What do you think about a "FoC fund" where FoC members agree to give X (5?) dollars a month to the FoC fund and then paying members can vote on projects to fund? (I guess each project can access a max amount of money/months per year) The best way to predict the future is to fund it

Here’s my context on IndieFund: • Investors are successful game developers with millions of dollars (usually) • They espouse a model that worked well for them (independent development, usually no publisher, direct upload to Steam / Xbox / online stores), so there’s also a social / philosophical angle here w.r.t. the approach they want to popularize • They also provide timely advice on non-game things like how to market your game, thinking about game conferences, thinking about launches, tc. • It was launched during a period when these people felt Microsoft / Sony were being mean allegedly to indie developers and giving them bad deals. They wanted to offer an alternative to that So I think in every way, IndieFund is able to offer unique funding and unique perspective. The questions I’d have for a FoC fund are: • What can the community uniquely offer an FoC project? Can we be the ‘best’ option for this? • What does a FoC style project actually need? Grants? Reliable funding commitments? Something else?

I was thinking something more like a "big" patreon fund where we change who the recipient is every couple weeks/months, in return we get weekly updates and potentially a working tool

ah I gotya. Would we fund the person or the project?

where big may be in the 100s range hopefully around a ramen lifestyle amount

random related idea, I wonder if we could fund a FoC project into existence. Something that many projects + people would benefit from? Projects like Apache Arrow (common dataframe standard) come to mind as a multiplier project

that would be cool too, but given the variety of projects here it's hard to think of one that would benefit even a small majority 🙂

Random thoughts.. • This funding model would fit people on the "industry" side of FoC, who are working on a prototype with the plan to turn it into a usable tool, perhaps even a product. But it doesn't feel like it would fit people on the "academic / research" side of our community, who often need to spend a few years just to prove that a particular path isn't viable. (Eg: Would $XXX for a month or two meaningfully help @jonathoda succeed in ways he otherwise wouldn't?). So in addition to the "only for people who can't otherwise raise money", this cuts down group of potential beneficiaries to an even smaller number. • Indie fund also takes a small cut of sales for the games they fund, which is how they make it sustainable. • I am in general very fond of the idea of "everyone pitches in a little so that someone who needs a lot can have it right when they need it". • I think there's a minimum threshold where the amount of money goes from "token gesture" to "actually helpful", and I think that that threshold is probably higher than what this community would be able to raise if all the regulars here chipped in $X (single digit). • The Clojure community put together something like this — https://www.clojuriststogether.org. They funded it with a few large backers rather than many small backers. It's been running for a few years now and seems good. I think the Ruby community also does this, probably other communities too. So it's not outside the realm of possibility.

maybe a format closer to "google summer of code"?

When I was funded by indie fund it was very close to a traditional publisher\developer relationship

Could the folks who are interested set up individual Patreons as an MVP of this? I already subscribe to a few creators on that platform, so it would be nice to have all of my subscription “giving” in one place. Just a thought!

Curious. I wonder which of us would feel good being on the receiving end of the fund.

@crabl — might be easier to set up a single patreon for the community, and then distribute funds to whoever the current recipient is. I had been planning to set up a pateron for the community itself (to fund some community-focussed projects), but then the pandemic hit, and the BLM protests happened, and now there's the election. Hasn't felt like an appropriate time to ask folks for money for the community. But maybe I'm just being nervous, and dreading responsibility. :$

That’s also reasonable, though it would require some sort of group on the FoC end of things in order to make sure the funds get to the right place (which, keep in mind, is also complicated with issues like currency conversion, since we have lots of folks outside of North America in the group), which is why I figured individual accounts might work better as a proof-of-concept. That way, all the FoC group would be responsible for would be maintaining a list of projects looking for funding, à la Github Sponsors.

in FoC most ideas are tied to the author of the idea, I've yet to see a project here with a community of contributors.

Maybe we need FoC projects that, at their founding, have a community of contributors. That might be a better path to success than providing limited funding to a scattering of different one-researcher projects.

A few large backers rather than many small backers

This is the way to fund something substantial. I wonder if we have access to those few large backers here within the community, or if this (still) requires outreach to elsewhere?

The few times someone has poked their head in and announced, "I have some money I'm looking to spend", I've reached out to them and asked, "Would you consider sponsoring the community? Here are some initiatives that need funding to get off the ground." No luck yet. So unless there are some folks here who are willing to kick a few $k into a pot each month to help the community and/or specific members' projects, I think we'd need to reach outside. (Steve talked some big game about this just over a year ago now, proposing a $20m fund for FoC. A lot of folks got excited about that, because funding is scarce, but the $20m was never a real thing, just a hypothetical sure would be nice if someone paid us for this, hey? My armchair analysis of that whole.. thing.. is that Steve was just trying to feel out what it'd take for him to maintain an interest community management.)

since a few comments said that they would be interested in funding a project directly: is there a policy regarding individual promoting their project and asking for support on Patreon or similar platforms? if the FoC community doesn’t create a fund of its own, it could pick certain projects (from inside the community) that are looking for financial support and make them more visible

Great question @elbear. We haven't had anyone ask for patronage yet (other than Steve Krouse, back in the day), but if someone wanted to do that, I'd be okay with it as long as it wasn't spammy. (Eg: if someone only ever posts about their patreon, that's no good. But if someone wants to launch a patreon here, or occasionally ask for support as part of some other milestone announcement or some such, that's fine by me. We'll fine-tune the social norms around that was we go, once we learn what feels good.) As for picking projects, we do have this page that needs to be populated and fleshed-out a bit: https://futureofcoding.org/collaboration.

We don’t need funding - we need to get out of the basement. What seems to work in other creative disciplines is a competitive market or scene. There is a place to release your work, repeatedly face rejection and criticism, and occasionally win. The key seems to be a communal value system. People strive to produce valued work, but often with an edge that tries to nudge the values in some direction. People care enough about the values that they invest in evaluating and criticizing other people’s work. If you want to fund the future of computing I suggest funding a competition with a prize.

I can foresee this causing massive issues unless it is done very carefully. The main issue would be that once someone is receiving the funding, say they quit their job, now there is massive friction against the funding moving to another, potentially better idea. Perhaps as a first step, it might be useful to have a board where people request money for specific things? E.g. buying a research paper, buying an VR headset etc.

cough sci-hub cough

@Chris Knott sure, but if you follow the approach of funding a specific person or team for a certain amount of time, rather than a specific idea you'd free up a lot of people to work on potentially better ideas. Side projects both assume a lot of free time and being willing and able to use that free time to work on the side project. It also limits the scope of projects to things that can make reasonable progress as side projects, or decelerates the timeline for those projects

There was actually some good discussion of funding the research into tools for thought on the Metamuse podcast (from the Muse / Ink & Switch folks), in the episode with Andy Matuschak. Discussion on this subject starts at 46:40, but the whole episode is great. They talk about borrowing ideas from the indie games world, self-funding via Patreon, collecting donations for the "public goods" part of research (papers, ideas, etc) while still working on proprietary commercial software, how PARC was funded relative to the rest of the industry at the time, how the industry has changed since and what that means for funding research, etc.

I would be willing to put in at least $50 a month into a "FoC fund". I don't have strong opinions on how exactly it should work, but perhaps we can first gather proposals to see what level of funding would be needed to make a significant difference (e.g. enough funding to work on a project full time)

I’m happy to submit a detailed proposal any time 🤷‍♀️