crowdfunding plugins

i recall that previously some plugin ideas were shared in the community for crowdfunding. although i prefer not to use 'money' at all in my life, if possible - i also acknowledge that there are some services i could use which would help my project, which presently are most easily accessed by use of money.

so i am considering a crowdfunding process for my own website, to support some of what will help the site to expand. while thinking about the types of 'perks' i can offer, i realised that i have put so much time into coding unreleased elgg plugins recently that they are the most attractive 'perks' that i currently have available. so i am thinking of offering them as crowdfunding perks for low amounts of 'money'.

i do not see any conflict here since donations are supported in the community for plugins and ultimately crowdfunding is a form of donation. the reality is that out of 1000s of downloads, i have only received 2 donations and they were from ones i consider friends here, who i spoke with directly... so the donation function is not effective, in my experience - without having more than just a single community link that does not draw the attention at all. alternatively, i may create a free version of the plugins and 'special editions' with extra features that are only available through the crowdfunding/donation process.

does anyone have any comment on this approach?

  • I don't know about crowdfunding plugins. There were two developers that wanted to crowdfund plugins but didn't went well.

  • learn.elgg.org has doc hosting provided by Read the Docs which uses Gittip crowdfunding.

    Wordpress was an early player in the blog market when good scripts/sites came from young talents  in the free domain ( and not stinking commercial datamining monopolies like FB)  like drupal, geeklog and plenty others (this genre has actually died in the last few years) - wordpress also had nice very nice marketing and a huge ecosystem around it. Elgg has minimal marketing/advertising and in its latest versions lacks good themes and ability to let users choose their own theme in a social site (old plugins no longer work) - multitude variety of themes was a strong point of wordpress. Elgg blog / profile also do not let users choose their  header images and/or theme (paid plugins are there) and media plugins ( tidypics is doing excellent job, still) are lacking and not yet in core, considering that net shares now more media than text. Commenting needs a lot more love (like Disqus). But still Elgg is fantastic and needs more 'pitches' and active 'marketing'. Drupal based Acqua did this sort of thing and was a fair (though not huge) success.

  • crowdfunding does not always succeed, for different reasons, depending on the unique example.

    finding a format that works for the specific group of 'target' funders is a significant part of the process - as is locating the potential funders and inspiring them to be involved. even contacting techcrunch (or similar) to let them know that there is a 'new' homebase for crowdfunding social software, where we can all have a say in what software gets produced, is an incentive enough to draw a new fun crowd.. for.. crowd.. funds.. ;)

    one aspect to this is to identify inspiring options to offer as 'perks' - e.g. the coder could offer the opportunity for 'funders' to 'buy' small features of their own choice in the design of the plugin. or even buy votes in a poll to decide what features are in the plugin. there are many possibilities. this way the features that are most desired are identified and coded, while those who might have considered paying for a plugin with these features, can get the features at either a lower price or at a price that they prefer to pay.