Crowdfunding critical infrastructure

Thu Jun 27 16:49:33 UTC 2019

On Thu, Jun 27, 2019 at 11:32 AM Tom Beecher <beecher at beecher.cc> wrote:

> Encouraging folks to contribute to specific individuals directly may be a
>> little more difficult though, compared to, say, getting a legitimate
>> organization going that provides (likely objectively-determined
>> merit-based) payouts to the sort of folks you're talking about.
>>
>
> Adding an organization in front of that whose sole reason for existence is
> to decide who gets what % of the money doesn't make a lot of sense, mostly
> because it is just creating another layer of people who are then going to
> feel entitled to be compensated for taking the time to decide who should be
> compensated.
>

I don't think anyone needs to be compensated for that. I think that you can
certainly run a volunteer organization. The time required would be minimal
enough that normally-employed folks could participate without issue in
managing it. Having that tax deductible status, in the US at least, would
be a big benefit and would also bring in institutional/corporate donors and
the like as well. Non-profits have been run for making infrastructure
software before and have been at least somewhat successful. ISC is an
example of this. Something a bit more decentralized could work just fine,
too, imho.

As far as just asking people to give to others at random, I think you'll
see less uptake and potentially issues with parity (for example, if you add
worthy folks to a list, those at the top of the list will likely benefit
more from random contributors just because they select those at the top of
the list - so how do you decide who gets to be where on such a list?), and
little if any interest from institutional/corporate donors. A formal
organization structure with rules written down in public also helps to
ensure transparency and if you set objective, meritocratic rules for the
disbursement of funds and you keep things transparent around them, I think
that would attract a lot of contributions.

Just my opinions, though.
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