I know a guy working on a related idea. Instead of funding people, his system works by funding issues. The link is http://www.freedomsponsors.org
The workflow, as I understand it, goes something like that:
1) There's an issue on a project you use that's getting no love.
2) You go to freedomsponsors register that you'd like some issue solved, so much that you'd be willing to put your money where your mouth is. Also, you'll probably want to put a link to freedomsponsors on the project's issue tracker.
3) When one or more people solve the issue, the sponsor pays them (if more than one person has worked on the issue, the sponsor can distribute the money in anyways).
Kind of a neat twist on those third-party support sites like Fixya and that GreatSomething one, but that domain name isn't very good. I'd look more towards a "bug bounty" type name.
Whoa, I just noticed a huge spike in access count from Google Analytics coming from here. So this is what happenned...
Hi everyone. I'm Tony, creator of FreedomSponsors.
You're absolutely right @ebswhat. Sorry about that. The layout and webdesign still have major room for improvement - we're working on that. Functionality is pretty stable though.
To sponsor an issue, just do like @reginaldo said.
Gimp is not registered yet so you'll need to fill in more details about it: "Where does the bugtracker live?" and "What's gimp Home page?"
Would you please let me know about you usability experience in the Feedback section?
I'll tell him to put a giant Sponsor button on every screen.
First you'll have to click the tiny "Login with google" button in the upper right corner, then the "Sponsor new issue" button. Then you paste the link to the original issue. After that, the site will guide you a little bit better.
We will add more ways to signup: facebook, twitter, yahoo and github, at least.
I'm not a big fan of owning users' passwords, so unless people really really ask for it, we probably won't add a "create login/pass" functionality.
Also, there is the concept of reputation - Sponsors that pay their offers as promised will have good reputation.
For reputation to mean something, we need to know something about the user, and I believe linking with a social account is our best option for that.
Anyway, talking about FreedomSponsors on GitTip's thread is probably not good for MY reputation here on HackerNews (right? I don't really know, I just signed up). So I'm gonna create a new topic and answer questions there...
I didn't know about that untill now. I'll look more into it.
But the main idea behind the way accounts work on FS is that the user should have some sort of online presence before he can sign up.
So if Mozilla's Persona doesn't offer a way for the user to publish some sort of online profile, then we probably won't add it as a primary form of signing up on FS. Linking an existing account to authenticate later is ok. But we do want to make it more difficult to create completely "anonymous" profiles. At least that's our thinking today anyway.
The workflow, as I understand it, goes something like that:
1) There's an issue on a project you use that's getting no love.
2) You go to freedomsponsors register that you'd like some issue solved, so much that you'd be willing to put your money where your mouth is. Also, you'll probably want to put a link to freedomsponsors on the project's issue tracker.
3) When one or more people solve the issue, the sponsor pays them (if more than one person has worked on the issue, the sponsor can distribute the money in anyways).