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build at least some basic documentations about how to get involved in dev work (basics of the FTG platform, "indie edu bundle", etc.) #22

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holtzermann17 opened this issue Mar 20, 2013 · 2 comments
Open

build at least some basic documentations about how to get involved in dev work (basics of the FTG platform, "indie edu bundle", etc.) #22

holtzermann17 opened this issue Mar 20, 2013 · 2 comments
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@holtzermann17
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I've pitched Planetary as a rather ideal platform to use in both the Free Technology Guild and the Commons Abundance Network, where it would act as an asyncronous UI for the Node.JS semantic ticketing system, Netention. I'm not entirely sure how much buy-in there is for this proposal -- I'll want to get more feedback from Fabrizio Terzi and Wouter Tebbens (FTG) and Helene Finidori and Seth Horne (CAN) about whether a December 2013 timeline suits their plans at all. If so, I'll invite them to join this repo and we can start playing the "long game" 👍

The actual developer docs in progress are here: MathHubInfo/Legacy-planetary#88

The comments in this issue concern other aspects of getting people involved.

@kohlhase you might have thoughts about these outreach and social engineering issues? Perhaps you know of some other projects that we should be connecting with, to form a bigger user community (particularly ones related to education, and not just for math).
@holtzermann17
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Here's a discussion (live version at http://piratenpad.de/p/indie-edu-bundle) where we look for some common interests in a common platform and "social infrastructure".

Introduction

PlanetMath is great, but to be honest it is something of a "niche" interest. And the same could be said about the Free Technology Guild, Independent Publishers of New England, the Bergamo Hub, Open Source Learning, Pub Dom Ed, and the Peeragogy project itself ... and possibly some other projects from other people here.

Maybe most readers will like 2 or 3 of the things on this list.

  • A teacher: I like Open Source Learning, Pub Dom Ed, and Peeragogy!
  • A geek: I like PlanetMath and the FTG!
  • A publisher: I like IPNE and Pub Dom Ed!
  • A maker: I like the Bergamo Hub and Peeragogy!

Put together, the true operating costs of these projects in excess of $100,000 US dollar a year.

But what if I told you that during our limited time offer, you could get premier access to any or all these projects AND get 5 free ebooks for only $15 dollars? Plus we'll throw in a printed copy of the Peeragogy Handbook, absolutely free!

I see I've now gotten your attention. :-)

My point is: If we wanted to get funding to hire a system administrator and part time developer to help us with all of our projects, we might not be able to do that from the point of view of any ONE of the projects I just mentioned. But if we banded together, I don't think we'd need more than one admin -- to do website stuff, platform development stuff, some documentation, some teaching. I don't have a candidate in mind at the moment, but I do have a model. It's the "Humble Indie Bundle".

Let's assemble our best list of cool projects and make an "Indie Edu Bundle".

Compare:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humble_Bundle

Projects, needs, wants, offers...

Brainstorm for more projects to add in

Is this projects or funding opportunities? Mostly "projects" to approach - but there's cross-over potential.

  • Etherpad
  • P2PU
  • Coursera
  • Mozilla
  • Wikimedia
  • Project Gutenberg
  • Open Knowledge Foundation
  • Software Freedom Conservancy
  • Ubuntu (or edubuntu)
  • Las Indias
  • Commons Abundance Network (C.A.N.)
  • ............. <- add more - brainstorming is easy, any idea will
    work

"Other" e.g. sponsors (?)

  • Humble Bundle, Inc - they started this sort of thing, maybe they
    would want to contribute to further development of the idea...
  • Google (matching sponsorship?)
  • Valve Software (game company familiar with previous Bundles)?

The Bundle: what you get

These offerings should be made as concrete as possible

  • "premium" membership in PlanetMath.org (we need to build the
    "premium" features)
  • "apprentice" membership in FTG
  • "basic" membership in FTA (?)
  • membership in PeerPubU
  • membership in the Bergamo Hub
  • ebook copies of all of the books in the PubDom Ed catalog, plus free
    updates for life!
  • printed copy of the Peeragogy Handbook (if donation is in top 50th
    percentile)
  • printed copy of Don't Go Back to School (if donation is in top 75th
    percentile) ...maybe? - let's ask!
  • membership in new nonstarter.org site with the potential to bid for
    funding
  • ... <- add more

Budget: how we will spend the money

target: $100000 US

expenses:

  • $50K on shared system administrator/developer
  • skills: (technical) Linux, PHP, databases, Python, Semantic Web
    a plus... ; (social) writing, teaching, blogging, work with
    massively distributed teams
  • responsibilities: assist with admin and development needs of all
    member projects, write documentation and share knowledge about
    the technologies that are being used
  • $50K slush fund for general project expenses to be managed through
    http://nonstarter.org :-)
  • Will become available for internal bidding to project members,
    in the mean time will gather interest

reasonable expectations

Donations will be distributed according to a Zipf curve, perhaps something like this:

50000 x 0
25000 x 0 <- if we could get even one person donating at this level, it might pull the curve up considerably :-)
12500 x 0
6250 x 0
1562 x 0
3125 x 0
781 x 0
390 x 1
195 x 2
97 x 4
48 x 8
24 x 16
12 x 32
6 x 64
3 x 128
1.5 x 256

= $ 3712.0 (from _511_ contributors) <- we will need a lot more than this if the project is going to really be successful! - a higher peak and longer, fatter tail?

Discussion

(the usual kickstarter minimum is 5, do people even bother making smaller donations nowadays?)

On https://www.humblebundle.com/weekly the minimum seems to be $1 and the average for the "weekly" is $3.75 -- so far this week that's added up to $75,602.97 !! Cool. (That's 20,233 purchases).

Isn't the realistic number of donations < 1000 in the first year? Given prior experience with PM.

Well, I'm not sure what the "window" should be. The Humble Bundle people were inspired by sales of a game called World of Goo that sold 57,000 copies... The first Humble Bundle sort 116,000 copies in one week.

I see. What I now remember is that the Humble authors are indies, so typically 1-2 person teams where this pays off. I remember kickstarter had much more massive teams getting funded

  • Yeah... I think it kinda depends on the concreteness of what we offer. If we can't offer something as fun and engaging as World of Goo etc. then people won't be motivated to donate.

I think it matters as well what kind of payment gateway we use. Ideally we set up a gateway in Ripple or OpenTransactions that would permit us to transfer any amount in any desired currency in a p2p form. However these two projects are still prototypes. If we'd use BitCoin it would also work, but that would reduce our audience.

The way I see it, you need to support cc transactions or you'll drastically limit donations to exotic users.

You're right, still. But I foresee that this might change drastically in the times ahead of us. CC payments have their problematics, like commissions. Which solution would you go for?

99.9% of my own transactions are CC based, and all major vendors use CC transactions (Amazon, Google, Skype). And paypal of course. I remember funding through both kickstarter and the humble bundle with my CC as well. Typically your exotic user also has a CC if she has bitcoins. Supporting multiple payment methods can be added in the future, IMO.

http://selfstarter.us/ is a free/open platform that supports multiple payment methods ... but maybe not out of the box ;-) ... Looks like they support Amazon payments to begin with. I think the best thing is to start with something that works and then customize. So, Selfstarter+Amazon Payments is an initial possibility that probably won't require too much time to set up on an experimental basis. Extended haXoring to improve it can come later, along with fancy things like nonstarter.bit and who knows what other shenanigans! I consider those to be projects for 2015 tho.

Sounds good to me. It's Ruby code though. I feel better abut JS frameworks.

Process

  • Clarify more about "what you get" and "how we will spend the money"
  • We need a dedicated team that commits time & energy. How do we
    sustain / compensate the team economically? Can we think of the team
    being the core of an "Open Value Network a la sensorica?
    http://www.sensorica.co/
  • Well there are a few different levels here...
  • Getting this funding project off the ground
    - We can probably do this with volunteer effort over a
    couple months (but need to figure out how to divide up
    the tasks so that that's manageable)
    - Voluntary makes sense, but with the perspective to make
    some income when things get rolling, right? ✓
  1. Sustaining the network later
    - This is where the value network and economic
    compensation DEFINITELY comes in. I've thought about
    what we "really get" for $100K and I think it's
    something like a "heartbeat" for the project. Someone
    who will show up and work 9 to 5, 40 hours a week, 5
    days, etc. That person won't necessarily be the most
    creative contributor, but they will help hold things
    together. On top of that basis, we'd be able to do more
    to build financial opportunities for other contributors
    (I hope). But this is all longer-term planning. [Cf.
    http://peeragogy.org/practice/heuristics/heartbeat/]
    - that heartbeat sounds very good. I'm still wondering
    who's going to define all the projects in the bundle and
    achieve the needed funding for it. I imagine that's more
    than one person. Probably every project has at least one
    lead person who takes responsibility for it, otherwise
    it can't be in the bundle.
    - Yeah, I think that's the case. The project should be
    real enough that you can join it or do something
    there, or at least have the potential to become
    "real" in the next few months (assuming we have this
    admin/dev contributing towards it) - otherwise we're
    just selling people a concept. What we want to do is
    sell them something they can really use, like the
    original Humble Bundles for games and ebooks. So
    this definitely puts a "minimum bar" that each of
    the projects will have to jump over to get in in the
    first place. AFTER that - I think they are all going
    to be organized independently, just with some
    "timeshared" access to the admin/dev, and some
    democratically decided access to the slush fund.
    - Furthermore, they may collaborate on the
    income-generating issues (but this is again the
    long-term strategy stuff, maybe handled through
    further informal collaborations around
    nonstarter.org, FTG, etc.)
    - One big-picture view of the sort of thing we could
    build over time is
    http://peeragogy.org/knight-foundation-prototype-fund-proposal-unfunded/
    - a sort of university where PlanetMath is the math
    department, FTG is the Computer Science and
    Engineering department, Project Gutenberg is the
    Classics department, and so forth. I'm guessing this
    would have a lot of interesting income-generating
    potential, but the Indie Edu Bundle is only about
    getting to the 1st stage - having someplace to
    organize further work - orgs like FKI would probably
    do well at long-term planning, taking into account
    the availability of medium-term resources like an
    admin/dev.
  • Someone needs to take ownership of the "outreach" effort to set up
    contacts with other potential contributors
  • Set up a donation site so that we can control the fund transfers and
    not pay Paypal fees (look at old Humble Indie Bundle websites for
    UI) -
    https://www.humblebundle.com/weekly
  • Someone needs to do the coding, unless we get that for free e.g.
    from Humble Bundle, Inc.
  • Circulate via social media

Timeline to completion

~6 months (Launch date August, 2013)

This was referenced Apr 11, 2013
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@rspuzio rspuzio mentioned this issue Apr 16, 2013
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@rspuzio
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rspuzio commented May 6, 2013

I am wondering whether it would not be a good idea to offer
a range of target along a geometric scale rather than just
one large target. For instance, we could have:

$1000: pay for internet connection or server hosting

$4000: software development contract

$16000: part-time sysadmin

$64000: full-time administrator

This way, the ascent is not as steep and we have something
to show along the way. For instance, suppose that we manage
to raise $10000 by the end of the year. Rather than saying
"A half a year later, we are 10% of the way to our goal", which
can sound pessimistic, we could make the more optimistic
statement "We achieved our first two targets and are 63% of
the way to the the third target." And, of course, it would make
for immediate tangible benefits to the member organizations
along the way. (These could nicely be illustrated with a graphic
of one of those fairground where a ball jumps up and hits bells
when you whack a mallet.)

I am also not sure how the distribution of donations you present
fits into this. As I understand it, the bundle will have a fixed
price because it includes definite items. For instance, a regular
membership at PM costs $20, so it wouldn't make sense to
give a premium membership to someone who makes a $6
donation. Maybe the idea here is to have a graduated set
of bundles with the contents proportionate to price? That way,
for instance, a $6 bundle might include a PM bumper sticker,
a $24 bundle might include regular PM membership, a $48 bundle
might include premium PM membership, and a $195 bundle
might have a hard copy of the FEM thrown in as well.

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