Snowdrift.coop: Funding for free projects [LWN.net]

By Jake Edge
December 10, 2014

Funding projects in the "free and open" world is a perennial problem. "Crowdfunding" using Kickstarter and other platforms has helped to alleviate some funding issues for some projects, but it is a model that targets one-time goals, not sustained development. Snowdrift.coop, which is an organization aimed at providing long-term funding for free and open projects, has—somewhat ironically—announced a crowdfunding campaign to launch itself.

There are a number of ways that today's projects raise money: fundraising campaigns offering "perks", web site buttons encouraging people to donate to the project, bounties, advertising, and so on. The Snowdrift.coop project explores existing fundraising methods on its web site and finds them lacking in various important ways. What projects need is a stable source of funding that they can depend on, while donors want a way to pick and choose which projects deserve funding. Over time, if a project is not producing what the donors want, the funding may dry up and move to another project. Snowdrift.coop is aimed at facilitating all of that.

The "snowdrift" from the name refers to the Snowdrift Dilemma, which is a variant of the Prisoner's Dilemma. If a snowdrift blocks the road in a neighborhood, everyone needs it to be cleared—eventually—but everyone gains by delaying their participation as long as possible waiting for others to start in (and perhaps finish) before them. Of course, if everyone waits, nothing actually gets done. If there were some way to do your part and be sure that the others are doing the same, the work would be fairly and equally distributed.

Snowdrift.coop is not just targeted at software projects, but at any projects that produce "soft" goods: music, art, research, and so on. These goods take a lot of effort to create, but little or no effort to copy and share. Snowdrift.coop calls these Free/Libre/Open (FLO) projects; it would like to find a way for the community (and world at large) to sustainably fund these types of projects and it believes that a many-to-many matching scheme is (at least) part of that solution.

The basic idea is that participants ("patrons" is the term Snowdrift.coop uses) agree to donate a (small) amount of money monthly to a particular project that is based on the number of other patrons that the project has. So, effectively, each new patron is matching the contribution of the existing patrons as well as new patrons that come along. The amount is one cent ($0.01) per ten patrons, so a project with 100 patrons would cost each patron ten cents per month and raise ten dollars per month. But the numbers grow quickly, so a project with 1,000 patrons costs each one dollar and raises $1,000 per month; 10,000 patrons results in $100,000.

But patrons can allocate more than just $0.01 per ten other patrons. Each unit of donation to a project (known as a "share") is, effectively, $0.001/patron (i.e. one-tenth of a cent per other patron). Multiple shares can be allocated to a project, but they are not matched by others at the same level as the initial share from a patron; in fact, each additional share is matched somewhat less. There is a somewhat complicated formula to determine the share price. The idea is to try to ensure that some wealthy donor (or, worse, project confederate) can't artificially increase the matching for everyone else by pledging an enormous number of shares. The formula determines a per-share price that applies equally to all shares.

The complexity of this calculation (and of how patrons need to think about it) has been a source of some criticisms of the project (see this thread for some examples). In practice, there may well be problems with the way multiple shares are handled, but the plan is to work them out once Snowdrift.coop is up and running.

There are some safeguards, too. Patrons are choosing to limit their donations to what they have placed into an account on the site. Anyone trying to game the system would have to spend a fair amount of money to do so. In addition, projects that benefit from any kind of manipulation are likely to find fewer patrons over time. There may need to be some kind of soft limits established as well, since users may well deposit more than they want to spend in one month, even if a million patrons sign up for the "bouncing cows" game they are a patron of.

The Snowdrift.coop project is, itself, a FLO project (of course), but unlike Kickstarter and other fundraising platforms, it will fund itself just like any other project on the site, not by taking a cut of the funding provided by patrons. But, to get going, Snowdrift.coop needs to raise some funds. The original goal of $3,000 to cover some legal expenses has already been met in the first eight days of the 30 day campaign. In fact, the first "stretch goal" of $8,000 has been met with the addition of donations that have come in from outside the Tilt.com fundraising platform.

According to the request, $3,000 was only a bare minimum needed to cover some, but not all, legal expenses required to set up Snowdrift.coop. The more than $8,000 raised so far will allow the project to continue to employ its current developer for a few more months; more donations will fund additional developers and designers. As one might guess, even higher donation levels will lead to additional benefits for the project, including conference travel, funding co-founders Aaron Wolf and David Thomas to accelerate their work on the project, and international legal assistance. For anyone curious about the project's finances, there is an accounting page that lays out the income and expenses so far.

So far, there is the web site that has a great deal of information about the project, its underpinnings and plans, as well as a working demo of the code. In the demo, you deposit fake money into your account then allocate shares to two projects. Depending on how many shares are allocated by you and others, the "monthly" donation to the projects from your account will change—reflected in the status bar of the site. For the demo, though, months will pass a bit more quickly than they do in the real world: each day is treated as a new month in the demo.

The intent is to launch the site by Spring 2015 (presumably that is the northern hemisphere Spring). The Snowdrift.coop "company" will have an interesting structure: a multi-stakeholder cooperative that is owned by those patrons who also agree to the membership agreement (which is a stub right now, but will be fleshed out before launch). The bylaws explain that each member will be in one of three classes ("General", "Project" for those who are members of projects on Snowdrift.coop, and "Snowdrift" for members of the Snowdrift.coop project) and will vote on issues appropriate to their class using range voting. Coop-wide votes will be averaged first by class, then the three class averages will be averaged—which potentially gives the smaller Snowdrift and Project classes a larger say in the outcome.

All of the projects that will be hosted by Snowdrift.coop must release their goods under an appropriate free license (e.g. for software, a license approved by OSI or FSF) as is specified in the project requirements. Projects must practice patent non-aggression and release their results in open formats as well. There is also an honor system that must be followed, with guidelines for projects and for users. The intent is to clearly set out a space where participants are respected, projects are accountable, and disagreements are defused gracefully. It all seems a little utopian, but it is clear that a lot of thought has gone into the whole idea—governance and participant behavior included.

More of that thinking can be seen in the honor guidelines for projects, for example. While not mandating the use of free-software tools, FLO-oriented hosting sites, or privacy-respecting practices, they are strongly encouraged, as are things like consensus decision-making and paying a "living wage". There are clear philosophical goals for the project, which are embodied by the "Our vision" section of the mission statement:

We envision a world where everyone has equal access to a robust and vibrant public commons; where everyone is empowered to realize and share their additions to our cultural heritage and to participate in the ongoing development of science and technology; and where there is liberty, privacy, and human dignity for all.

It's a little hard to see the straight path from a new funding model for FLO projects to achieving all of that, but there's no harm in trying. Snowdrift.coop has been more than two years in the making—and it shows. Given that there is already some success on the fundraising front, as well as some supportive blog posts (e.g. Joey Hess, Paul Chisuano, and Mike Linksvayer), Snowdrift.coop looks like it has some good ideas to go along with some momentum. That still may not be enough to reach the ideals the project has espoused, but it may well be enough to make a difference in the FLO project-funding arena—and that's certainly a good start. More is just gravy.

to post comments

Snowdrift.coop: Funding for free projects

Posted Dec 10, 2014 21:09 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (20 responses)

Nice to see additional continuous-funding mechanisms beyond Patreon.

I'd be interested to see a direct comparison between the two. Is there something more than just the funding model (independent per-patron on Patreon, versus more from each patron as patronage increases on Snowdrift)? Does Snowdrift have mechanisms to share content specifically to patrons, or patrons at particular levels?

Snowdrift.coop: Funding for free projects

Posted Dec 10, 2014 21:48 UTC (Wed) by wolftune (guest, #100179) [Link] (19 responses)

Hi Josh,

The comparisons between Snowdrift.coop and all other platforms on the internet (including Patreon) are described at https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/othercrowdfunding

Regarding your specific question: the Snowdrift.coop mission is to support true public goods. Thus, we oppose putting any artificial limitations on publication. As planned, projects at Snowdrift.coop will be required to publish all work freely. That means no special content limited only to patrons.

The motivation to be a patron even when you receive no special access is that your support is amplified through matching and you want to get the results that will bring (even though freeriders will still access the results). Freeriding is only a problem to the extent that projects are underfunded because of these issues. If we can motivate the community to provide adequate funding anyway, there's no justification giving any publications some special exclusive limited access (unless your goal is to keep power or to exclude people as an end in itself). See https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/economics also.

Cheers,
Aaron Wolf
Snowdrift.coop co-founder

Snowdrift.coop: Funding for free projects

Posted Dec 10, 2014 22:00 UTC (Wed) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (8 responses)

Thanks for the link to the comparison page.

Regarding the ability to release things to patrons: I'm not particularly concerned about the ability to release things exclusively to patrons, though the ability to give patrons early access to things that will become public later can provide additional motivation.

However, the rewards offered to patrons on other platforms can also include things like time with the project team (video calls for instance), prioritized or special requests (e.g. commissions for artistic works, one-off development for software), physical goods, services, and similar. Those rewards can provide significant motivation for patrons, making it easier to get projects funded.

Snowdrift.coop: Funding for free projects

Posted Dec 10, 2014 22:05 UTC (Wed) by wolftune (guest, #100179) [Link] (7 responses)

We don't want to encourage projects to favor patrons *too* much, because we want projects to serve the public interest. Projects could still offer outside special support for charge. But the main idea is: we're implementing request / ticket / feedback features that will indicate to projects who is a patron etc. So, projects have an incentive to keep patrons happy, and people know that they may have more influence as patrons. We just don't want to encourage formal special treatment.

Anyway, we don't *oppose* special offerings as long as they are naturally rivalrous (the team's time is rivalrous). We oppose artificial scarcity, but careful use of *naturally* scarce things as motivators is acceptable.

Snowdrift.coop: Funding for free projects

Posted Dec 11, 2014 19:17 UTC (Thu) by martin.langhoff (subscriber, #61417) [Link] (6 responses)

I like Patreon (in fact, I sponsor a band I enjoy, Postmodern Jukebox) and I like what you are trying t do. A Patreon-style site focussed on FOSS seems like a great idea, with a mechanism adjusted for a better fit to FOSS use cases.

However, it seems to me that you are putting rules into what developers may do. A large dose of laisses faire is possibly a good idea for something you are trying to get started.... you might not want to risk putting restrictions that make Patreon be a better option for FOSS projects.

Licensing and how the relationship with patrons works (whether perks are worthwhile "hooks" or not) are things that are very much in the air. There is no way anyone can claim to hold the truth -- let people experiment and find out naturally.

Remember: you are building a platform to be useful, in part to be useful in an exploration of what works. If instead you build a soapbox to pontificate, it won't be a useful contribution.

Snowdrift.coop: Funding for free projects

Posted Dec 12, 2014 6:06 UTC (Fri) by wolftune (guest, #100179) [Link] (5 responses)

Useful is a *necessary* condition but not *sufficient*. For example, a platform that is *useful* in creating powerful monopolies is not one we would want to build. It is not useful to assert the fiction of their being some valueless idea of "useful" as though the word meant anything without asking "useful for what?"

We have no interest in helping developers in any ways that are otherwise harmful to society. The mission is to align developer interests better with the public interest.

Anyway, requirements and terms we launch with are not all set in stone. Some may be more fundamental to the mission and others more easily adapted.

If you're open to reading relevant thoughts without *pre*judging them as useless pontification, you might appreciate https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/whyfree (even if you don't agree with every point).

Snowdrift.coop: Funding for free projects

Posted Dec 12, 2014 12:56 UTC (Fri) by martin.langhoff (subscriber, #61417) [Link] (4 responses)

Hey Wolftune. I've been doing FOSS for at least 15 years; my patches appear across the stack, I can guarantee you are using code I wrote. If you want to verify, my ohloh/openhub profile will show you a healthy amount of evidence.

Much of FOSS is produced by folks that don't care about such strict politics. Folks who like (and build) FOSS but have a more open view of the world. For example Linus Torvalds. Or me.

We are not the only ones, naturally; there are passionate FSF-aligned folks as well. Both crowds collaborate; we naturally have lots in common. However, only one of those crowds will agree to the strict sense you are advocating.

Nitpicking on specific licenses and saying a t-shirt for supporters is evil... isn't endearing. Open the gate to OSI licenses, let folks have perks.

If you want a large diverse party that helps FOSS-as-it-is, build a big tolerant tent.

That's my suggestion anyway :-)

Snowdrift.coop: Funding for free projects

Posted Dec 12, 2014 19:51 UTC (Fri) by wolftune (guest, #100179) [Link]

We already have stated in our requirements that any OSI license is fine: https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/project-requirements

We rejected the request from Richard Stallman to remove that, despite the fact that most of us care about the values of software freedom and support GNU generally.

Snowdrift.coop: Funding for free projects

Posted Dec 12, 2014 19:55 UTC (Fri) by wolftune (guest, #100179) [Link]

Oh, and we have *no* problem with t-shirts for supporters. I never said there was anything wrong with perks like that. We only oppose those type of perks that involve contradicting the basic focus on having projects be free/libre/open. In other words, we only oppose perks that themselves violate the basic definitions that are the scope of the platform. So, t-shirts are fine, but proprietary software extensions are not because the purpose of platform is to support free/libre/open work.

Snowdrift.coop: Funding for free projects

Posted Dec 12, 2014 20:15 UTC (Fri) by wolftune (guest, #100179) [Link] (1 responses)

One more update: thanks to your feedback, I updated the "Why Free" wiki page to make it more explicitly clear that we are not making ourselves a license authority, we are only explaining to others the general scope of licenses as approved by respected authorities. So I added links to the project requirements there. Sorry for the initial confusion!

Snowdrift.coop: Funding for free projects

Posted Dec 12, 2014 20:57 UTC (Fri) by martin.langhoff (subscriber, #61417) [Link]

Thanks for all your clarifications! I will be keeping an eye on snowdrift :-)

Snowdrift.coop: Funding for free projects

Posted Dec 10, 2014 23:55 UTC (Wed) by eean (subscriber, #50420) [Link] (9 responses)

> That means no special content limited only to patrons.

That seems a bit misguided. The extra content put out for Patreon supporters are always quite minor, just encourages supporting a bit more. Like a typical extra for podcasts might be a monthly meta-show.

The equivalent for floss software might be builds I guess.

But really I think that get's to the difference between Snowdift and Patreon: Snowdrift is meant for software. Patreon doesn't have any software afaik, the site isn't really setup for it.

Snowdrift.coop: Funding for free projects

Posted Dec 11, 2014 0:43 UTC (Thu) by wolftune (guest, #100179) [Link] (8 responses)

Snowdrift.coop is not specifically for software. It is just as much for art, research, educational resources, etc. — any sort of shareable works. The goal is not funding as an end in itself; the goal is to better support cultural and technological freedoms. So, encouraging the production of special extras that are exclusive and non-free would hurt that mission.

Yes, it is possible to provide something that *is* freely-licensed but is not provided publicly (unless someone else uses their freedoms to publish it elsewhere), but that still reinforces the idea that it makes sense for non-scarce works to be artificially restricted. We want to build a different set of cultural assumptions where people reject the basic concept of putting artificial barriers and locks on things that would otherwise be public goods.

Snowdrift.coop: Funding for free projects

Posted Dec 11, 2014 6:20 UTC (Thu) by eean (subscriber, #50420) [Link] (7 responses)

But you allow licenses like CC-BY which allow others to add restrictions - and in fact specifically ban CC-BY-NC which seems like a very sensible license for art and music.

> The goal is not funding as an end in itself; the goal is to better support cultural and technological freedoms

But I guess this is the problem. It's not about creating things, it's about your agenda. For software that's fine, there's an existing Libre software community that doesn't need convincing, this site could potentially help support it. We're privileged in software, there are day jobs aplenty in the very field we all love.

However I'm not going to tell a musician or artist that someone else should be able to profit from their work.

Snowdrift.coop: Funding for free projects

Posted Dec 11, 2014 11:39 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (1 responses)

That's fine, but there _are_ musicians and artists who work on this basis and it arguably makes sense to encourage more of them.

For artists in particular it's actually quite normal for those working in some formats to have most or all of your work be commissioned up front either by public bodies which see culture as valuable in and of itself or private entities that want to generate good will - and then freely accessible to the general public and thus generating revenue (even if indirectly) for others. Something like Carsten Höller's "Test Site" could not exist any other way - likewise the once controversial "Angel of the North" and ill-fated "B of the Bang".

It's also more honest than the present status quo. In the visual arts a bunch of resources exist which take "inspiration" from the work of minor artists to determine future themes and directions for the fashion industry and other trend-based industries. These resources could not conceivably be run legally from a copyright point of view, acquiring permission (probably in exchange for payment) from each of hundreds or thousands of artists referenced - so in practice they just take whatever they please and rely on the expense and difficulty of legal action to keep them out of hot water. So they're exploiting artists anyway, and nobody gets paid, but at least if we said "You're not going to get paid" up front the artists wouldn't be under any illusion about how the culture they're getting into works.

Snowdrift.coop: Funding for free projects

Posted Dec 13, 2014 0:35 UTC (Sat) by eean (subscriber, #50420) [Link]

> That's fine, but there _are_ musicians and artists who work on this basis and it arguably makes sense to encourage more of them.

Like who?

> Something like Carsten Höller's "Test Site" could not exist any other way

Not really sure how non-digital works has much to gain either way from this. Snowdrift.coop is explicitly about digital work.

Of course if someone gets paid upfront and the person paying wants to use CC-BY that totally makes sense.

Snowdrift.coop: Funding for free projects

Posted Dec 11, 2014 15:49 UTC (Thu) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link] (4 responses)

> in fact specifically ban CC-BY-NC which seems like a very sensible license for art and music

I'm not sure that it is a very sensible license for *anything* I remember a discussion that if you have ads on your webpage and you reference CC-BY-NC contents you may be violating the license..

Snowdrift.coop: Funding for free projects

Posted Dec 12, 2014 6:13 UTC (Fri) by wolftune (guest, #100179) [Link] (2 responses)

Indeed, but the biggest problem with non-commercial is that it causes incompatibility while typically failing to achieve any of the effects that users of it intend. See http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC for thorough discussion.

Snowdrift.coop: Funding for free projects

Posted Dec 12, 2014 18:44 UTC (Fri) by martin.langhoff (subscriber, #61417) [Link] (1 responses)

Consider me as a potential user -- I am one definitely. It honestly puts me off that you want to play license and perk police.

Pick an open minded license criteria, say OSI, and get the license topic out of your mind. Don't let licensing politics mar your project. I would even say: be humble in your license recommendations -- project owners know a lot more about their projects and reasons for their license than you know.

I don't mean to tangle the discussion with armchair quarterbacking. I do like the idea; and I do consider myself a potential user. Hopefully my feedback is useful.

Snowdrift.coop: Funding for free projects

Posted Dec 12, 2014 19:48 UTC (Fri) by wolftune (guest, #100179) [Link]

Thank you for the feedback. That is already what we are doing. We are not affirming or rejecting licenses. We do not do that at all. We are deferring to existing criteria like OSI. See https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/project-requirements

The OSI and Open Knowledge all others all reject non-commercial clauses. This is not us making our own license decisions. We are just following the most respected authorities for each class of project.

Snowdrift.coop: Funding for free projects

Posted Dec 13, 2014 0:26 UTC (Sat) by eean (subscriber, #50420) [Link]

Well that makes sense. The trivial but real case of a CC-BY-NC violation is someone posting your music or video on Youtube with ads turned on and getting the money for it.

Snowdrift.coop: Funding for free projects

Posted Dec 11, 2014 14:19 UTC (Thu) by pj (subscriber, #4506) [Link] (1 responses)

Gratipay (formerly gittip) does something like this, except without the complications: patrons choose to give a weekly recurring amount of money to... well, anyone with a twitter or github account.

Snowdrift.coop: Funding for free projects

Posted Dec 12, 2014 6:10 UTC (Fri) by wolftune (guest, #100179) [Link]

Gratipay is not a new business model. Just giving a regular donation is an option that existed long before Gratipay. It's nice that they facilitate it well though and that their site is public domain software. Further discussion specifically at https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/othercrowdfunding...

Snowdrift.coop: Funding for free projects

Posted Jan 20, 2015 16:28 UTC (Tue) by zooko (guest, #2589) [Link]

I like Snowdrift.coop's values and I hope they succeed. Coincidentally, this morning I was just looking at another new crowdfunding technology: Lighthouse http://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2015/01/61342-bitcoin-cro...

Lighthouse is an app to do decentralized crowdfunding with Bitcoin, so instead of receiving a pledge, and then hoping that later the pledger, or a trusted third party, will actually send you the money, the cryptographic protocol enforces that if the aggregate goal isn't reached, the money stays with the pledger, and if it is reached, the money goes to the beneficiary.

I find that to be interesting, that a decentralized cryptographic protocol can replace the "trusted third party", e.g. kickstarter, who otherwise gets to decide whether or not the pledged money gets transferred to the beneficiary.

Anyway, snowdrift.coop and Lighthouse are at least philosophically aligned — they are both attempts to find new ways to fix the problem of underproduction of social goods. So maybe they could complement one another somehow.