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There used to be a cool site for this even before Kickstarter, called fundable.org, but apparently it went under. See some more info here: http://www.fundable.org/online-fundraising/

That page says that they're in the process of rebuilding it but until then they recommend:

http://www.chipin.com/
and
http://www.thepoint.com/

Also search the net for 'charity crowdfunding' to see if you stumble into anything interesting.

Good luck!

Seems like an as-yet unsolved problem.

There have been proposals to have a centralized mozilla bounty system at mozilla.org, but they've been dismissed as WONTFIX in anticipation of human conflict becoming distracting to those with authority over the code base.

Some, like Mark Shuttleworth, once held hope for more support for bounties from Mozilla, such as a bugzilla feature to associate bounties with bugs. That hope seems to have disappeared.

Mozilla-related Wiki attempts have also disappeared, and the other websites out there seem to lack critical mass.

However, Mozilla has started a limited bounty program for security bugs, with help from long-time bounty advocate Mark Shuttlesworth.

As far as the mechanics of moving money around, http://fundable.org/ might be an option.

other sites
----------
http://bountycounty.org/
http://www.opensourcexperts.com/bountylist.html?bo untytype=1&cat=33
http://croczilla.com/zap/bounties/

There are often group purchases on fundable.org, where groups of solo web designers pool their money to purchase a group subscription as if they were a larger company. $40 gets you one year of premium access, and it's not against BrowserCam's TOS, in fact they're aware of the practice and apparently have no problem with it.

There are a few spots left on this group purchase, and if you miss that one, another one is sure to pop up soon.

There are often group purchases on fundable.org, where groups of solo web designers pool their money to purchase a group subscription as if they were a larger company. $40 gets you one year of premium access, and it's not against BrowserCam's TOS, in fact they're aware of the practice and apparently have no problem with it.

There are a few spots left on this group purchase, and if you miss that one, another one is sure to pop up soon.

Yes, it's feature chicken. The game of chicken is a good metaphor for a lot of things. Superpowers bullying each other? Nuclear chicken. Libertarian/Conservatives arguing against social security? Welfare chicken. They don't want people starving in the streets either, but they hope someone else wants it even less so they don't have to pay.

Ok, now that was a not-planned thread hijacking attempt. I'm sorry.

Seriously, those dominant assurance contracts could probably be a great solution to the problem, but it seems that even where there's really no need at all for it, people would rather have artificial scarcity. I think it's because fundraising for common goods is still seen as a sort of begging. And from the ones who come closest to implementing good assurance contracts, it seems that not only do bidders think of it as begging, sellers don't grok it either and mostly use it for begging...

Totally. I'm never entirely sure how ESR got to where he is... he wrote a few utilities and a book or two, but short of maintaining the Jargon file, it's hard to see what he did on a day to day basis that allowed him to be quite so prevelant.

Anyway, I think we should buy him an iPod.

I don't think we're going to see all that impressive games for linux anyway, they don't follow the usual open source rules, as has already been discussed to death. They will be small, they won't have really complex physics or enviroment calculations, or sophisticated AI anyway. So they might as well be written in Perl.

(They can still be fun, though. Two amusing games, mortal szombat and frozen bubble, were written in perl as I recall. But they are both clones of old games on other platforms)

There is a way high-quality open source games could be produced, though, that I intend to promote. The group auctions at http://fundable.org/ can at least be used to ransom games already developed, and that site shows promise. Perhaps it will be extended in such a way as to provide reliable up-front funding of FOSS games as well.

I'm trying out a promotion campaign through http://www.pledgebank.com/promotefundable (you can tell I like these sort of schemes, can't you? :-)

seriously, when's the last time you and your virtual friends got together and said "Hey, let's go wiki a road! The one to my house is inefficient, and I have a plan. By a magical confluence of pornography and EverQuest, we can more efficiently collect taxes and move hundreds of tons of pavement and dirt!"

Not quite.

I personally suspect that if the Internet replaces aspects of government, it'll be by facilitating assurance contracts between individuals. Sites like fundable.org and PledgeBank are some early implementations, allowing people to more effectively pool resources in pursuit of a common goal.

Couple good internet-based implementations of assurance contract brokerages with prediction markets and/or decision markets, and I suspect the results should be pretty formidable. Such a system would likely be able to accomplish much of what is currently delegated to government.

Fundable would be my choice. I started to set one up earlier and ran out of time. I'm thinking the PayPal link above should be avoided. It belongs to some offshore account. I smell fraud. :\

Some people will try to take advantage of anything. :(

1. Make everyone shareholders. I think this idea is no better than what we have now, and probably worse. Anyway, set a "release" price on new works (ideas, art). When enough people have collectively put up enough money to meet the price, release it to these people only. They are now shareholders. Whenever outsiders want in, they buy shares. Everyone who is already in gets a bit of this money, thus the incentive not to give away property. You can't sell out, because proving that you've forgotten an idea is impossible. As more people buy in, the share price goes DOWN, because what it is really doing is spreading the release price plus some profit out among more and more people. It doesn't go down entirely proportionally, so that early adopters are rewarded for their discernment, and of course the creators/inventors/authors are the first people in. As an example, suppose the release price was $1 million. 100,000 people put up $1, 50,000 put up $2, and a wealthy impatient person puts up the other $800,000. Then it's a hit and a million people decide to jump in for $1 each. The first shareholders will get some, not all, of that money, and the share price can be lowered to, say, 75 cents. When the price goes below some minimum (1 cent?) the shareholding arrangement is dissolved and the "properties" are thereafter public domain.

2. Similar to 1, but skip all the shareholder stuff and release it to the public, not to "shareholders". Rather like this idea.

3. Change to a "Creditright" system. All ideas are freely available. The only obligation is give credit where due. Accreditations are counted. How exactly this can be achieved without inconvenience, cheating, or violating privacy isn't easy, but it can be done, and has been done for centuries. The process is called "voting". Voting is of course a high stakes, expensive, slow, trouble prone and inconvenient process, but I think computers and the Internet could really be an enabling force here, making it possible to have the needed frequency of votes at a reasonable level of convenience and reliability. Then, to "promote the arts and sciences", appropriate organizations will have as their sole duty keeping the counts and giving out money proportionately. Something like Distrowatch could be a starting point. They would be funded by tax revenue, which makes sense because if it is everyone who "owns" an idea because trying to restrict copying is absurd, then it is everyone who should reward the creators proportional to the value of the idea. Shut down the patent office and set those people to these new duties. Perhaps the government should do it, maybe by having an agency devoted to the task. Or perhaps independent corporations would handle the task. After all, we have safety organizations such as Underwriter's Laboratories. So, like every time someone listens to a song, the counter for that song ticks up another spot. All this does is count votes. The problem of haggling over how much money each vote is worth can be left to annual budget battles. If the government feels that there isn't enough research, it's very easy to pump more money into this system. Also, could have charitable organizations help out. Great way to "feed starving artists". All kinds of questions can be fairly handled in this "Creditright" system. One example is "reach through patents". Would be easy to count. For example, if a particular song uses a particular new instrument, could have anything from add 1 to the count for that instrument, or add the counts for that song to the counts for that instrument. Let voters or arbitrators or the courts or official boards or committees decide how the counts should be interpreted, and what they're worth. But of course we would develo

This website might be the one you're thinking of. There is a very cool, very relevant idea called the "dominant assurance contract". It's explained informally here and more formally here.

Seriously tho, other ways are held to unreasonable standards. There's "copyleft" of course, which is basically "we can't figure out any way persuade or force most users to compensate us for our work that doesn't violate their rights and make our products significantly less usable and therefore less valuable, so we'll just give it away. We knew that before we made the product; we were just scratching our own itches." The best answer they have seems to be government support, as in Socialism. Here's another. Lot of people see a flaw or 2 in an otherwise good idea, and won't try it or give it a chance. The question shouldn't be only whether another way works well, it's does it work better than the current way? The current "intellectual property" way works quite poorly.

Anyway, go Taiwan! Show those cartels they don't have a legal hammerlock and can't ask for the moon. As for the argument, "but there wouldn't be Tamiflu if not for Roche's time and investment", don't be so sure. They don't have any monopoly on people capable of coming up with new drugs, perhaps even that same drug, or on labs and equipment. Thomas Edison was hardly the only person to come up with a light bulb. He was merely first to the patent office and marketing campaign with a good enough design. One of the huge flaws with the whole idea of patents is the granting of a monopoly. A monopoly is the embodiment of the unstated notion of a "sole inventor", "there can be only one!", as if no others contributed anything whatsoever. Other contributors don't get compensation; they get their heads cut off. It's pretty bad here in the US, with that prescription drug benefit addition to Medicare/Medicaid, and the muzzling of research for fear of leaking potentially patentable information. The drug benefit is disguised as "helping the elderly", but it's really subsidies for the drug companies. "Reach through" patents attempt to address part of that "sole inventor" criticism, but only made things worse. I can't see any improvement until society stops mistreating ideas as if they were property.

Do you really expect people to send you $X with no guarantee or even necessarily a liklihood that the project (or, in the case of Mrs. Spears, the CD) will ever actually be released?

Yes. See The Street Performer Protocol. To address your fear of what happens if the bounty is never completed, see also Fundable.

I really only use the Windows system for games and checking my HTML/CSS/JS when I'm doing web design, everything else I do on the Mac.

It's *hard* to read stuff like this!

While ppl on under development countries work their asses off as volunteers to help poor kids to have a computer usage knowledgment rich ppl throw out their PCs.

I've set a fundable.org account to try raising funds for *ONE* barebones computer for the public school I work in... if *ONLY* those richies could send us their 'garbage' our work would help many more children!

Anyways, maybe YOU can help. More then 300 children will be very very thankful!

It's *hard* to read stuff like this!

While ppl on under development countries work their asses off as volunteers to help poor kids to have a computer usage knowledgment rich ppl throw out their PCs.

I've set a fundable.org account to try raising funds for *ONE* barebones computer for the public school I work in... if *ONLY* those richies could send us their 'garbage' our work would help many more children!

Anyways, maybe YOU can help. More then 300 children will be very very thankful!

Damn 120 char limit on signatures!!!

Btw, ok, it's offtopic but it's important and doing the right thing is much more than folow post rules.

I started this to raise the money needed to buy a new barebone computer to the local public school where I voluntarely teach the kids with the basics of computer usage.

The lab now have only two old k6-2 computers running on Fedora. With this setup we can only have 4 students at a time, 2 per computer.

Buying a new box would let us do a better job, taking this kids a step next to their goal of having a better life by providing them with the knowledgment they need.

Please help if you can. Thank all of you!

The decisions of what Verisign can charge and how long they can charge is are really up to YOU: the customer. Vote with your feet and start looking at some non Versign controlled TLD's!

Anthony

HELP AN OPEN SOURCE PROJECT:
https://www.fundable.org/groupactions/groupaction. 2005-07-08.3911172488/

I have just set up a account so maybe I can raise the funds needed to buy your public school Linux Lab a new box.

Help if you can

Many Brazilian kids would be very very thankful!

What is needed is a bounty system that users could pay into easily so the bounty could grow over time.

Kind of like fundable?

This really is one of the most interesting things I've seen developed on the 'net in a long, long time.

It has, of course, heaps of utility beyond just funding development of pet projects...

Check out http://www.fundable.org/

If you know of a group of people who are interested in a feature, try using http://www.fundable.org/ to create a group action.

EG: You have 5 people interested, each person contributes $100, when all 5 people contribute the $100 then the money is unlocked and you can use that to finance the development of the feature.