On 15-02-25 11:15 AM, Edward Saperia wrote:
I'm not sure you've understood correctly. In my proposed system, people propose projects and these projects are advertised on the centralnotice banners.
Ah, I indeed hadn't. My understanding was that you wanted to substitute for the grants process(es) but that the actual source of funding would remain the WMF coffers.
In which case I need to reclassify your idea from "intriguing" to "horrifying" in my opinion. Not because I find anything fundamentally objectionable to crowdfunding (I do not, and have indeed thrown money at a number of cool crowdfunded projects in the past) but because - as FloNight noted - this is an invitation to formalize and cement systemic bias to an insane degree. "All the knowlegde" - not "all the knowledge someone is willing and able to afford".
Beyond which is the simple reality that many things you'll find no shortage of agreement that they need to be done are, fundamentally, unsexy and unimpressive. You would be hard-pressed to make a workable "marketing campaign" for them, and quickly find that the boring stuff gets underfunded no matter how important.
I still think there is something to the idea of trying to work in more "crowdsourcing" to the project financing processes - being able to create a lightweight and attractive way of getting a vast number of community members to weigh in on the relative desirability of ways to spend money towards the projects /is/ a laudable objective.
-- Marc