 On various other types of game theory things in economic studies, people might use one of the prisoner's dilemma. The snowdrift dilemma is a slight variation, and we can go into the details. There's actually a page on the side explaining it, but I'm going to skip right to the snowdrift dilemma, which says basically there's a big drift of snow blocking the road and you have to get through, and maybe some other people have to get through. Also, a typical game setup is there's two people. But the question is, who's going to do the work? So, if you go ahead and get to work, and the other people are lazy or busy with other things, then you have to do it all on yourself, and that kind of stinks. But if you have other things to do, you can wait and then see maybe other people will do it. And if the other people do it, then the road will get clear, and that means you get to do other things, and that's sort of the optimal selfish result. Not that everybody's selfish, but if you're aiming for your own best interest in this game, that's your goal. But if both people have that goal, then both people wait, and we don't get anything happening, and everybody's stuck there, and that's the worst case. So, what happens in most situations is that somebody feels like they care about having a thing at least good enough, so they get to work and they get it done sort of. It's what you get with only one person doing it instead of a better result you get with both people. It's not as nice, it's not as fair as if everybody cooperated together, but whoever kind of needed it done first ends up doing the work. So, unlike the Prisoner's Dilemma, it can lead to things happening. It's not quite as impossible to get over, but it's not a great situation because if everybody cooperated, that's really the best world. So, overall, this is like free software funding. We have competition from proprietary things. We have people making choices about being restrictive and proprietary. We have people using or funding proprietary development, and we have people choosing to do different things with their time than working on free software. And obviously the people here are often the people who are choosing to come and work on the free software, and our problem isn't that we're not doing our part, it's that we don't have enough other people helping us. We need to get more people to fund us or to make our funding for our work not be somehow dependent on proprietary stuff, like how Mozilla gets all their funding from Google, which gets all their funding from proprietary stuff, even though they do some free software. So, there's a lot of different ways to do this, and we're building a site called Snowdrift.co, which is our proposed system to address this dilemma, in which basically, each month I will say that I'll pledge some very small amount, minimum be a tenth of a cent, and we'll go like a penny for every, well, in this case it would be, this is actually our old thought, we changed our formula, but we're saying, like a network effect, I will match everybody else, so I will chip in each month a tenth of a cent for everybody else who's with me. That type of pledge addresses this dilemma because it says, I'm not going to just do it on my own. I'm going to tell you that I will do my part if you come and join me. And so, the uncomfortable part is to actually say to somebody you might have a hundred dollars you want to support some developer with, maybe don't just give it to them, maybe tell the rest of the world that you'll match them, and invite them to come join you, because I don't have a lot of money, and if you chip in all that you can to this project, I'm happy that you did, and maybe I'm going to keep my little bits of money that I have, because you already donated it, and whether I donate or not doesn't change what you do. So it doesn't, if all my extra ten dollars does is ten dollars. I lose ten dollars, they get ten dollars. Issue with free software and proprietary and everything else doesn't change. What changes is if we have a critical mass and everybody works together, and that's taken on that root effect. So the more people who pledge together, the more funding the project will get, and we have some formulas on that, and the site is built with ESODE, which is Haskell based web framework, and we're AGPL, and so the idea is to run it as a cooperative, and we have three member classes, which is the people working on the site itself, the people who are working on projects that want to get funded, who want to make a living working on free software or free cultural works, and the people who want those things to succeed, who want to support them. So at a very simple level, one of the reasons I'm here, although I have other things I could say about WM, is that I'm interested in getting people who want to help with any of these three things. At this point, we're not launched yet, but we have a site in progress and we need help building it. We could also want to talk to people who want funding, and we want to talk to projects who want to talk to us about how we can best serve their needs, and you can help support us even, because we're actually thinking of running a traditional one-time fund drive at some point to just help us get a watch. But that's basically it. There's a simple summary. The site is live at snowdrift.coop, and you can check it out. We have a lot of research, and I've also smoked a lot into the existing site. So, for example, we went off and actually said, I don't like wheel-reinvention, by the way. I really wish that everybody would coordinate together and work on things that we all need and help the things that are already existing do better. So I felt it was our duty to look at all the existing things before we just throw off the end of another site. So we actually did it. If you're curious about any of these things, we actually made a summary after looking at all 700 existing crowdfunding sites. So we have one to do the one-time things. They don't actually solve our solution, because they're all one-time. There's a bunch of hype, and it's just a little marketing. It's like an excuse to hassle your friends. It has a certain place, like just getting going, but actually most of the stuff on Kickstarter tends to be proprietary. There's bounty systems, which there's like 12 of them that have failed. These are the ones that are still around. There's reasons that type of system has its place, but it's not really a great solution. And then there's like ransom systems that people have used in cases. And then we're like a subscription type of a site. You may be aware of what used to be called a get-tip is how grant and pay is... There's a lot of sites that say, hey, it would be great if we all just sort of ongoing support people to have a living, but it doesn't solve the snowdrift dilemma. It just says one person donating, that's it. It doesn't really invite anybody else. It doesn't grow the community necessarily. So there's nobody doing anything like what we're doing, but there's a lot of great stuff out there and there's a lot of challenges. So I can go into a lot of detail about how we chose the different things that we chose and where we are right now. But I'm going to leave it at that and say, that's the basic idea, and I'd like anybody to tell me your first impressions or questions. And yeah, go ahead. How do you choose how to allocate funds to the projects? That's a great question and I understand there was a session about that earlier this week regarding Debian was not one of the projects that currently is lacking in funds, at least in terms of they're not going through them all. They have funds and they're not sure how to spend them. That is a slightly different dilemma than the one we're focusing on. Our focus is on existing projects that are not trying to do some new dream thing, although we could expand on that at some point. I'll go ahead and tell you something specific about the Debian related, my personal story in all of this and getting into free software, which is that when I got frustrated enough with a lot of proprietary stuff and ads and things back in beginning of 2012, I had a music background actually and I was coming to this from a free culture sort of side of things and I decided to try a Linux system and figure out what I could do for music. And after a lot of looking around, I ended up with a system called KX Studio. And for those of you who are not familiar with it, basically there's this set of repositories, packages and additional tools that are extremely user friendly for the Linux world at least that are all built on extras for Debian. So basically anybody running Debian can add the KX Studio repositories to your system and you will have the latest up to date, all of these 500 and whatever audio plugins 30 or 40 different great audio softwares and a whole bunch of other things and this suite called Cadence which helps update the whole thing and keep the system running. Now it still took me a little while to get used to this idea and get into Linux and everything and I was asking for help and kind of got comfortable with the community a little bit and I now personally in some sense over the internet know the guy who actually is behind KX Studio and he is a guy who something like five years ago had no idea about any of this stuff, picked up a book on Python and decided to learn to program and he lives in Portugal and he doesn't know any other programmers and somehow he became the like one of the most significant gurus in understanding the whole Linux audio world and making sense of it all and packaging it and then making this totally accessible downstream thing and currently he lives with his grandparents and he's basically unemployed and poor and he lives in Portugal and makes something like two thousand euros a year in donations and he could do a lot more if he would probably be good for him not to stress out about basic living things and it would be nice if he could support a number of other people who are trying to do some other things or get other help and he doesn't have a question of how he would spend money he's literally like I would get some nicer groceries so there are people who donate to what he's doing but it's a question of growing the community again and that's actually just one example but I have other examples like that so that's a great project for us when we get launched he's going to be signed up and we're going to try to get some extra funding for him to do what he can do and he told me basically that if he got to something like I don't know ten thousand euros a year or something like that he would be like wow this is fantastic I can donate to other upstream projects and things so there's a lot of different levels of where people are at with funding and there's a lot of space where there's clear need I guess I should answer your question more specifically though our system is designed so that we say you're a project you probably should keep within a small enough frame so not Debian as a project probably but some smaller projects that we actually have a focus and we identify on site who are like a project team the people who are getting paid and it's going to be you saying I'm somebody who works on this, this exists and I either have a day job doing something that is proprietary so working against the goals of free software or it's otherwise something I don't really want to do I'd like to spend more of my time on this but I need to get a basic living to do that and that's the sort of people we're trying to fund and so if we can succeed at funding some people like that we'll dabble with all the other things but as an ongoing system like a monthly goal the idea is you report your expenses and your revenue on the system so that the patrons can know what the status is and then people can keep projects accountable and you can say I see this over these three months this project really made good use of their funds and keep supporting them Do the patrons choose where the money is allocated or do you have some sort of advisory group that chooses how to allocate things? Yeah, yeah, so the formula is the system is project gets listed on the site patrons at least this is actually a bigger broader question that we have to deal with legally but the actual facilitation of funds but proposal at this point is basically you put your funds in that scrotum cycle account where it's your funds but in the system it says you have this much and you make a pledge to the projects you choose to support and then within those projects we have a system to have a discussion you can say I want this but the project has some level of autonomy to say we have this much funds for patrons we're going to use it as best as we can but you can pick which projects you want to support Is that a kind of flatter style? You could think of it that way so one way to think of this is flatter is a way to budget a bunch of funds and then choose how you want to allocate and we're doing that except flatter doesn't have the assurance contract, doesn't solve the disclosure dilemma and it's a zero some type of situation you donate to them that means the other person gets less but it's like flatter having sort of a monthly budget but the budget goes to the projects when other people join you which is more like Kickstarter in terms of actually having a collective action issue except it's not all or nothing it's not hard you know oh you didn't hit the skull, you failed it's a little more like scalable but yeah it's got some similarity to the flatter Is it possible for patrons to nominate groups or do groups have to sign up themselves? We haven't okay so I should tell you about the status of the system right now right now you can go on the site and you can sign up and you can play around with the two projects listed on the site which is the site itself the other one is the site that the project I was involved in that sort of is part of the inspiration of what led to the site which is called Task Coach which is because I'm involved I put it up there we are currently we have like in the testing but it's not live like forms for projects to sign up and we have a wiki page of like projects we're interested in talking to so a lot of these details aren't figured out yet we've got a lot of the plans a lot of the research but we don't have a site fully operating so sure it'd be great to say I want to support this project I think we need to have the actual project signed up you know in order to actually start collecting funds for them the example you gave is the situation where you probably want to nominate that right but I would go to so I go to Thuype and say hey I know you're struggling and like I don't have a lot of money and I donated a little bit anyway but I know that doesn't do much because it's just my ten dollars but you know we're working on this site and he says okay cool I'll sign up tell him when I can sign up and I just have to figure out international issues because that gets complicated so I can't promise that when we first launch we'll be able to send money to Portugal I just don't want to say that we're doing that right now we want to the actual sign up process because we're trying to I'd say that the biggest challenge that we've had by far has been that we made a decision early on that we had to be consistent with our mission and so every single thing about the site is free software and so we didn't want to be reliant on GitHub even so we've been near undutorious and when we studied all the different ways you can have tickets and other things that the future should get with the system like GitHub for various reasons that relate to mixes of yeah, shaving and technical choices and whatever else and I'm not the developer so I had to defer to the people who know more than I do we ended up building our own discussion system that's connected to our Wiki thing that we put tickets on but we designed it so that every project that signs up will have access to the same things so basically we hit all of these obstacles and said like ok, we're at this point, how do we do that and be totally free software right now we have no analytics on the site because we could use PiWare but we just hadn't figured that out yet we're really avoiding JavaScript actually because we're doing progressive enhancement making sure it works with no script and screen readers and things like that so there's all these different tools like if we just popped in some standard stuff or proprietary thing or the standard old tools like if we just used MediaWiki or something that that would be not exactly the right tool for us we have to adapt it and the developer doesn't like PHP anyway if each of the times along the way we hit all these obstacles and we did the research and figured out what we could do and then we said ok, if we figured out a solution that at least worked for us we'll make sure it's available to all the projects if they choose to use that so we put in a bunch of time recently on getting our discussion ticketing thing kind of operating better whereas that's not directly getting us to launch but I like it, it maybe won't work out it's been a challenge so I guess the answer to how this relates to the process of nominating projects who gets involved is like we actually had this idea of saying here's the list of this relates to Zach's talk at the plenary what makes it a free service, that sort of thing and so we tried to collect a list of all of the honorable ideals that the best community-related free software projects would do and then we're asking projects to go through filling out like an honor report thing that just says here's how we're doing on these things, you know we have third party ad trackers on our site, yes or no or whatever else so that that can be reported to the community and hopefully push projects in that direction so there's this process we had in mind for how a project could sign up and we have a few projects in mind but any other questions, any thoughts, anybody, have any if you want to talk about other things related to the economics of free software this is sort of the, I've studied it a lot is the point so I can tell you about our system but I can also talk about the potential things so I am a member of a cooperative in Brazil we have seven years or eight years of working and so we came together to create a business based on the principle of free software so everyone who works on the cooperative is also an owner of the company except for interns but our plan is always to make the interns those partners after they finish school and spend one year with us and there's also in Argentina they have several cooperatives free software cooperatives they even have a national federation or something at that level so they actually go lobby governments and stuff like that to prefer free software and everything and so we are kind of connected with those people so we are trying to create something like that at the Latin America level also so I just wanted to point out that's another alternative for funding so you can create a business and together with other developers and so we are not rich you can tell me what my understanding and I've talked to a few people in different cooperatives in free software they are almost entirely all worker co-ops in my experience that your situation so I think worker co-ops are a great model I like cooperatives in general the thing that we've been trying to do is what's called a multi-stakeholder cooperative so I have mixed feelings about how I present this to different audiences but I'm making some assumptions about the people here I've been I'm not coming from a developer background I've been learning Haskell because our site is written in Haskell and David is the lead developer you can help with some easy things here and there if you study Haskell so I'm studying Haskell but I don't have that coming from the tech side I'm coming from the I'm a user, I like my privacy I like having control over my system I don't like that you have ads on everything I don't like the old direction of all of that and I care about free culture issues so I'm talking about educational resources being available to everybody things like that so in my sense I wasn't actually designing this or thinking about this as a the goal is about the funding of the developers like the developer's interests I think that's their important I want their interests included but my thinking is that in the public so the general public, the people who are using the software they're the interests that I want to serve and so it's some level, it's a means to an end if we can give people a good economic system to fund free development then we don't need to fund proprietary development or I can say you can check this out if you're curious because there's a lot of interesting stuff on the site but I wrote this up in an article about economics here in which don't see anything on the oh we lost the thing that doesn't really matter I was just going to anyway yeah, no well it doesn't matter, I'll tell you there's an article about economics on the site that describes this but I'll tell you, my thinking of it this is one way to explain the economics of free software and culture there's basically three things that you get when something is proprietary when you add artificial restrictions to something make it proprietary one of them is that it enables certain business models and they have been proven to be actually pretty effective sure there's a lot of competition but the amount of money that's given to proprietary software proprietary cultural works is quite a ginormous amount of money the other part of it is that of course it gives the people who are in control of it a lot of power over users as free software people are aware of and the third thing is that it excludes people so if you have a special barrier to access or whatever else then people who are poor can't use it so the first example, the idea that it funds you is a totally legitimate thing, there's nothing unethical about that it's just that the other two side effects are really horrible so at some level is to create an economy that is effective enough to pay people salaries so that we can say now, because we can show you that you can make a living doing free software and not in a way where you're doing a little bit of free software so that the company you work for can then make a proprietary project that's not what I mean, like really making end user enabling free software now you have no excuse now if you're still proprietary then you're just being an asshole now you're just trying to gain power and exclude people but right now I understand that the free software economics is challenging and so I know people who are proprietary who are not trying to do so for malicious reasons and they're trying to do so because they want to make a living and I sort of say that's a good excuse I don't want to be dogmatic about it so I think the main conclusion that I'm trying to get to is that right now we have a very supply side economics and we have people making products start-ups coming up with new products all the traditional stuff and then as a consumer in the market and I don't like that word but it works in this case you look at what the products are and you get to choose and that's it you don't have freedom to do really do anything it's not really serving your interest they're not really responsive to you it's this stuff has to compete in the market so if the thing is really crappier you're not going to choose that one but you only get to choose from what the supply side offers you and I want to create an economy that's demand-side or at least is more demand-side where the community gets together and says we as a community want things to serve our interest we're the ones paying you we have a cooperative in which we've gotten together and okay we've included the developers because we want their perspective too but our cooperative is the people who are using the technology telling the developers we have funding we want to fund you serve our interests the goal of this is to be what's good for the community I don't say that too often I don't feel like that would always go overwhelming I work for a non-profit that is 100% free software and we are also majority funded by individual users and one of the things that's been I think very useful for us and our funding is to have all the content of our site and our monthly newsletters and our user interfaces and that sort of thing translated into multiple languages and in order to be able to have users all over the world and so I would definitely advocate making sure that as you're building things that you are ready for that so I don't know maybe Joey knows more than I do but I there are various systems that do all sorts of stuff and because I guess one of the challenges is because we're using the ASODE web framework and the various new tools there's not a drop-in this is that translating thing that they use with MediaWiki or whatever else it is but yeah that's absolutely on the list and we have a number of people who volunteer to do translation for us but at this point it's literally like I don't have a good technical thing on the site you know here's the this language version of whatever yeah and we do for some things but for things like the newsletter we still rely on just an email list of people sending things back and forth it's fairly low tech it would be nice if we had something fancy not just the doing the translation but when it's like how is it presented oh yeah I see what you're saying I'm asking in your case LARS is our own custom solution but it follows standards so what's the experience somebody goes to the site and there's just like a button that's different languages or yeah like a drop-down that they can select or if their browser already has a language preference set it will do the right thing sure so we need to implement that that's definitely a priority among lots of other priorities yeah Brett do you guys have like a blog or a news page to follow along with progress okay so to keep up with the developments the back I don't know a year ago or something when I was like we need a wiki to put all this stuff down you know I debated with all these things and we found even that there is like there's a can't think of a name but right now there's a wiki we didn't ask to leave them but it's gplv2 only and so that won't work without it we can't use it directly as we're a gpl anyway so we ended up throwing up our own wiki thing and we ended up throwing up a discussion thing and we have a system that I feel really great about kind of moderating things and keeping everybody being really respectful which is basically if you post something about it, it's the code of conduct somebody can hit flag on it and it sends you a message that just says please edit your thing and fix it and make it more respectful and then keep it there rather than some sort of zero-tolerance you know thing and so we were trying to think about what it was to do for an email list and it was like somebody could put up a mailman thing whatever it doesn't integrate with everything else I don't know anyway the moment the status is we're going to try to keep everything all in one system on the site because there's a lot of advantages to keeping everything consolidated and we are very close maybe within a week or something to having a new milestone sort of thing on the site where you can have you can say you're watching a project and then you'll get email updates so that it'll say it was somebody to flag your comment you can go to the site and see it you can certainly sign up on the site you can read stuff you can go on discussions and most of the stuff we do is actually on our IRC right now it's freenode.net and it's just snowdrift but yeah then oh and then the other part vlog somehow I got I think this was for a small bootstrap group I'm behind on doing the chrome or something for the blog that David wants me to do so that we can like put up the blog thing that will be integrated with everything but at the very least all the work that we've done is going to be available to everybody else so anybody who has a project that signs up on the site they didn't have a blogging thing already while the site will have a blog so they can use it there if they want so I like your concept this is all very sensible but you know I use an awful lot of free software things and in principle there's hundreds of projects I ought to give three cents to and how do you deal with but it's kind of a bit tedious going through your way into face you're saying yeah I'll give you three cents and I'll give you one and I'll give you a whole dollar and you know whatever how do you deal with that kind of diffusivity problem is it just hard so I don't have a perfect solution right now except that in terms of building a community we want to get more people who are actively involved so we're not totally there's pros and cons to something that involves a little more active connection there's some pros to telling people go to the site, look at what the project is doing see what the updates are be conscious of this, be involved not not encouraging the most amount of passivity but we don't want to create artificial obstacles we certainly want things to go as smoothly as possible Joey actually helped us with the very first version of having a little bit for our API which will be a little thing you can put on your site that will say there are this many people currently pledged to support this project and you who are looking at the site you know when you pledge these people will add more to support us and if you just click pledge you know go right to the page and we need to say you know pledge we didn't have to have an account on the site overall but there's also the level of I'm not sure that we expect people to or even asking people to donate to every single project they ever use although somebody who really wants to could do that yeah there's a little sort of infrastructure people who tend never to get you know they're not very interesting you know who wants to pay the utility to people but we all need that stuff where does it come from we're definitely building the system again because of the sort of downstream community focus is to focus on downstream user-fixing projects so the most popular, most obvious types of things like forkscape or whatever else and then if they use a bunch of libraries the premise is if you can get a bunch of funding to downstream projects they should donate upstream to the projects that you know they make decisions about just funding the things they rely on just really comment from IRC Steven C99 kickstarting Debian LTS sounds just like the problem the prisoners dilemma or there's no just dilemma bootstrapping the Debian LTS effort seems just like that so if you don't have enough committed funding then it's not going ahead could somebody try to put it in a question form or the point here exactly you're not familiar with it the point is that lots of people use Debian and we basically support it for a couple of years and then after that we've got new stuff to build and we move on but there's a lot of people who quite like it it's been supported for 10 years or whatever but they're a very diffuse interest somebody has to do that work and there's probably lots of people who would like that work done but it's never managed to coalesce to the point where there's actually some funding for the people who did a really rather boring job of backporting things to ancient I would say one of the reasons that one of the questions I get often is something along the lines of well wait a minute so some project gets pretty popular and they get a lot of the funds because they get all the matching things and they use up people's budget or something what happens to these other projects or that type of thing and part of the answer is you're okay with the idea that this is a democratic way to kind of funnel funds in certain directions so there may be things that people really want like a really long term support from Debian but it's a question of how many people really support that whether the economics is actually feasible and so if there aren't enough people who are willing to put their money to making that happen I would say that I'm sorry the economics aren't there as supportive it's not our fault we're not going to make that happen and maybe the limited funds that people have in the world need to go to something else but the main issue is that right now we have the snow drift dilemma so all of those individual people however many there are one of them could say I want this to happen I'm going to put in my $200 and it doesn't happen anyway because it doesn't do anything you have to have everybody as a society we have to decide we're going to put money towards that or it's not going to go ahead there has to be somebody of course who's willing to say I will do the work if you fund and so we are helping to facilitate that existing but there's sort of a test of it's I'm going to pay with this if people want to support all sorts of different projects they can and in the end you won't end up donating to a thing even the thing you really like you won't donate to unless other people are with you because you're contingent on having other people come and pledge with you and that's good because your money would have been wasted it's a risk to donate to things that are going to end up failing anyway I think in the case of the Debian long term support issue it's that particular project needs a slightly different funding model because it has a different community of users of it unlike something where like the example that you the music software example that you gave earlier where that's used by a lot of individuals around the world who can in aggregate come up with a fair amount of funding for that project in the case of Debian long term support I think what we would find is that there are a relatively few large users of that project who who could fund the project by contributing a larger amount of money you know like organizations that are using it and things along those lines as opposed to a whole bunch of individuals making use of it I agree with you and I should just say first off actually we're running out of time but I should also say please come talk to me because we have looked into all these things I might have an answer for you I thought about that question before but don't assume that we know everything I would love to hear your feedback and love to hear about you know real on the ground situations that we're trying to that will affect our decisions I would like to see long term a institutional level that we could have on the site so instead of saying individual people say entities like schools schools or something this entire school district says we would love to have free software that did this for our students or we would love to have this textbook that's used in our classes that's free open educational resources but we as a school can only put in so much and if we just do it won't pay enough to make it worthwhile so we will make a pledge to this project on Stedrich that go out and say however many other school districts that will you know or other entities that will make a pledge that is at the institutional level then we will add that much more from our budget that seems more complicated certainly not what we are going to launch with I don't actually know what to get there but I see the same economic issue at that at that level Suggestion for when you are presenting the system it would be really nice to have example figures of if one person says it's going to give one cent for every other person that joins this much goes to the project in these many months so it makes it clear to have a clear picture of how feasible it is one of the things we are working on that's a top priority among other top priorities is to have a system in which we can actually have a graph or something right now you can pledge with fake money so you can say that you can add fake money to your account you can see what the result is and we don't present right now enough of the stuff telling you this pledge will make this effect this pledge will make this effect and sort of showing it in aggregate but that's easy enough for us to add certainly anybody who wants to do a little bit of Haskell and help us add that we can use the help there's there's nothing if you're not a Haskell there's all sorts of other things we could do to design front end things or job script enhancements but anyway we've actually been teaching there's been a camp of volunteers who want to help us and didn't know Haskell had been learning Haskell just in order to help us but that's a separate thing but I'll give you a just to give you a concrete example which will help edit for now the current proposal on the technical level is that the minimum pledge is a tenth of a cent per other patron that means is that if everybody is at the minimum then if there's a thousand people with me I'll put in my dollar and you have a thousand dollars a month to fund somebody part-time if there's five thousand people with me I put in my five dollars and then we have twenty five thousand dollars a month so that gives you a sense of how it scales but not everybody wants to just be at the minimum and people are of different means so our proposal is to have a system in which you can pledge multiple shares and if you pledge multiple shares on the rhythmic scale where other people will match your extra shares but at a tapering off level so if you pledge eight shares or something then it'll count as though as though there's like if that's you know two to a third power sort of so you can think of it as like it counts as though there were three more people coming in to pledge with you I think we actually did a boost just from the first level so it's actually four but basically if you pledge like a thousand shares because you're some super rich person then you're saying I will put in this enormous amount for every additional person who pledges with me even when they're at a small level but those people don't have to match your crazy huge pledge so we can still have people at different levels but we're still encouraging people to say when you pledge a little extra beyond the minimum the rest of the community will still say like thanks you know and put in a little extra as well but we need to make some clear graphs to have an actual history and when projects are actually on the site you can see how it's working and we'll see I think the Kickstarter killer feature is the fact that there's this threshold and so people are often very likely to say yeah you know I'll join into that thing and if it doesn't get over the threshold nothing is lost but if it does that means lots of people are interested and then it will happen I like the model you're talking about how it kind of has this snowball effect as it grows so I think people might be risk-adversive what if it gets really popular and now I've just committed to funding so do you have anything like a cap in place? So overall the proposal is to have a cap in the system like flat or basically you say it's not exactly flat but we may adapt it to some legal problems depending upon what our proposal is but basically you put it you can say here's a hundred dollars I put into the system it's probably just from your a lot that you've got and that's your budget if you run out of funds then we say well your pledge is inactive and more you have to add funds if you want to stay active the reason that you know I don't want to do like a per project I'm opposed to this but various people like the idea and there's room to adapt but I don't like the idea of I will give this much exactly you know here's my cap for this project or something like that and I see that as destroying some of the game issues here it says to other people if we have that they know that I have some cap maybe if they don't even know what it is it's like oh well it doesn't really matter because when I pledge like somebody is going to just hit their cap and it will make any difference they won't actually match me so it doesn't it gets weirder with that and I think of it as the fact that I don't I don't actually have any good idea what's good personally like there's no way I know that it makes sense to donate $10 or $15 or $50 like I mean unless I'm actually starving I have some money in the bank like I can worry about next year whether I'll be broke or not you know how much I can donate today but people aren't good at judging these things at all and so like if you go to a auction you have this situation where you say like I pay this much for this random thing and then somebody else have bids you can go I guess 24 maybe I should really have no I still want it I'm going to pay this much so we really want it to be sort of flexible and the overall idea is that you have a cap in the system and it's just you're making a certain amount of funds available we're not going to put you in debt and say like it got to whatever level but we that's the proposal for now and I know that some things that's one of them in the system is challenging some people's assumptions right now I run into a lot of people who say the market makes these decisions and there's prices and it works like this and I know that I would pay this much for this but I don't think that's true I just think people have certain assumptions about how the economy works that may not be how they actually behave having done the Kickstarter thing myself and follow up it definitely can be used for free software but what I quickly found is there's no sustainability in that model and you know that you have people who want to support you but you can't just keep doing this crazy thing where you have to go do a lot of work just to go through the process again and after a while it would just become absurd and so I really like that this is pointing toward more sustainability and and also toward finding an actual value between different economic value between different things in some interesting ways that's why I'm really interested thanks so much I will add very quickly we have actually a page on the site about what we think is wrong with the Kickstarter model and why it's not working so well for free software and I'll add that my personal complaint is I really hate ads I don't like the big hype everything's in your face sort of thing and I think Kickstarter is just like more ads from more people it just encourages that culture and I would rather a system in which everything is clear everybody can access information on the site see how honorable they are and what they're doing for the people and it's free you just use it and if you use it support it and I don't really want to see more money going to fancy videos and marketing and all of that even though there's something to it still I don't like that personally for the organization that I work for the best possible thing for us is for people to sign up with a regular donation that occurs monthly we do an annual fundraising drive and that certainly brings in a lot of money as well and we are always going to do both of those things but in terms of ongoing funding so if you considered or you're going to build into the system some way where instead of putting in static amounts at one time people just automatically have a monthly amount going to be certainly as things sort of stabilize we see how things are going certainly saying you deposit a certain amount monthly into the system is fine obviously the system that lives alongside any of the other fundraising systems that exist and people can use Kickstarter or one-time campaigns when that's appropriate because that has a place where it's serving a different niche but I guess I'd say the one of the ways I like to explain the system if I have like a quick elevator speech I don't pick between different approaches but one thing is Kickstarter has this assurance contract the collective action issue and matching pledges are a really powerful thing in traditional fundraising I don't intend PR when there's some matching funds to claim that type of thing but sustaining pledges a normal ongoing membership fee is the other like most important robust thing in fundraising and we're just combining all of those that's what the system is it's all of those at once so anyway thanks everybody for showing up and thanks for please come talk to me later and check out the site and come see us on IRC and come help us make this reality it's a lot of work but I wish I had more to say it was already operating now but we're getting there we keep working on it thanks