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Re: [ox-en] Fwd from Martin Hardie

hi Michel,
at the outset, apologies that this letter turned out to be so extensive. but i think its the most efficient way to give you some more info on the background and what we are doing.
regarding willingness of a community to finance: i dont have any real world examples but i believe the majority of people are willing to pay a fee provided it is 

*) reasonable
*) (a big part) goes directly to the people who do good work (especially if it allows for the funding of specific actions that the person thinks is of value) (http://www.vodes.net/revstartshere/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=397&Itemid=116) 

and the

*) use is transparent
*) fair and
*) can to a large degree be influenced by the community.
regarding enforcement, personally i dont believe in kicking people out or excluding them from membership. however, in order to ensure that (most) people are paying one can discuss little "cheapie icons" on forum profiles for people who have not paid their contribution. the cheapie icon might have an impact if people are looking for help in a forum. social law enforcement that is. other benefits for paying members depend on the specific community but it should not be impossible to give them enough incentive to pay a fee that fulfills the criteria above.
generally i believe there is a core of "rationality" in most people; in other words, i believe that most people are willing to pay if one explains them in an honest and open manner the advantages and disadvantages and let them partcipate in the governance. and the benefits of membership fees (imo) tremendously outweigh its disadvantages. certainly, there will always be people who believe in extremes and dogmas and believe open source should be free of money. i, for one, want open source to prevail (in the marketplace) and to deliver outstanding quality for the benefit of most people. and im convinced that money is a core element to achieve all this.
im the reason why you didnt understand it because im quite bad with writing things down and explaining them to outsiders. but (slowly) i think ill get there. :)
regarding the word format, generally, the structure of the vn digital license provides for a maximum of two excluded rational uses. in the case of scientific publications of the vn foundation, one of the two excluded uses is conversion into the .doc format. here (http://www.vodes.net/revstartshere/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=46&Itemid=122) is, however, a published version of the letter in .odt format. you are free to do with it whatever you want. formally, you would need to be a community member, but you wont hear from our laywers if you dont register. ;)
regarding more literature on the role of the foundation: see the link above. interested institutions can directly steer research (with no overhead costs in employing me) in casting their capital vodes for the production of papers (and vode/allocate funds for answering specific research questions) which they think is most interesting. details will be announced in about one month. and, in the spirit of open source, when i say one month i mean at least two. right now our focus is on the practical aspects and the organisation of the first matchmaking party (http://www.vodes.net/revstartshere/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=399&Itemid=123) in stockolm at the stockholm university. if anyone is here...feel free to drop by. :) 

PAPER Proposal:
if you know some research insitutions who are interested in funding and having those thoughts below written down in an user-friendly paper and under the - very liberal and standardised (advantage to CC) - VN DL (in .odt format), please let us know.
generally, contrary to mozilla, one goal is to minimise the powers of the foundation vis-a-vis community members by:
1) limiting flow of internal capital vodes/money through the foundation; e.g. from Beta Tester directly to VN People, Artists, Open source developer/wikipedian; to the largest extent possible directly p2p (people to people);
First practical Example (http://www.vodes.net/revstartshere/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=397&Itemid=116): collective management of vn and direct funding of full-time employed ctvn-g (mgs); allows also for testing how a collective governance scheme works where the community (512 interested Beta Tester to be precise) vodes for/invests in/allocates money for actions of management which they think are of most value to vn. this direct funding scheme could easily be applied for core developers who offer to write a couple of lines for adding functionlities or do other actions they are interested in doing. people can than vode for the functionality that (s)he wants the most.
as a side note, there is also another big advantage of this p2p funding scheme as it pretty much does away with investment loss in the case of organising real world events (e.g. concerts): http://www.vodes.net/revstartshere/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=402&Itemid=66 

2) minimising asset vodes (physical goods) belonging to the foundation
as another means to limit the powers of the foundation vis-a-vis its members, the reversed leasing agreement aims to limit ownership/control of physical items. basically, the foundation leases certain assets from team offline members which they privately own (e.g. video camera, CD-Printer, etc.). another example are t-shirts which vn people/staff wear at vn events. they buy the t-shirt themselv in advance, but get an extra remunerated for each event they come with the t-shirt and help organising. one can discuss whether (and to what extent) they should be able to make some money on the purchase of the t-shirt.
apart from distributing costs for the foundation over a longer period and allowing private persons to make (pocket) money on their private items, from a psychological perspective, people who own things tend to treat them better. 

3) fair distribution of capital vodes within the foundation
last with respect to the role of the foundation, while one function of the vn foundation is to generate (external through corporate donations) money and to focus the goodwill and administer the investments of labour vodes and to co-ordinate actions by thousands of individuals to achieve the goals (just as mozilla) it does not stop there; rather the foundation is only a means to achieve the goal of a fair (as defined by the collective decision making body team beta tester) distribution of wealth. yes, vn wants to generate money - in order to distribute it among artists, vn people (mainly students) and open movement (open source/wikimedia) individuals.
difference to mozilla: there is a re-transfer of capital vodes - the money is given back to the community (and not kept within the foundation) and distributed to according to what the collective Team Beta Tester deems "just". i cant resist to mention the - almost insulting - prize for the best firefox extension of the mozilla foundation: it was a - corporate sponsorship (alienware computer). yet, the foundation sits on a pile of more than 50 000 000 in cash. had i done a single action (i.e. cast a labour vode) for mozilla before, i would not do any single thing for the foundation until they are opening up the books and are willing to let the community participate in the distribution of wealth. what 50 million can do for essential projects like openbsd, gimp, openoffice, inkscape is obvious.
it seems quite strange that the mozilla foundation does not believe in openness and transparency when it comes to the income and money that the work of the community generates. ive contacted and send the idNCC letter to the mozilla foundation but have not heard from them. on the other hand, it does not surprise me - in the light of the founders of the foundation and the incentives of those people/institutions. therefore, we have also put down the spread firefox logo. as soon as there is a viable and altruistically driven alternative on the horizon we do our best to promote this browser (unless mozilla is giving the community a say in the way money is distributed). in this respect, initially our "target group" is students (in europe alone there are 17 million). 

markus
On Thu, 23 Mar 2006 01:18:48 [PHONE NUMBER REMOVED], Michael Bouwens <michelsub2003 yahoo.com> wrote: 


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Markus:
have you seen how the user community (see comments) actually supports such financing? (this is conssistent with the non-reciprocity inherent in peer production) Linking income to effort changes peer production into a hybrid format based on forms of reciprocity, which is not a bad thing. Your link to the vodes.net document is very interesting, and actually, I'm only now starting to understand how the thing is working, for some reason, I just couldn't get it before. I'd like to quote from it in P2P News, is it possible to have a Word version of it? 
 Any more literature on the role of foundations would be very welcome?
 Michel
Markus <markus vodes.net> wrote: interesting article. regarding unilateral governance and use of funds: 
http://digg.com/technology/Mozilla_made_$72_million_from_Firefox. the
winner of the best extension got an alienware computer (which is most
likely also a donation). an open source projetc which lives from ll the
investment of people around the world does not even have transparency as
regards the money they make thx to the supporters. seems to be quite
contrary to the open source spirit.

here
(http://www.vodes.net/revstartshere/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=43&Itemid=122)
is an excerpt of how we are going to govern the - nascent - vn online
community.

On Tue, 21 Mar 2006 08:22:04 [PHONE NUMBER REMOVED], geert lovink  wrote:


http://beta.kainx.org/journals/view/content/729






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