Describing flexible crowdmatching options for different scenarios

Clearing the Path
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Continuing the discussion from Mechanism re-proposal: Preshold

WIthout going into the details, I easily imagine different real-world cases where any of these options for crowdmatching could make sense:

  • thresholds for where matching is turned off, mainly for budget-safety
  • opt-in to continued matching toward a higher threshold
  • share-the-burden reduction in donations as crowd pledges grow
  • thresholds for even starting funding (no donations unless the pledges hit a minimum worthwhile point)

And any of these could be combined or projects might switch between them based on how their situations happen to be.

I support eventually having this sort of flexibility. All still fit within the general frame of crowdmatching. All are independent of questions of how much variation the patrons can have in their levels or definitions of their matching pledges. I’m not sure about the complexity of pledges varying too much (e.g. two patrons in a single crowd who set their own different thresholds based on even different units, one based on sum of pledged dollars another on crowd size), but I’m open to even that if we eventually reach that point as a natural evolution after real-world experience with a simpler starting point.

Perhaps we could categorize the ways these options would interact and describe the reasons we imagine various options would apply to one case or another.

To be practical, I support explicitly clarifying that we are targeting only one type for our initial launch. If we express this well, it will avoid misunderstandings where people try to fit other scenarios into the limited scope we are initially targeting (specifically: I think, though we should clarify, that we plan to focus on cases where it makes sense to not have a funding-turned-on threshold nor a share-the-burden mechanism yet but we will certainly include the budget-safety threshold).

Visitors could then more easily understand which projects would fit our initial target or not, and they can see that we intend to expand to the wider range of scenarios later. So, projects that won’t be in the initial target can hope for (cheer for even) our initial success and later expansion.

Perhaps a sort of chart or visualization could map out this “territory” so to speak and show within that where we are initially focused,

1 Appreciation
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Tangential but I wanted to add here:

I think “proportional to the participation of others in the crowd” is a good neutral way to describe crowdmatching without specifying the exact mechanism (e.g. whether participation is measured in dollars vs just number of patrons or otherwise)

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If we’re going to do that, let’s add it as a section on the home page. I imagine a header “here are three types of situations a project could be in:” with a graphic/blurb for each of the three types, closed out with a final header “our initial focus is only on the second category.”

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