Crowdfunding Creative Jam

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

Welcome to the fifth Crowdfunding Creative Jam! This session will run Sunday, March 18-Monday, March 19. The theme is "respect."  (Visit the Creative Jam over on Dreamwidth.)

Crowdfunding Creative Jam
Everyone is eligible to post prompts, which may be words or phrases, titles, images, etc. Prompters may request a specific creator, but everyone else may still use that prompt if they wish. Prompts may specify a particular character/world/etc. but creators may use the prompt for something else anyway and post the results. Prompters are still encouraged to post mostly prompts that anyone could use anywhere, as this maximizes the chance of having creators make something based on your prompt. Please title your comment "Prompt" or "Prompts" when providing inspiration so these are easy to find.

Prompt responses may also be treated as prompts and used for further inspiration. For example, a prompt may lead to a sketch which leads to a story, and so on. This kind of cascading inspiration is one of the most fun things about a collective jam session.

Everyone is eligible to use prompts, and everyone who wants to use a given prompt may do so, for maximum flexibility of creator choice in inspiration. You do not have to post a "Claim" reply when you decide to use a prompt, but this does help indicate what is going on so that other prompters can spread out their choice of prompts if they wish.

Creators are encouraged, but not required, to post at least one item free. Likewise, sharing a private copy of material with the prompter is encouraged but not required. Creative material resulting from prompts should be indicated in a reply to the prompt, with a link to the full content elsewhere on the creator's site (if desired); a brief excerpt and/or description of the material may be included in the reply (if desired). It helps to title your comment "Prompt Filled" or something like that so these are easy to identify. There is no time limit on responding to prompts. However, creators are encouraged to post replies sooner rather than later, as the attention of prompters will be highest during and shortly after the session.

Some items created from prompts may become available for sponsorship. Some creators may offer perks for donations, linkbacks, or other activity relating to this project. Check creator comments and links for their respective offerings.

Prompters, creators, and bystanders are expected to behave in a responsible and civil manner. If the moderators have to drag someone out of the sandbox for improper behavior, we will not be amused. Please respect other people's territory and intellectual property rights, and only play with someone else's characters/setting/etc. if you have permission. (Fanfic/fanart freebies are okay.) If you want to invite folks to play with something of yours, title the comment something like "Open Playground" so it's easy to spot. This can be a good way to attract new people to a shared world or open-source project, or just have some good non-canon fun.

Boost the signal! The more people who participate, the more fun this will be. Hopefully we'll see activity from a lot of folks who regularly mention their projects in this community, but new people are always welcome. You can link to this session post or to individual items created from prompts, whatever you think is awesome enough to recommend to your friends.

Tea Shop Things

[the-borgqueen.livejournal.com]

Things are moving forward-ish with that, so I'm looking for some input on the best way to set up donations and such.

My friend and I met with a woman in the downtown area who owns several buildings that they're renovating for shop fronts and restaurants. She is very excited about our idea to have a small cafe/bakery/tea shop, as have been the Small Business Advisers that we talked to and my late father-in-law's financial adviser. We would have a shop on the Main Street in a down town area where there is a population of 15 thousand, and 300'000 visitors. There's a yearly boat show in the area and a "Taste of" festival, and art shows, and during the week there are a TON of commuters going through given the judicial center is there and the court house and all of this.

So, it's looking very promising. The building won't be fully renovated for at least six months, but I figure that gives us some time to lock down funding. I imagine that we're going to have to sort out some loans but I'm hoping that we can get some money from the crowd funding route. The less we have to loan the better.

While they're renovating the building, replacing the roof, painting the exterior, putting in new walls, redoing the electric and the plumbing we'd need to get funds in order to supply any kitchen equipment that we need, pots, pans, plates, cups, refrigerated displays, do the floors and the internal painting all the rest of it. We do have some "nest egg" but half of that covers the deposit, three months rent and utilities, so the remainder is not nearly enough to cover the supplies even with friends donating their services to tile, paint and make the sign template.

So, I'm trying to sort out what the best way to approach the donation markers are with regards indiegogo.

Baked goods might be difficult to ship out as gifts. We're trying to make things as naturally and organically as possible and promote wellness so as little chemically processed stuff as possible; I'm still figuring that other than maybe cookies things would be hard to ship. (We're planning on also offering scones, biscuits, croissants, cornish pasties, cupcakes, tarts etc.)

Tea is a little easier to hand out, put in the little packets send it out with tea-bags. Given we want to get mismatched chairs and tables and will be repainting and refinishing a lot of that we'd wondered about saying we'd paint people's names, or family friendly design requests as thank yous onto the chairs and tables but I'm not sure how that would go over.

Brain storming other things we could send out tea balls or mugs and pots, I suppose. We'll be offering other services on an appointment basis, such as hypnotherapy and tarot readings -- but some of that is less easy to do via mail order.

We're going to have a little gift section in the store to go along with some tea gift baskets that we intend to have which will likely have some wood-burned jewelry and boxes, hand made candles, smudging supplies, crystals, runes and some things like that.