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

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Edward Middleton writes:

 > 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.

That sounds very reasonable to me, but I don't think the OP was aware
of that.  (I wasn't, except to the extent that Kickstarter itself says
the most successful projects put effort into promotion.)

 > 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.

My impression is that Kickstarter doesn't check for scamminess (how
can they? is it that hard to write a plausible proposal for a creative
project?), and that according to their site most rejected projects
violated their content guidelines.  Likelihood of success clearly is
important to them, they explicitly mention sufficient funding to
complete the project as a rationale for returning pledges if the goal
isn't reached.

 > I think this finite amount of money assumption comes from you assuming 
 > contributers see it as charity.

No, that's not my assumption.  Eventually you do run into a resource
constraint.  My precise assumption is that project requirements will
increase much faster than available funding as people become aware of
this funding source.

 > 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.

A valid point.  There are two contervailing factors, though.  First,
this is somewhat inconsistent with developers putting a lot of effort
into promoting their projects.  Second, at least on Kickstarter, you
can only post one project at a time, so using it as a barometer is
inefficient.  On the other hand, use of multiple crowd-funding sites
wouldn't be very reassuring to your potential backers I suspect.

 > 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.

Maybe not in the light of what you said above, but I'm mostly just
following up on the OP, and have been doing so throughout.  If that's
not what you meant, please explain.

 > If the mailman developers plotted out a good way to make SPAM
 > filtering easier to setup with mailman,

I don't understand where you're going with this.  Doing it in Mailman
is bad in principle for several reasons, and I don't see any way that
calculation is going to change.  This is the MTA's responsibility.
Our users generally understand that, and that's figured into the
funding side but ignored on the project side[1] in the ROI
calculation.

Footnotes: 
[1]  If I didn't ignore it, it would become a "you can't pay us
enough" proposition.