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I wouldn't worry so much about spam, but rather about frivolous projects.

To see what other models are like, go check out...
http://www.indiegogo.com/
http://rockethub.com/
http://www.pozible.com/
http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/
http://invested.in/
http://fundry.com/
http://pledgie.com/
http://www.sponsume.com/
http://peerbackers.com/

Then after you're doing reading through the hundreds of projects that amount to little more than "give me money because... well, just because.", you'll probably be glad that KickStarter does some, albeit a very superficial, checking of projects.

Yes, KickStarter has its own problem projects that make it through the review process.. projektor (probably a scam), juicies (unrealistic funding vs rewards leading to a kid way in over his head), Googly Eyes (essentially selling an existing product for a premium).
But they do try, and they explicitly disallow 'good cause' type projects, which are often the "just give me money" type projects.

Nothing against 'good cause' projects when they really are for a good cause - people who need a prosthesis but can't afford one.. more power to then. But then there's the "I want to go on a trip to Europe"-types.

I'd be more afraid of that sort of thing hitting crowdtilt, than spam hitting it.

Also, for those who want a truly open alternative, set up a Wordpress site and go check out:
http://ignitiondeck.com/id/wordpress-crowdfunding/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/crowd-funding/

Hi, I've been commenting elsewhere (bitchily) on the thread and I'm a commercial artist and work in Hollywood.

A number of people have proposed alternative systems for compensating artists, but instead of giving serious consideration to those proposals, we simply ignore them and continue to pretend that copyright is a form of property.

Many of my friends who direct and produce have absolutely been giving serious consideration to these other funding models:

- A friend of mine from school produced an entire very well-made scifi short many years ago, funding it with donations on his website, long before Kickstarter even existed. It's a great short and he got a lot of attention, and it won a lot of awards at several festivals. Aside from producing another friends feature, however, Jason's paying gig remains an editor-for-hire on E! cable shows of the "100 Craziest celebrity moments" variety. If he wasn't making money from those he would never have been able to complete his short; he was able to raise money to just make the thing with friends, and nowhere near enough to pay himself for the time it took to develop and produce the project, or pay anyone their actual market wages.

- Another friend of mine has been raising money for her project for several years now on IndieGoGo. Several years now. Luckily she has means and is able to supplement her income with writing gigs on Big Hollywood Movies.

Basically none of the proposed funding models work without either (1) Hollywood paying everybody the 10 months out of the year people aren't working on their crowdsourced project or (2) abandoning the concept of the professional artist. As I said in another post, your median open source developer doesn't live on donations, they make their money at day jobs working for Evil Corporations that Sue People for infringing IP. Open source is a "marginal time" activity, it doesn't satisfy material needs. Open content is only so far a complement to the copyright model, it can't replace it.

Crowd sourced funding promises a lot of things: the idea that people will reward good work with more money, or that new work that is "suppressed" by the old system will emerge. In practice, however, these things haven't materialized and I don't think they ever will, I just don't think entertainment works that way. People want a casual experience they can take or leave, they don't want their entertainment experience turned into an advocacy enterprise where they have to band together with people and raise money and attract friend networks and go through all this bullshit just to see 20 minutes of mumblecore.

Kill copyright and you threaten to kill everything that stands on top of it, like a lot of open source software developers, and any artist that isn't willing to whore himself out to rich patrons. That's what the world was like before copyright: there were artists and there was art, and it was whatever a rich guy said it was. With copyright everyone gets a say in who is rewarded, and they vote with their pocketbooks. Ending copyright, wether that is right or wrong, would unquestionably jeopardize this.

Appleseed is open source, distributed social networking, built on a commodity stack, and installs in a few minutes on any LAMP compatible host.

Code is available here:
http://github.com/appleseedproj/appleseed

Appleseed has a main beta site, appleseedproject.org, and approx. 150 test nodes out in the wild. If you'd like an invite, just email invite@appleseedproject.org. It's still in beta, but new features are added regularly.

We've also been fundraising, if you'd like to donate, our fundraising ends in only 4 days, but every little bit counts:

http://www.indiegogo.com/Open-Source-Social-Networking

Here is our roadmap for the future:

http://opensource.appleseedproject.org/roadmap/

Diaspora is also available, here is their github. They are running on Ruby + Rails, and they were MongoDB based, but recently switched to MySQL.

https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora

Support this project, I did: http://www.indiegogo.com/The-Appleseed-Project

Appleseed is a lot more near completion than Diaspora is. They are already working for 6 years on it, and currently have a working prototype running on test servers.

Diaspora is now saying how their demo is "pretty fast" with message passing. They do show 6 connected servers in the video, but there is only one active user. And they never talk about scaling up (to thousands/millions of users). Scalability should be a factor considered from the start for this kind of application. They don't mention anything related to it in their "road map," instead they have items like "Implement awesome user interface."

I'm not trying to ridicule Diaspora here, actually I also donated to them. I would love to see a decentralized and open source alternative to Facebook. But I think Appleseed is much more ahead.

So for all the money the Diaspora guys collected for just presenting an idea, I think the Appleseed guys also deserve to get some funds to continue working on their project.

It was actually more like one year, although I was silently committing to the svn without doing much promotion for the year before that. We just couldn't get momentum going, so at some point, jobs and personal lives took over.

This time around, it's different, though. I have to thank the Diaspora* folks, even if they don't end up coding anything, they've really gotten people to start thinking about open source, distributed social networking. And that's a positive for everyone.

We're trying to raise money the same way Diaspora* did, using a similar website. I don't expect to get as much as they did, but I think it's definitely possible to meet the goal.

http://indiegogo.com/The-Appleseed-Project