lesscode.org

What are you guys thinking about Fundable.org? Newsforge has the short and sweet:

The concept, while unique, is quite simple. Anyone who has a product or service to sell, or needs monetary support for a charitable cause, or who wants to organize a group purchase, posts their requirement on Fundable.org. They specify the number of contributors needed and the amount of money required from each. They also specify a deadline by which to raise the needed capital. Fundable.org holds all contributions until the total amount requested is received, or the deadline is reached. If, by the deadline, the amount contributed is less than the required amount, the project is scrapped and the contributors receive a full refund.

I’ve yet to see a working method of raising money on the web for collaborative development and I’m skeptical by default besides. That being said, this does have some interesting ideas attached to it that I’ve not seen elsewhere and sometimes a slight modification makes all the difference.

I’m sorry to say that I don’t think this is going to be a revolution in funding projects based on anonymous donation but here’s a few scenarios where Fundable may be useful in collaborative development:

User Groups

I’m a member of a few local area user groups and there’s a frequent need to raise money: food, venues, food, fix things that are broken at people’s houses, and food.

Of course, telling everyone to bring $5 to the next meeting works pretty well, too.

Infrastructure

Hardware and bandwidth can be had for cheap if you can find a nice little group of people with OS and configuration tastes similar to your own. I’d rather split up a root level, dedicated, co-located box between 5 others than deal with a shared or virtual box.

Here’s something to try: go out and find a nice hosting plan, determine the optimal number of people needed to get the cost down but not tax the box, throw something up on fundable and then point people to it via weblog. I’d think you may have a decent chance of working something out.

Oh well, it will be interesting to see the types of uses people put Fundable to in the next few months.

For a really long time now I’ve wanted to get my development related projects, essays, and other ramblings into a more coherent place on the web. At the same time, I’ve been thinking a lot about this “movement” (for lack of a better word) that I’ve grown a small part of that is simplifying, humanizing, and opening up IT.

There’s a significant portion of the development community that’s just plain pissed off at the status quo and have begun pursuing radically different ways of building and delivering systems from what is now commonly accepted by the established industry. To our delight, we’re finding that There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom and that the next big thing in IT should really be making it smaller.

We’re also finding that this new-think will not be accepted by the mainstream analyst firms, tech publications, and vendor powerhouses on simple merit. Pimping the latest acronym from the latest vendor with the latest money is a much easier way of bringing in stupid amounts of cash than is trying to move an industry forward in providing real value to actual people. So screw you guys - your goals are in direct competition with those of my customers.

As you can see, I’m a little bitter… But I’m also excited - we’re assembling a stack of tools and techniques that are demonstrably superior and yet somehow much simpler than those of the mainstream past. We’re starting companies and controlling our future and it just feels right.

So I’m proud to announce that lesscode.org is open for business. It’s still a work in progress but here are my goals for the place:

• Advocate, communicate, and discuss the happenings of the less movement.

• Provide tools and resources for like minded individuals to collaborate on projects (subversion, mailman, trac, etc).

I’m also prepared to chase funding in the form of hosting, bandwidth, admin time, etc. should their be significant interest in the concept.

The site is getting there. I spent an hour or so skinning Trac. I have to say, whoever did the HTML for Trac did a really good job. It’s all very simple and you can tell they were anal about semantics, which makes my life a ton easier. I modified a small bit of the header.cs template but other than that, the redesign was done purely with CSS.

I’ll have to announce this place over at naeblis.cx/rtomayko/ but as of right now, it is imperative that I get shitfaced as soon as possible. 8)