Recreated comments for Perl in Catincan, an open source crowd funding proposal
I spent time to create the below message for Brian's post on crowfunding. For whatever reason, he felt the need to delete my post. So I've recreated the gist of what I said previously. I guess next time I'll take a screenshot for posterity.
Brian, Now that is a great contribution! Thank you!
Discoverability issues: On a crowdfunding platform that is generic in nature there is a discoverability problem if you are targeting a specific audience. Brian, does Catincan support creating a Perl channel/filter with permalinking? If so this could then be linked directly from Perl.org. If not, how do we address that issue?
Regarding concern over processing fees: This can be addressed by the idea of large sponsors(e.g. ActiveState/Cpanel/Booking) agreeing to donate $XX,000/yr just to cover processing and operations of a Perl-specific crowdfunding platform. This essentially applies 100% of user donations toward the project. This has become a popular practice in recent years by non-profits. A great example of this is by charitywater.org (http://www.charitywater.org/100percent/).
New additions:
Additional food for thought on open-source crowdfunding. Gittip(gittip.com) is quite interesting but has so far struggled to get off the ground. There has also been a number of market place processors that have formed in the last few years specifically geared to handle this type of payment idea. An example is Balance(balancedpayments.com) who came out of the '11(not sure which class) YCombinator incubator.
I dream of a Perl you would want your offspring to use.
You can call me Bob.
Regarding sponsored processing fees, this is exactly what the YAPC Europe Foundation does with the online payment system they offer to (European) Perl conference organizers.
Thanks for sharing BooK. That is a great example!
Looking into it I see the link to ACT(A Conference Toolkit). I wasn't familiar with it so reading the history to my surprise, you're one of the creators. Of particular interest is the payment system. So naturally that extends to my next question, what do you think about a Perl-specific crowdfunding platform? I might be grabbing at straws but are we looking at a means of extending or integrating ACT for crowdfunding of Perl projects?