Allow backers/sponsors to pledge to future collectives

[xdamman]

Problem we are trying to solve:

Many sponsors would love to sponsor either specific projects that are not (yet) on the platform, or a category (e.g. all Machine Learning meetups in this region).

Proposed solution:

We could introduce the concept of a pledge. Any backer could pledge any amount towards any combination of tags and of websites (e.g. a GitHub URL or a Meetup.com URL).

We could have a page /pledges that would list all the pledges as a way to invite people to create collectives to claim them.

MVP

We could implement pledges the way we implement goals. We simply store them in the collective.settings column. It's not ideal because we would want to be able to query all pledges. So it's not the preferred way.

I think it would be better to have a Pledges table with FromCollectiveId, tags, url, description, longDescription, createdAt, deletedAt.

• /:collectiveSlug/pledges/edit
  Edit the pledges. Would be great to also accept a package.json as input.

• /pledges
  List all the pledges across the platform.

Claiming a pledge

To claim a pledge, one has to create a collective that matches the tags or the URL (GitHub url, meetup url, ...). Pledges wouldn't be automatic. Instead, whenever there is a new collective that matches a pledge, we send an email to the owner of the pledge. And we can let the admins of the collective know that we have notified x pledges.

That way it's safe for any backer to make a pledge as it's just a way to be notified.
A second version could include the ability to actually put money down but that's much more complex to develop.

[piamancini]

I agree that the correct way of thinking about this is to have a pledges table and make them discoverable by anyone in the /discover page.

We could include a pledged tier too (this was suggested by a sponsor). example: a 500/m tier with sponsors logo on every page of their doc.

Definitely pledges shouldn't be automatic. We can treat the claiming a pledge as an apply to a host. It's pending review and author of the pledge can hit accept/reject in an email

The way to put money on a pledge atm is to create a collective like the Cloudflare one.

[piamancini]

we need an owner of this feature.

[stale]

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