Re: [tlug] kickstarter for open source...

[Edward Middleton <edward.middleton@example.com>]

On 06/15/2013 05:33 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Edward Middleton writes:
>
>   > To be honest, what I see as being mostly ignored in all this is the
>   > effort involved in finding the couple of thousand people willing to
>   > spend a couple of dollars.
>
> That's exactly the hoped-for value in Kickstarter, of course: reducing
> that cost.  My main points are that
>
> (1) looking at Kickstarter itself, I don't see it as being a very good
>      way to communicate the existence of a project to people who don't
>      already know about it, and
>
> (2) even as a way of allowing kuchikomi to snowball into funding as
>      friends tell friends about Kickstarter projects, as crowdfunding
>      becomes more popular there will be more projects chasing more or
>      less the same amount of money.

I don't think Kickstarter is really about promoting your project in any 
significant way.  The people I know who have run successful Kickstarter 
campaigns spent a lot of effort in promoting their campaigns and, as far 
as I can see, thats what got them most of their contributors.

My impression is that they are about providing minimal assurances that 
the project is not a complete scam and that it is likely to succeed. 
Not all projects are accepted by Kickstarter.

I think this finite amount of money assumption comes from you assuming 
contributers see it as charity.  If people think the project will go 
ahead and they will get the fruits of the developers labor without 
contributing then it will only be peoples charity, and maybe some 
companies looking at it for PR value, that will contribute.  That is 
definitely going to be a finite amount.

If as a developer you use it as a barometer to gauge whether a project 
has sufficient interest (is worth doing), and more importantly are 
prepared to walk away or invest time in other things, then their is no 
longer an assurance that non contributers will get something for free if 
they wait.

>   > For your mailman example above, the question would be, how many
>   > people actually use mailman in a way where a better spam filter
>   > would be worth $1 in saved effort.
>
> No, although that is an interesting question, that's really not the
> question I wanted to answer.  If it were I'd have been using different
> examples.  In fact, I am sure that there are plenty of people who
> would find more than $1 worth paying.  And if the Mailman developers
> wanted money more than a project to be proud of[1], I'm sure we could
> get a couple $K pledged for 2/3 as much investment.  The point here is
> entirely rate of return, which will not come close to 10 to 1.

As far as I can see, most projects are started by the person developing 
the project not a third party interested in having something done.  So 
your example doesn't really make sense.  If the mailman developers 
plotted out a good way to make SPAM filtering easier to setup with 
mailman, by your above statements they could raise funds by crowdfunding 
to do it.  How much would they need to raise to give themselves a decent 
rate of return?  Could someone other then the main contributers attack 
this problem?

Edward