Reverse bounty: securesite.module

The module sounds like it would be useful to me, but more than that I like this idea of reverese bounties, so I am putting up 100 euros toward your goal.

I also like the Donorge site. Very Free Software friendly.

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I think you can send (at least a part of) the money to Moshe....
He wrote webserver_auth.module a while ago...
http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/modules/webserver_auth/

[Update: Moshe just explained to me that webserver_auth uses the .htaccess file as source for authentification whereas your module would use the Drupal database.]

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If you have troubles with a particular contrib project, please consider filing a support request. Thanks. And, by the way, Drupal 4.6 will support PHP 5.

I've been thinking about vaguely similar applications, but more in the charity/politics fundraising area.

One thing I've thought about is, would it be better to take credit card backed pledges rather than actual donations? The idea being that a pledge drive might do better because I don't have to commit my money unless something is actually going to happen.

Here's how it could work:

I put my credit card down, pledging money towards a goal, but it just gets validated at the time of the transaction. In the mail order world, this is the same as a merchant validating your credit card for a charge of a certain amount, but not actually charging you because he hasn't actually shipped the product. It's a pending transaction. It reduces available credit of the person pledging, but no money is transferred yet.

If the pledge goal is reached, all the previous pending credit card transactions are "fulfilled". Ie., the money is actually transferred. If the pledge drive times out, then the various pending credit card transactions are voided. The website holding the pledges just has to hold the transaction id's of the previously validated credit card transactions, not the actually credit card info.

A possible fly in the ointment, I'm not sure if credit card processors would like a large burst of "void" transactions. That might smell like fraud to them. Ie., like a vendor who's selling a fake product and getting lots of "cancel my order" requests. I will be researching this for DemocracyInAction.org.

PublicMailbox@benslade.com
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Thank you for the 5% Boris :) Appreciate it. With a Drupal item on Donorge, any item, goal or organization could 'tip' percentages to Drupal, Drupal would not even need to have a Donorge donation button on it's site to take advantage of this.

Same works in reverse, Drupal or any item could give a percentage to the securesite.module of each donation it receives. Items are encouraged to support each other this way as it also removes slightly the dependency on 1:1 donations to interests.

I love the idea. However, I don't like the name "reverse bounty" so well. It's more unnecessary jargon that will get in the way of selling the concept. The first thing I think of when I hear "bounty" is they payment made for the capture of an outlaw. So is a reverse bounty the amount of money an outlaw pays to capture you? Obviously I'm joking. But my point is that the term "reverse bounty" is confusing and requires extensive explanation. There's no need to go out of our way to extend meanings of existing words in the English language to handle this concept. Better words already exist.

I propose development incentives or developer endowments. They are just as short they tell you precisely what they are.

I think "endowment" is particularly accurate and appropriate. Here's what Merriam Webster says: "to furnish with an income; especially : to make a grant of money providing for the continuing support or maintenance of "

I like the idea too. This would probably speed up the development of Drupal's module repository. I suppose it would also contribute to peoples motivation for creating modules to use as references. However, I hope this doesn't lead to alot of modules not being released to the public, as it would make Drupal less popular.

The biggest benefit from this type of award being offered is that it has the potential to bring more developers into the Drupal world. Most of the people here seem to have found Drupal because they wanted to make a website and Drupal looked like a good fit. I'd like to see more people using Drupal because they figure that's where the money's at.

- Robert Douglass

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www.webs4.com

I see the value in the module, and it was actually one of the reasons I hadn't yet jumped into Drupal with both feet. That and awaiting 4.6.0 gold.

Got one, so the least I can do is help the other along.

I would like further to explore this idea of user driven software development by user donations.

First let me define that "users" can mean individuals or corporations.

Given that most software developers dislike fund raising activities and prefer to write code rather than being a fund raising manager for their projects, the Donorge on-line concept is a step in the right direction.

I am not sure asking users to put money in a centralized pool works, otherwise non-profit orgs like GNU would have enough money to reach their goals. I do not participate in any open source development, so I do not know for sure how open source funding really works, but given this thread I suspect developers are still trying to find solutions to the funding problem. Maybe users would prefer to fund software development on per feature/bug fix terms as opposed to "project XYZ" at large.

Regarding money and trust, I too would like the trust system to work, but I think users see things differently. How can they spend their hard earned money onto someone they don't know, and without a contract?

Please allow me to continue the idea in the original post. Say you prepare a development plan with a cost/time associated with each task in the plan and published your project plan on-line with buttons for users to put money toward a specific task, then users would know where their money goes to.

On the project management side, tasks have dependencies. You may want the money a user has put in, to be escalated up the task dependency chain. Users may not want that though, so I would also give them the "no dependency escalation option". Of course, developers are bound to the dependency chain, so that too has to be communicated to the user.

Developers have to put bread on the table, and users don't want their money to be consumed until the work is done. This system needs terms in a contract to cover the fact that some of the money will be consumed during development. There must also be clauses in the contract to cover the case of underestimated complexity or underestimated amount of work (need more time/money).

You also want multiple donators to be able to share the cost of a feature/bug fix, and you want to allow developers to share the benefits of teaming up on a task (i.e. split the money). You may also want to advertize this fact to the user, and you definitely need to something in the contract between the developers.

Since you want to present some time/cost estimate on a per task basis, you have to consider that developers are not equaly accurate in their estimates. So you also want an "estimate accuracy index" based on who made the estimate. Developers would earn this "estimate accuracy index" based on a known formula that reflect their performance in meeting their time/cost estimate. The index would be visible on the task list.

Finally (for now), project plans change as not all plans are right from the start. This also has to be communicated to users (users that fund the project that is), and this also has to be stated up front.

I am making sense? Where can this discussion be continued?

OK, so I was the last one to donate, and that's been over a week. The project is only at about 2/3 funded (if my quick, in the head Euro to CAD conversion is right).

This has obviously dropped off the radar. How can we better promote the concept? Perhaps a permenant placement for the items in the donage system at the top of the site's home page?

This page here should have a Drupal bounty registry, where people who would like to sponsor specific development tasks can post their bounties.

Now that your drupal site is totally secured from the outside world.

How do you let someone signup since the signup page is also secured.

Marcel
http://www.macminiforums.com/forums/

this is a very interesting concept. it'd be great if in general users can contribute feature requests, developers can provide a quote, and there is a way to collect the money. right now I am going to have to manually contact each developer I know working on ecommerce/paypal, ask them for a quote, and then figure it out from there. see node 44295. plan to do this at conference next week.

Have there been any updates on the "reverse bounty" (or whatever it's called) approach? I'm considering doing something similar for a classified ads module, and wonder how well donorge.org works. I've set up a donorge.org project but I'm not sure if I've done things right (verification, other configuration). Any constructive feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Michael Curry - Exodus Development

Check out my bounty module:

http://drupal.org/project/bounty
http://openpackage.biz/documentation/bounty-orientation

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Jonathan Brown
http://openpackage.biz/