Re: PaySwarm-powered Open Source Crowdfunding Platform

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.

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).
catarse, selfstarter, crowdstarter, - Implemented in Ruby, we don't have
any Ruby expertise in-house, long spin-up time.
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?

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: The Problem with RDF and Nuclear Power
http://manu.sporny.org/2012/nuclear-rdf/

Received on Saturday, 22 December 2012 04:25:11 UTC