Crowdfunding: Connecting Creators and Patrons

I've seen "cybertipping" too.

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I break it down mentally this way:

Busking: The content is there with a tip jar.
Sponsoring: The audience pays to make something publicly available.
Subscribing: You pay for a series or a period of time.
Purchasing: You buy something, whether a chapter, a print, or, a short story.

I like Pay-for-Perks for that one though. I hadn't worked out a particular name for that.

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Hmm. "Busking" describes something the creator does. But the other three describe something the audience does. What I'm looking for are terms to describe the project... so, say, I would say that "Half Sick of Shadows" is x, and people would know, "Oh, I pay for extras for that project." Saying it's a "busking" or "subscribing" project sounds weird to my ears...?

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Reason I'm doing this being, I'm thinking of maintaining an index of CFC projects grouped by how you interact with them. :)

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This sounds like a really useful project. Thanks for opening the discussion.

Hmm ... it occurs to me that these are all grouped by payment method. What about projects that are mainly defined by some other feature? Frex, a fishbowl is all about the fact that people give the creator ideas that will be turned into writing/art/etc. Also, some projects have multiple payment options; mine spans pay-for-perks, tipping, and sponsoring.

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Well ideally it would be organized by several tags and you would just go to the section that organizes it by how you want to search. So you could search by how to pay, or what kind of content (poetry, art, music, writing, etc) or you could look by interaction style.

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Okay, that would be really useful.

Where would it go, though? I don't think LJ will do that sort of thing; we'd probably need an auxiliary page somewhere.

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You could do it on LJ (which is how I was planning), it just wouldn't be dynamic. I was just going to cut-tag the different lists and have the headers tell you how the list under it is organized.

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That could work.

This still sounds like something that would be easier to do with a real database; worth keeping in mind for future reference. We've had some previous discussions about what kind of things a cyberfunded creativity organization might do, beyond just having a blog. A heavy-duty database could be one.

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Yeah, but I'm not writing or hosting that database, *chuckle*. I'd help maintain it but I've got too much on my plate to take on another project that big.

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Fair enough. You can start with the version you envisioned. Maybe someone else will be inspired to try creating a database version.

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ellenmillion.livejournal.com

*sits on hands* Maybe next year - I've got a few things to get off my plate first.

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wetdryvac.livejournal.com

If someone has a place to host a database and the associated PHP or ASP to drive it, I'd be happy to build it in between other contracts.

It would mostly be a matter of determining the result-of-pay as discussed above and relating that to payment method (if desired), author/artist, type of work (with at-desire degree of granularity) and so forth...

...and then wrapping it up in a shiny, easy for new coders to edit shell.

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That sounds promising. I'd say discuss the possibility with

haikujaguar and maybe space could be found. Someone might have spare space to contribute, or we might discuss funding a site to put CFC resources on, such as this project database and the proposed co-op stuff.

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I can't help on providing web-hosting, I don't own any server space anywhere. Maybe make a separate post to see if anyone knows a web-host that fulfills your criteria?

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ellenmillion.livejournal.com

I've got more space and bandwidth than I could ever possibly use and would be happy to donate some for this!

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Makes sense. Except a lot of these cross-styles. I still consider HSoS as a busking style, even though I usually offer a bonus to those who donate. I don't like thinking of it as paying for the extras because they're really just a little extra. It's not the same as paying for the ability to alter the course of a story, or, to have your prompt used. It's more like the thank you card you get from donating to your favorite cause.

I also prefer "busking" conceptually over "tipping." Tipping implies that you're giving something extra. Even waiters have some sort of basic salary though they rely on tips. There's no base here -- just as much as I can convince the audience it's worth tossing in towards.

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Hmm. So what are the people in a busker's audience doing when they put money in the hat? What's that called?

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Oddly, I've never thought of that as tipping though it's the only word I've got for it.

It's a matter of psychological emphasis I suppose.

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*muse* Well, I want to describe what the audience is doing, not the artist... wow. Is this a hole in English? o_O

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wetdryvac.livejournal.com

If one is to believe my un-sainted aunt, "Supporting," Is the word of choice. This in replacement for what I grew up with calling it, "Giving," Which seemed rather a useless term, as I was hardly just giving...

*shrugs*

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Where I live (Illinois, Midwest dialect) people generally use "tipping" for all the versions of "giving money to people who are doing things for you, when you don't have to and it is not a Charitable Donation or Fundraiser."

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"Cyberbusking" has appeared in multiple places referring to music made available online with a donation button for tips.

I like your other descriptions too.

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I think that we should keep an eye on large-scale terminology as well as small-scale terminology. When I started researching "crowdfunding" I discovered that most of it is quite different than what we're doing here with cyberfunded creativity. "Crowdfunded creativity" might work as a term for our branch, but "crowdfunding" as a whole is really broad with more of an emphasis on entrepreneurship than creativity.

That said, I like the categories. I think the terms are descriptive but kind of clunky. I suggest a title/subtitle approach where we find a concise name and then follow up with a hyphenated description. Otherwise those long hyphenated terms are going to hit the same kind of roadblocks that some people complained about regarding the community's current title.

"Pay-to-Read/See" could be "Pay-to-View," which would cover art/writing (but not music, which some people also do). Hm, maybe "Pay-to-Access." For a shorter term, maybe something with "ticket" like a movie ticket?

I suggest "Tip Jar" for "Tip-on-Whim" because that is a well known term and technique.

I favor "Sponsor" with a subtitle of "Pay-to-Publish" for the last category. Multiple CFC projects are using "sponsor" in that sense.

There is at least one more category, though: "Advance Financing," where the creator has an idea for material but can't afford to produce it unless people fund it. That's important because it makes a difference whether something even gets created or not.

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