams that dedicate all their time on one thing, e.g. Discourse for new forum software.
Their model that calculates how much money that is paid out to each project feels like the opposite to what I would prefer. One would get paid something proportional to the number of supporters ^ 2. But if I wanted to donate money to something, then, if few other people donated, I would want to donate more, so that the project got a reasonable amount of funding. And if many people donated, I'd want to automatically donate less (not more), because I don't want the project to get more money than what it actually needs.
With Snowdrift's current model, I'm afraid a few projects will get a lot more money than what they actually need, and won't be able to use that money efficiently. Whereas most projects will get like $0.1 a month.
I'd love to see that their ideas work out well despite the things above :-) Best wishes to you the Snowdrift team.
Yes, there's a natural intuition that you should pay less if others join you, but that only makes any sense after a project already has adequate funding. Anyway, the intuition is a failure in reality. Why should I add my donation if it just means others will donate less? The question to think about is: "what will most encourage others to donate who aren't donating now?" And the answer is definitely in matching as a big factor.
Anyway, the whole snowdrift dilemma is about the fact that you would indeed like to donate as little as you can and have everyone else donate as much as they can. The point of Snowdrift.coop is to acknowledge how that thinking is destined to be a failure for the project, so we have to make people adjust their thinking.
The mission-creep concern is totally valid, but there's pros and cons as well to having a more integrated system. I happen to agree with you that wheel-reinvention is a big problem in general. And Discourse is indeed pretty nice for what it is, and no way would it be easy for someone else to quickly whip up something comparable.
They wouldn't donate less, that's not what I had in mind. I'm thinking the other people are supporting many different projects, in addition to project X that I start supporting. Now, when I support project X too, they'll contribute a little bit less to project X (but the net effect should still be that X gets more money). However, then the other people will get some money over, which the system will distribute among the other projects they support.
I'm thinking I'd prefer a money distribution model that tended to divide money evenly between many projects, rather than one that favored a few popular ones.
Anyway I'm thinking that the model you currently have in mind can be changed later on if needed. You could perhaps support more than one model. Or even let people choose themselves which model should be used when their money is being distributed.
The immediate challenge is that most projects are severely underfunded.
Anyway, I still would be less likely to donate to a project if the effect was "I donate $5, and the project only gets $1 extra, and I'm freeing up $4 of other patrons' money so it can go to other projects." That's worse for my goal of wanting this project to succeed than plain unilateral donations. If I want a project to succeed, I'd rather send them my entire $5 with a simple Paypal option than to do that screwy thing where others give less. Your version does mean, "others give less [to the project I support] when I donate." And that would make people want to skip that system and just donate unilaterally.
It's actually far better for the overall ecosystem if popular projects actually get adequate funding and less popular ones die than for all the funding to be split among all the projects regardless of popularity or worthiness. Yes that's two extremes. The ideal may not be either extreme.
Think of it this way: It would be way better to have two or three GNU/Linux distros that got enough support to completely outdo Mac and Windows in every respect than to have every GNU/Linux distro out there get an extra $100 a month. It's perfectly reasonable to argue that it's basically negative for GNU/Linux that there are so many distros and confusion. Consolidating the community and the funding around the most deserving projects is a positive effect.
That said, the goal is that if people want to support the popular projects and many others, they should add more funds, and up their overall budget when they see the value. People wont' keep to an absolutely fixed budget for the system. I might put in $100 at first, but if I knew the rest of the world would truly join me to build a truly better entire world, I'd put in my life savings. So, there are real limits, but don't assume this has to be a zero-sum game.
Feel free to clone it and fix any issues, if you want.
Open, voluntary membership.
Democratic governance.
Limited return on equity.
Surplus belongs to members.
Education of members and public in cooperative principles.
Cooperation between cooperatives.
Anyway, for Snowdrift.coop, it's planned as non-profit so there is no equity or return on equity. All revenue must serve the non-profit mission.
The rest of what you mention is affirmed in the Bylaws (which are still only a draft, pending legal review): https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/bylaws