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A New Non-Money Oriented Crowdsourcing Platform Based On Code Contributions (crowdsourcer.io)
An anonymous reader shares a new crowdfunding site built on open source principles to "remove the money element from project creation" so creators "don't have to take extreme actions such as quitting their jobs or compromising on their ideas because of investor demands. Because of the nature of crowdsourcer.io projects, project creators can remain as ambitious as funded projects and get all the contributors they need to make their idea a reality."
From the site: Crowdsourcer.io is an alternative crowd sourcing platform that allows developers and designers alike to create or join in on software related projects, build up their contribution and earn an income from the final product. Think of Crowdsourcer.io as something between open source software creation and Kickstarter start ups, a new crowd sourcing alternative, in its purest form"
The site's creator recently answered questions on Reddit, saying they'd spent years fine-tuning the idea, and writing that "It's really focussed on people who don't want to quit their job to form their own software company, and don't want to become embroiled in debt or other financing." A note at the bottom of the site adds that "Crowdsourcer.io is young. We want your ideas!"
From the site: Crowdsourcer.io is an alternative crowd sourcing platform that allows developers and designers alike to create or join in on software related projects, build up their contribution and earn an income from the final product. Think of Crowdsourcer.io as something between open source software creation and Kickstarter start ups, a new crowd sourcing alternative, in its purest form"
The site's creator recently answered questions on Reddit, saying they'd spent years fine-tuning the idea, and writing that "It's really focussed on people who don't want to quit their job to form their own software company, and don't want to become embroiled in debt or other financing." A note at the bottom of the site adds that "Crowdsourcer.io is young. We want your ideas!"
The last part of the quote (from Reddit) which got cut: "...At the moment I’m hoping that on every sale there’ll be a cut of about 10% before transaction costs so that 90% of all sales revenue is going to the project contributors - with no extra, hidden costs. This could change though, depending on costs.".
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Why do people today need millions of dollars and thousands of hours of uninterrupted (otherwise unemployed) time to program?
Market standards.
When I wrote my first released software, a good idea and a few hundred lines of code would be sufficient to get a customer base, because the odds were good that it was a unique new tool that helped somebody.
Now, to even get customers to try a product, it has to have a good website, professionally-designed interface, and be significantly better in some way than the dozen other equivalent tools available. All of that polish takes time, and if you're working on a spare-time basis, that means it takes a scale of years to produce a viable product. During that time, technology still changes, and that promising library that saved so much time is now obsolete and considered a security risk. Updating the product is possible, but it takes more time, and that means more risk. Finally, when the product is viable, it has to compete with an offering from a bigger company with an established revenue stream.
I don't mean to imply that it's impossible to succeed with spare-time projects, but it is more difficult now than even ten years ago. Software has moved from being a few amusements and office tools to a mature industry driving the majority of our civilization. There's competition out there for most of the current generation of ideas, where there simply wasn't before.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Asking people to donate their time and efforts in lieu of pay is called a charity.
At the end of the day, your donated efforts will line someone's pocket. You're either cool with that or you're not, but enough of the Millennial-flavored marketing bullshit trying to label this as crowd-something simply because it involves more than one human.
You don't need to make modifications to GPL software to make use of it. Someone could conceivably use GIMP to make money by selling the work they create using it or hiring out their labor to others who want something created. Hell, you could run a huge business and use LibreOffice instead of Word and never contribute back to it. I think that's what the previous poster was getting at.
Hi, I'm the creator of the site, and submitted the original anonymous article to slashdot. You've got some fascinating ideas, and I love your cynicism. I just wanted to correct some things. The contribution points are distributed to all members of a project, including the creator and all the profits are distributed to every member of the project based of the weight of their C.pts, not "this warm feeling of having helped the aforementioned two groups of people to get money from virtually anything". The second is "I guess that they will be spending the money given by some VC (most likely, already used for the promotion so far), various $ millions probably". I've spent £600 so far to get the branding done and the rest has been built by myself in my spare time. I managed to get a grant from the government, but I don't see a penny, I get 40 hours of advice from experts (been really helpful so far). I've actively denied going to financing experts as getting an investment would go against absolutely everything the site holds itself to. I know it may take some convincing, and it's impossible for me to ask any one to trust that I built this on very strong political & economic principles, but this site is absolutely not designed to take people's money/time and give it to other people. It's actually the complete opposite. People will only be paid if they contribute something tangible to the project. So managers and directors who get a large share of something for just managing will find they have a reduced earning potential here. Everyone who contributes an hour of their time, whether they're the creator or a contributor or whatever, will earn the same amount for that hour of time. Anyway, if people want to know any more or have their suspicions, please feel free to chat to me about it.https://developers.slashdot.org/story/17/08/27/0639253/a-new-non-money-oriented-crowdsourcing-platform-based-on-code-contributions#
I'm the creator of the site
A true honour and I am not being sarcastic. This is one of the aspects which I love of Slashdot: you can get involved in this kind of situations!
I love your cynicism
I am not cynical. I am absolutely and completely realistic on account of all my experiences on this front. But you don't need to take my experience to get a proper feeling about all this, you might just take a look at the last quite a few revolutionary app, site, whatever posted here, their actual content (beyond a poorly thought idea), the involved funding (quite a few millions) and how everything ends. You can even start a programming chat here with almost anyone and see the knowledge/reactions/contributions of the younger members. You can start visiting (newer) open-source projects, check their chats and the problems they have (mostly not related at all with technical aspects). You can do some research about how developers are being hired, what is the background of decision makers (and what aspects are really being weighted to make the final decisions), etc.
distributed to all members of a project, including the creator and all the profits are distributed to every member of the project based of the weight of their C.pts
In principle, it sounds much fairer that my initial assumption (sorry for the having shared inaccurate information). On the other hand, ideas on these lines are usually being sold as fair, because this is precisely the bait to attract free workforce. The first question coming to my mind is: how are you planning to perform such a distribution? How can you assess the relevancy of each contribution (across the huge number of different programming languages which I presume that you will be supporting)? How can you avoid people to trying to trick the system by performing lots of irrelevant commits? I will answer it for you (if you were still thinking about it, here you have your options): you can either try to come up with a pretty complex (even just for one single programming language) application which is likely to be eventually tricked or you can rely on people assessing that issue like moderators. Whatever option you choose, at the end, you will almost certainly end relying on these moderators; probably to be the ones who firstly initiated the project and consequently this would be a sub-set of idea-people-1 (or a new subset which you might call idea-people-1-b whose position would be pretty similar to those). Even if this assessment wouldn’t be required, pushy mobs/factions/bros would eventually appear and relegate actual knowledge/objectivity to a secondary position by converting them liking you/arbitrarily deciding your contribution into the only relevant factor. Any of these versions have nothing to do with actual software development, objectiveness, sharing among knowledgeable and for the knowledge; all of this has to do with people with no knowledge (or not willing to use it) expecting to get some gain from others' knowledge by basically relying on an arbitrary assessment system not based on actual merits (or payments). Basically, idea people providing ideas (impositions, arbitrary decisions, etc.) milking knowledgeable people. So, I am afraid that what your system is essentially linked to (any version of what) I described.
I've spent £600 so far to get the branding done and the rest has been built by myself in my spare time
If this was true, it would be excellent news and a very much appreciated fresh air in the industry (and again I would have to apologise about my inaccurate random guess). Although honestly, it seems kind of hard to believe that you can get so much visibility (lots of shares in Reddit), being posted here, etc. for so little. On the other hand, you might be good at social networking (one of my weakest points) and it might be possible.
I've actively denied going to financing experts
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Let me first address your questions on the practical features of the site which contribute to making it a fair workplace. And then maybe if I can allay some of those concerns, I can talk about why I genuinely believe it can create a change in the industry even though I know all too well the exploitation of workforce by the largest and most powerful in the industry. I've spent years coming up with solutions to the problems you're thinking about, so even though it may seem like the site has tonnes of flaws, it's my job now to show you that I've likely had the same issues with it as you and have come up with some way of tackling it.
So first things first.
How can you assess the relevancy of each contribution (across the huge number of different programming languages which I presume that you will be supporting)?
Simply put, we advise creators to come up with a system for allocating cpts. The default suggestion is one hour of work equates to 1cpt, irrespective of what that hour was doing. Creators and task editors can come up with any scale they like, as long as it remains consistent across all positions and throughout the life of the project
How can you avoid people to trying to trick the system by performing lots of irrelevant commits?
Actual commits bear no relevance to the system. Everything is done through project tasks. Tasks are created based on position and have a cpt associated with them. Anyone in that position can accept it (provided they've not undertaken too many tasks) and anyone in the project with a threshold level of cpts can create new ones. Should a task be completed, under certain circumstances it can go into review in which case it can be voted on by anyone in the project over a certain threshold of c.pts (not the same threshold as task management, though all thresholds can be changed by project owners). So simply put, I've built projects in such a way that they're autonomous. They can't easily be hijacked by random people but likewise there can't be a dictatorship by the project owner. The balance of power of course, was the largest thing I had to solve. Also this might also begin to draw a bigger picture of how it'll be hard for venture capitalists or work exploiters to take advantage of the system. The whole site involves a two way relationship throughout. Both sides have to realise that this system is only going to work for them if they don't try to rip each other off. That's quite literally the only way projects on CSio won't fall into mayhem.
how are you planning to perform such a distribution?
Which brings me on to the last point of the mechanics. We're providing a store for our users + selling tools to sell on their own sites & third party retailers (though the technical side of that is a little off implementation). All the money gets distributed straight away to all the contributors. If the project creator hasn't pulled their weight (or anyone for that matter) then they're going to earn less than those who've dedicated lots of time. That's the mentality we want people to have. And sure there are going to be issues internally; what if the project creator feels like the project is being swept away from under him and gets jealous/spiteful? What if the project creator is a bit of a tool and annoys all his contributors? These are people problems, and people problems can't be solved. Lastly this also begins to tackle the issue of requiring money to be seen in the market. Something a bit like watch itch.io does for games, by providing them a store and tools to advertise themselves without fighting head on with the largest stores with the largest marketing budgets. We're creating our own ecosystem where money is not necessary and - if we stay true to our values - never will be
Alvaro, thank you for the comments. I'm glad that I've been able to come away from this with some good feature ideas.
I've actually got to scoot (dog walking, exercise, you know the drill) so I'll keep this short, but the idea of a centralised governing body is a very good one. To some degree this has developed naturally, for instance hard rules to the system that can't be broken, i.e. projects which don't match the site get rejected by the approval process which we do. E.g. if someone's going on there to build something for a business or investors, they're going to get rejected. There's also fixed ranges for the parameters of the settings, task contribution points etc. etc. so there's only so much flexibility in the model. I'll also have a think about how a ubiquitous cpt allocation across all projects will benefit the system as whole. At the moment I'm not entirely convinced that local bubbles of cpt "value" will lead to unfairness. But I'll have a think. The idea of templates is something that could work either way, providing a structure and a foundation for projects to understand the value of contributions, rather than leaving it at an arbitrary 1 unit of time = 1 cpt.
For any project, contributor or owner having problems, there's a dedicated panic button that automatically invites me into a chat - albeit under a different, support focussed account named "Gandalf" - where I can mediate any issues, bring about a verdict or just help out with understanding different features. So while it's not a system that acts as a central, governing body, I can if need be act as one myself and enforce a particular course of action if the project needs it desperately.
As per your suggestion I'll also work on making the message clearer, that it's not a platform for accessing the labour market and is for technicals primarily. I'll also certainly look into better voting models, it's without doubt that any voting system can be exploited. It might be a case of reacting as we go or completely redefining the system.
Anyway, I really do appreciate the feedback.
Mike
Anyway, I really do appreciate the feedback.
Happy to help and to confirm that you have the kind of adaptable and reasonable attitude which is certainly required to accomplish what you want. I will keep an eye on your site and might give it a shot at some point.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.