Funding (from donations) and the diaspora* project
goob
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Diaspora now has the ability to accept donations, under the non-profit umbrella of the FSSN.
It would be useful to discuss two things:
- How should we use any funds raised from donations?
- Should we actively seek to raise funds from donations, and if so how should we go about this?
We should consider all ideas and think about medium-term strategy for fund-raising, but also to think of simple, manageable first steps we could take both in raising and using funds (assuming we agree to do both of these things).
This discussion concerns funding raised from donations given by people who want to support the project. Other ways of making money, such as building money-making schemes into the Diaspora app itself, are not within the scope of this discussion.
Rich Tue 18 Feb 2014 8:59PM
What are the current aims of Diaspora?
I've been all over diasporafoundation.org and the wiki, but I can't seem to find our current aims listed anywhere?
goob Tue 18 Feb 2014 9:39PM
Rich, do you want to start a Loomio discussion on that topic?
Ryuno-Ki Tue 18 Feb 2014 10:04PM
@rich1 Wrong thread -> https://www.loomio.org/d/VMg5HlpZ/diaspora-the-next-12-months
goob Thu 20 Feb 2014 11:33PM
I have edited the discussion context to make clear that this discussion concerns what to do with donations given to the project by people who want to support it, and not other money-making schemes. Apologies for any confusion.
smdm Fri 21 Feb 2014 7:47AM
Thank you!
smdm · Tue 18 Feb 2014 8:58PM
@goob WordPress is under GPLv2 license from the FSF - http://wordpress.org/about/license/, so we can extend it without any commercial partnerships.
We should implement revenue model for the content creators, and they will allow us to scale the remaining things.
If we need to outline a strategy, we should focus first on the main problems we have to resolve. Let's make a SWOT analysis.
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
What I see for Diaspora is:
Strengths:
- public recognition from the big medias
- considered as the most popular
- large community (how many people? countries? demography?)
- initial funding of $XXX (how much exactly?)
- donors of $XX and XX active sponsors? (any public information?)
- how many volunteers? with what qualification?
Weaknesses
- No revenue model
- Insufficiency of business know-how
- Insufficiency of devs and tech architects as volunteers (am I right?)
Opportunities:
- aggregating experience from working models(the Pat Flynn one, etc)
- research social models, which would bring engagement
- partnering with like-minded businesses, sharing the same values, for iterating some models(like MindJet.com, strategyzer.com, leancanvas.com, or people who want to use Diaspora for commercial purposes)
Threats:
- not scaling on time and losing any engagement from the content creators
- bugs
- security vulnerabilities
Add/ comment on any of the facts explained above and I'd create leancanvas at the end and will unite all the ideas we have in single document.
Best Regards,
Svetlina