I’m in favor of switching the fixed-budget framing to the project-goal style even for alpha. It’s not otherwise a change to the mechanism at all, none of the math is any different, given that we already hardcoded a budget for everyone and there’s only one project.
I think this solves the tension around the kicked-out budget messaging. So, we should figure out what to do with this for just getting alpha in place.
Initial thoughts:
redo video and how-it-works stuff so that the budget is described as crowdmatching turning off when the project hits a goal (i.e. you won’t be charged more than $10 for the snowdrift project)
design a good-enough-for-alpha /p/snowdrift page and user dashboard etc UX that includes that style of goal
We can for alpha describe the cap as 10,000 patrons giving $10 each, so it’s both crowd and dollar. We could choose to go for more modest and just make it 5,000 patrons giving $5 each, as long as its the same match-rate.
This is for-now, get alpha functioning, get funding for us, be able to announce etc so that we can have better resources and community-interest to build and finish beta and on.
The question is what is the minimum amount of monthly income we think will really impact our progress? $25k would allow us to hire multiple people to work on this full time, $1k wouldn’t really, $100k would leave us with more problems than we have any business being involved in.
A cap that is nothing but a budget limit (i.e. “don’t worry about infinite budget, we’ve set crowdmatching to turn off at $5 per patrion = $25,000 monthly for the project”) seems MVP enough to me, even without that being a meaningful target.
But meaningful seems preferred. How about we go with that 5,000 patrons at $5 cap? It would indeed mean a small full-time or mixed full- and part-time team who could really manage all the rest of going forward with great success. Also, the vision of 5,000 and $5 seems a good balance to express that we’re ambitious in crowd size and asking modestly of each patron etc.
That seems fine enough to just build out the alpha, get rid of the kicked-out budget approach, and then announce alpha operation etc.
Meanwhile, even while building the alpha and before announcing it, we should still be also working toward post-alpha including the more flexible mechanism, project outreach, and so on.
For my part, a per project cap beyond which crowdmatching stops does seem to address “but it might grow without bound” concerns without introducing the complications of per-patron limits. I’m +100 on this call for the MVP, +1 beyond that.
We have alignment on this decision, we just need to organize the work to make it happen. This task is really a to-organize collection of stuff to split into separate issues: