Snowdrift.coop fund-drive

"The snowdrift dilemma All public goods face similar dilemmas. One variation is the snowdrift dilemma: Who's going to do the work of clearing the snowdrift in the road? We all want the results, but we all benefit whether or not we share the costs. It's not effective or sustainable for a few people to take on all the burden while others freeride. Most of us want to do the right thing, but we can't do it alone. We need organized ways to cooperate and share the costs. Network effects drive our economy. We use Facebook because others use Facebook, not because we like everything about how it works. Certainly not because we think it truly serves the public interest. Projects that get the most funding initially become the highest quality and thus the ones we keep using, despite the problems they may present ... Snowdrift.coop uses network effects to put the power back in the hands of the people instead of the platform owners. At Snowdrift.coop, you become a project's patron with a monthly donation pledge: For each additional patron who gives with you, you will donate a little more (limited by the amount of funds you choose to make available to the system overall).  This way, those of us already pledged invite the rest of the world to join us. The existing patrons of a project will together match the donation from each new patron (although our exact proposal includes additional measures to accommodate varying pledge levels from different patrons).  This approach is something like the mutual assurance and reduced risk that we get from a hard threshold for a crowdfunding campaign… Except with Snowdrift.coop, the mutual assurance isn't all or nothing. It's flexible, sustainable, and designed specifically for the needs of funding free/libre/open digital works.  No more donating to an exciting community project only to have it sell out to corporate interests! Snowdrift.coop will offer a curated market where allprojects use free/libre/open licenses. The whole system will be run by our own patrons as a non-profit cooperative. We license our own work freely under the GNU AGPLv3+ for the code and CC-BY-SA 4.0 International for our writings and other media. And because projects get long-term support instead of receiving all the funding up-front, the community can hold them accountable ..."