{"id":5044,"date":"2013-09-24T19:15:51","date_gmt":"2013-09-24T23:15:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=5044"},"modified":"2013-09-24T19:15:51","modified_gmt":"2013-09-24T23:15:51","slug":"can-micropatronage-save-the-net","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=5044","title":{"rendered":"Can micropatronage save the net?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>How can we fund common Internet infrastructure without risking that it will be captured by corporations or governments?  He who pays the piper tends to call the tune, which is a bad thing when you don&#8217;t actually want the content of your network to be controlled.<\/p>\n<p>This is a problem I&#8217;ve been worrying about a lot for the last couple of years.  I&#8217;ve been working on one organized attack on it that I&#8217;m not ready to talk about in public yet (but will be soon; some of this blog&#8217;s regulars are already briefed in). I&#8217;ve just found something else that might help which I <em>can<\/em> talk about: micropatronage.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a site called <a href=\"http:\/\/gittip.com\">gittip.com<\/a> that provides a way for people to give small recurring gifts, weekly, to a person or project team. Donors give it payment system information; weekly gifts are then automatically shipped unless donors elect to stop.  It&#8217;s meant to handle small amounts, with an upper limit of $100 per patron\/client pair per week.<\/p>\n<p>Gittip has the interesting property that, as a patronage receiver, you don&#8217;t know who your patrons are &#8211; all you know is the total amount you&#8217;re being gifted.  So people can fund you, but they can&#8217;t attach any strings.  There&#8217;s still a kind of market check; if you&#8217;re not doing work that your donor base as a whole finds interesting, your patronage volume will drop.<\/p>\n<p>As a mechanism for funding commons development that is insulated from political and commercial pressure this seems very promising.  Of course it has other uses, too; creators of all kinds might be able to use it to turn reputation into a steady cash flow.<\/p>\n<p>That is, if there are enough patrons.  Chad Whitacre and his team are betting that a lot of people will actually <em>prefer<\/em> making small recurring donations to single lump-sum gifts.  So far there is one piece of objective evidence that suggests they&#8217;re right: gittip development is itself funded through gittip.<\/p>\n<p>Watch this space.  Soon, the gittip team and I will try an interesting social experiment&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How can we fund common Internet infrastructure without risking that it will be captured by corporations or governments? He who pays the piper tends to call the tune, which is a bad thing when you don&#8217;t actually want the content of your network to be controlled. This is a problem I&#8217;ve been worrying about a&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=5044\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Can micropatronage save the net?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5044"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5044\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5051,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5044\/revisions\/5051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}