Crowd Sourcing / Crowd Funding

So, how does open source work, under the hood?

Sure, you decide that you want a new bedside table.  You head over to the Open Desk web site and choose an appropriate model.  You download the design, get the necessary materials, and away you go.

Pretty simple as far as it goes.  Of course, a little daunting for those who don't have the tools or are unsure of their skills.  Nevertheless, there is not much to it.

But, what if you come up with an idea for a truck that runs on wood gas?  Do you know enough to make a truck?  Do you know how to gasify wood?  And what if you want to share this with the world by making it open source?

You might want to look at crowdsourcing and crowdfunding.

Wikipedia describes crowdsourcing as "the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers."

Back in the Free Software days, programmers created programs and shared them with other people.  Those people who got the program often received it in code form.  They would often make improvements and adjustments to the program and then share them back.  This was basically crowdsourcing.

By the time open source became mainstream, web sites sprang up to help people share their open source programs.  On those sites, other people could join projects they liked and did what they could to help build, improve, document and promote the software.

While this is common for software these days, with places like Sourceforge.net and github, the new open source disciplines are only beginning to organize these types of spaces.

There are a number of things that are different for software developers than the average inventor.  Software developers need their computer and a place to share files and they can crowdsource.  Inventors often need space, tools, access to materials, and other resources that they may not have in their basement or garage.  So what is cropping up are maker and hacker spaces.

There are many web sites that are cropping up to take advantage of this new phenomenon, and it can be a buyer beware concern.  It isn't uncommon that these are simply businesses that are trying to sell services to people interested in crowdsourcing, whether it be advertising and marketing services, to selling people on patents and IP law service.  But that shouldn't taint people from trying to move forward with their projects.

In future articles, we will feature reputable crowdsourcing groups and if necessary, show you how to create your own, if none are available in your area.

Now its one thing to get your project made to prototype and beyond.  What about sharing it with the world?  Well, that may require crowd funding.  Wikipedia describes crowd funding as "the collective effort of individuals who network and pool their money, usually via the Internet, to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations."

This might seem a little strange, but as we wrote in a previous article, Open Source is not opposed to people making money.  And with many open hardware projects, there is often a need to provide people with kits to make their own copy of your project, even for the simple reason that they like the product, but don't want to make it themselves.  This is a very real value and service that people are willing to pay for.  Some people are even happy to just providing financial support to people who are doing the research and development on an open source project, knowing that it takes a lot of time and resources to do the R&D.

The old school way of crowdfunding was to go to your family and friends and ask them to contribute financially.  Unlike banks, they generally didn't put you on contract to pay back the money or require you to make money with what ever you were creating.  But what you may have done is, once you had finished the project, you would possibly gift the contributors with duplicate items or directions on how to make their own.

This is how the new cowdfunding can work for makers.  Like cowdsourcing though, there are many sites that are showing up on the internet that are simply businesses disguised as crowdfunding sites.  They might be venture capitalists and may even disguise themselves as angel financiers, who ultimately will ask for their money back, plus interest just like a bank.  In other words, your project suddenly becomes a business startup and you become indebted to people who are only concerned about their profitability, rather than any greater good.

Yes, many crowdfunding sites are businesses, and just like ebay or paypal, will take a certain percentage of the money that was crowdfunded off the top, to put in their pockets, often described as overhead costs.  But these are very real costs and certainly, 2% to 5% isn't a lot to share with those who put your project in front of thousands of potential supporters.

In future articles we will take a closer look at methods, tools, and online crowdfunding sites like Paypal Donate, Kickstarter and others.  Certain methods work best for different projects and sometimes crowdfunding is just another DIY piece of the puzzle.

For those ready to jump right in and get started on their project, definitely get out there and do your research and find your crowdsourcing and crowdfunding resources.  As for this article, it was a lot to take on just to describe these two tools in a single sitting.  It can seem quite straight forward, yet there is a lot to learn and work through, depending on the context of your project and your intended audience.  And of course, there are things to watch out for when all you want to do is work on your project and provide it to others in an Open Source framework.