Re: PaySwarm-powered Open Source Crowdfunding Platform

Excerpts from Manu Sporny's message of 2012-12-22 04:24:35 +0000:
> On 12/20/2012 06:41 PM, Josef Davies-Coates wrote:
> > Just in case you're not aware, there are already numerous open source
> > crowdfunding platforms:
> > 
> > https://github.com/Goteo/Goteo 
> > https://github.com/danielweinmann/catarse/ 
> > https://github.com/lockitron/selfstarter 
> > https://github.com/donpdonp/crowdstarter 
> > https://github.com/keofilms/Peoplefund.it https://www.thrinacia.com/
> > 
> > Oh, and this might be of interest/ relevant too: 
> > http://www.opentransact.org/recipes/crowdfunding.html
> 
> Elf, Josef,
> 
> We were aware of some of these, but not all of them. Thanks for the
> quick summary. We've yet to do very good due diligence on this bit, but
> here are some of the concerns that we've had for the past year or so
> having thrown the idea around.
> 
> 1. Based on our experience building out RDFa and JSON-LD, the time it
>    takes for a project to integrate a technology, even if it is on
>    the W3C standards-track, is probably close to 12-18 months. Some
>    have adopted within a few months, but the larger projects tend to
>    require much more buy-in to integrate a technology that may stay
>    with the project for years. For projects involving money, the
>    uptake is predicted to be at least as long, if not longer.
> 2. We have the base technologies required for PaySwarm (namely
>    JSON-LD and the PaySwarm client) built out for Python, PHP, and
>    JavaScript. Integrating into Ruby would take longer, especially
>    since we don't have any Ruby programmers on staff.
> 3. The PaySwarm crowdfunding stuff will be decentralized, and thus
>    may be quite different from an architectural standpoint as all of
>    these projects are centralized crowdfunding platforms.
> 4. There may be some technologies, like the use of RDFa or JSON-LD,
>    that are non-starters, or tar-pits, for some of these projects.
As for today many services still (unfortunately) work in centralized way. On a positive side both Goteo and Catarse already have build community using those services! I would also take such social aspect into account along technical aspects :)

> 
> Here's a quick list of concerns with each project listed above:
> 
> Goteo - documentation and code comments are not in English, potential
> language barrier to developing for the system (and perhaps communicating
> with the developers).
I find it myself one of biggest mistakes an open source project can make... I believe with strong encouragement and motivation they would fix it sooner than later...

> catarse, selfstarter, crowdstarter, - Implemented in Ruby, we don't have
> any Ruby expertise in-house, long spin-up time.
Looking for broad adoption, nowadays IMO it requires supporting Ruby anyhow :) Luckily it already has possibly one of the best support for RDF which may make implementing PaySwarm more straight forward? I could also suggest to people from Catarse and Selfstarted considering making a small joint crowdfunding campaign for developing such a gem.

> Peoplefund.it - Very little activity and github forks.
> thrinacia - no released source code yet.
> 
> Out of all of these, selfstarter seems to have the most activity on github.
> 
> To be clear, I think that Digital Bazaar (our company) should contact
> all of these open source crowdfunding solutions and see if they'd be
> interested in integrating PaySwarm. I also think that we should do that
> in parallel with possibly developing a new codebase. A naive guess would
> have the first release out there in 3 months, as we have most of the
> basic site code (login, REST API, etc.) already written. We would
> probably re-purpose the majority of it from the dev.payswarm.com
> code-base (and have already gone through this process for other projects
> that we're working on).
> 
> Does anybody on this list have direct contact with the primary
> developers or project leads for the projects above? Would you be willing
> to do an introduction? Maybe we should get all of them together on a Web
> Payments call to discuss the difficulties in building such a system?
I have contact to Olivier Schulbaum from Goteo and could also create tickets in issue trackers of those 3 most developed platforms. Manu could you maybe write a short post/page with clear explanation how such platform will benefit from adopting PaySwarm? I could like to it while proposing eveluation of this technology :)

Another option to consider - creating a small mailing list for crowdfunding-webpayments where people from all kind of platforms could coordinate efforts and share experiences.

> 
> -- manu
Thanks for your in depth answers!
☮ elf Pavlik ☮

Received on Wednesday, 26 December 2012 14:59:38 UTC