Recently launched Cofundos.org, from the Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web Research Group at the University of Leipzig in Germany, is a community funding site for open source software. The site allows non-coders to join forces to fund open source programming projects that might otherwise not get made. Software made as a result of these community-funded bounties must be licensed via the Creative Commons CC-BY or an OSI approved license.
The site essentially works like microPledge, which we wrote about in August. After someone posts a project idea, the crowd discusses and refines the idea and contributes to a project fund. Programmers then bid on the contract to make the software and the funders vote on who gets the bid. After completion, the project’s funders vote one whether the programmer completed the task satisfactorily, and if so, the programmer is paid. Voting is weighted based on how much that person contributed (money) to the project’s bounty.
There are currently 47 projects listed on Cofundos.org, with the highest commanding a bounty of 1030 Euros. In the first week of operation, the site has attracted 3700 Euros worth of pledges from approximately than 100 bidders, according to the site.
Cofundos.org is focused specifically on open source software, but the team behind it has indicated that they plan to adapt the concept to other areas, including beyond software development. microPledge has also indicated the desire to branch out beyond software and use the same scheme to crowdsource the funding of things like events.
