Hi Snowdrift !
I’m Boris, soon to 32 years old. I live in the far west of Eurasia. My mother tongue is French.
First of all, let me say I’m just socked.
Shocked that I didn’t hear about Snowdrift.coop years ago.
Shocked that I didn’t even know the snowdrift game. I studied a bit of economics and game theory when I was in high school. I knew about the prisoners dilemma and the free-rider problem (plus Nicky Case refreshed my memory on those concepts most recently), but I didn’t know about the game of chicken, so thanks for that!
I’ve been interested in FOSS since I was 15 yo and learnt programming. I went to study computer science at the university, stayed there a year and a half, and left when I heard a teacher say “we now have to industrialize the processes”. I felt despair thinking that getting the diploma would eventually lead me to produce proprietary software, with no consideration whatsoever for the common good, so I left.
I then taught website creation to small business owners (had to pay the bills) and learnt some marketing concepts along the way.
Still thinking about Free Software and ways to fund it, I had the same analysis as yours (at least one half of it) : we don’t donate when we think our impact will be small.
So I suggested on FramaColibri (Framasoft forums ; Framasoft is the association that funded PeerTube) that we give users the opportunity to fund specific features of a project. Just like feature bounties on LaunchPad, but aimed more towards the general public, with a nice user interface. At the time, I thought about something looking like this :
It didn’t get much echo, but in a reply to my post, I was told about the Relative Theory of Money, libre currencies, Ğ1, Duniter, Cesium and Ğchange. I jumped right into this rabbit hole and contributed by improving websites, communication, the UX/UI of a Duniter client, etc.
But progress on this project felt too slow for me. There is a religion of bootstrapping and dogfooding among the Duniter community. They don’t want to accept debt money (such as €) and the whole project relies on soon-to-burn-out contributors. That was about the time I read Pieter Hintjens’ Social Architecture
Then I left and went to live in a forest-garden, which is supposed to give us the food, water, electricity (#solarpunk) and time we need to code.
Then, a few days ago, as I was ruminating about the lack of good music creation tools on GNU+Linux, I googled “linux music crowdfunding” and stumbled an article in Linux Magazine (it was the 4th result).
This is how I got there and I want to help, because I think Snowdrift has the potential to be a game changer for both FOSS and the commons in general.
How I can help
I can help :
- by translating contents to French
- by talking about SnowDrift to Framasoft (they don’t seem to be aware of SnowDrift, which I find quite shocking)
- by spreading the word anywhere I can. I’ve very recently started working on a project called Pimp My FOSS, and I plan to mention crowdfunding (esp. SnowDrift) in the course
Projects I most want to see funded through Snowdrift.coop
- VSTs on Linux (strings, woodwinds, brass, etc.), though a one-off campaign seems more appropriate for that (?)
- Scuttlebutt
- Delta.chat
- KDEnlive or some better video production software
- anything related to low techs and climate resilience