Re: Kickstarter for Emacs

[Eric Schulte]

Tom <address@hidden> writes:

> Chong Yidong <cyd <at> gnu.org> writes:

[...]

>> 
>> If there is interest in funding anything at the Emacs project level, the
>> FSF has set up a mechanism for donating to individual GNU packages,
>> currently used by GNU Octave and GNU Telephony; see
>> 
>>   https://my.fsf.org/associate/donate/working-together
>> 
>
> Yes, but it's project level support. I was talking about feature
> level funding, so that people can fund the implementation of their pet
> feature explicitly instead of giving money to the generic project
> and let the developers decide what they want to work on.
>
> People are much more willing to give money if they know it will 
> go to fund the specific feature they want implemented. Paying
> for scratching my itch makes my itch go away, so I'm willing to
> pay for it.
>

Maybe the FSF donation system linked above should be enhanced adding;

1. increased donation granularity to specific features tasks or bugs,

2. user (not-developer) introduction of projects of interest, e.g., "if
   someone did X I'd happily donate Y" and an up-vote or up-donate
   driven system of ranking and displaying pledges.

Making something like this would require both development effort to
build the infrastructure and social effort in advertising to potential
developers and users.  Perhaps the fact that only two projects are
listed at the link above means that the social environment is not yet in
place.

-- 
Eric Schulte
http://cs.unm.edu/~eschulte/