Re: PaySwarm-powered Open Source Crowdfunding Platform

On 12/26/2012 09:59 AM, ☮ elf Pavlik ☮ wrote:
> 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 :)

Yes, you're right. It's very important to not discount the size of the
communities around these alternative currencies.

>> 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...

Yes, but will they fix it on our short 6-9 month timeline? Probably not.
I hope they do, but I don't expect it to pan out that way. In any case,
having a representative from their project on this mailing list would be
very helpful. If we can't put in a patch request because we don't have
the time or don't understand the code base, that doesn't mean that
somebody else won't come along and do it.

>> 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?

Yes, I agree... it's just a matter of making sure our focus is narrow
enough that we can get a demonstrable commercial system out there as
soon as possible.

Ruby does have a very strong RDFa/JSON-LD stack thanks to Gregg Kellogg,
so we'd probably leverage his fine work to build the PaySwarm stuff. The
hardest part of the PaySwarm client implementation is the JSON-LD
normalization algorithm and digital signatures, everything else is a
cakewalk compared to that. We've been trying very hard to produce
libraries that developers can just use without having to deal with the
low-level PaySwarm protocol details. Here are two examples of those:

https://github.com/digitalbazaar/jsonld.js

https://github.com/digitalbazaar/payswarm-wordpress

A Ruby library for PaySwarm would be a very welcome addition.

> I could also suggest to people from Catarse and Selfstarted 
> considering making a small joint crowdfunding campaign for
> developing such a gem.

That would be great, and we'd certainly put a couple of hundred dollars
into such a campaign.

> I have contact to Olivier Schulbaum from Goteo and could also create
>  tickets in issue trackers of those 3 most developed platforms.

Yes, please do that.

> 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 :)

Sure, I'll write up a quick post on this in the coming week and notify
this list.

> 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.

We could certainly create such a mailing list. My concern would be over
having too many mailing lists. What do folks on this list think?

1) Keep crowdfunding discussion on this mailing list.
2) Create a new mailing list for crowdfunding discussion.

Whichever route we choose, we should all try to get as many folks from
the crowdfunding platforms on this mailing list as possible. There seems
to be a pretty strong case for standardizing crowdfunding, and the more
input we have from the current crowdfunding companies, the better.

-- 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 Sunday, 30 December 2012 17:18:46 UTC