I just sent the following email to the initial set of patrons to the Snowdrift.coop project!
-------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: The first crowdmatching donation at Snowdrift.coop! Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2017 12:11:30 -0700 From: Aaron Wolf <aa...@snowdrift.coop> Organization: Snowdrift.coop Greetings patrons of Snowdrift.coop! Somehow you figured out that we were actually accepting pledges even though we still haven't made a public announcement! You successfully pledged as one of 70 patrons. ## The SHORT version ## We've run the crowdmatch event for the first time finally! Your account is now billed 7¢. We won't actually charge your credit-card until you reach a higher total so that the fee from Stripe will be no more than 10% of the total. So, the 7¢ will be carried over to next month's charge. Thank you for your support! ## The background details, updates, perspective: ## I'm giving a talk at SeaGL http://seagl.org/ later this week about all the challenges and story of why it's taken so long to get Snowdrift.coop working. I won't go into it now, but I plan to write a blog post about that. Today, we are finally getting through a lot of foundational issues to clean up the code, the design, the legal stuff, and get to where we are ready to announce the working system more widely. As soon as that happens, we're sure to get a lot more than 70 patrons, and then you'll be donating more along with everyone else. I plan to adjust our messaging also to emphasize further that this is about building *solidarity* on the demand-side: the users, readers, citizens, general public. Snowdrift.coop isn't just about raising money, it's about building cooperation so that creative projects depend on and answer to the general public and serve the public interest instead of primarily serving a few big donors, enthusiasts, corporate clients, or advertisers. We know you could donate more than 7¢, but we want you to donate more *with* everyone else and *not* accept the premise that a small core set of patrons do all the work while others freeride. You will donate more by recruiting others and the crowdmatching growing for everyone. That said, "bootstrapping" and "dogfooding" are unrealistic concepts. We, as the core set of Snowdrift.coop patrons and volunteers simply cannot get to a fully working system by pretending that it's already fully working. "Bootstrapping" comes from "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" specifically as a sarcastic retort to those who push the mythology of self-made-men etc. To get launched initially, we will gratefully accept larger grants and other support. See https://snowdrift.coop/donate if you want to help us out more right now, and please let me know if you want to help us apply for grants or if you can volunteer to help us in other ways toward our full alpha launch. Thank you so much, apologies for the recent lull in communication. Here's to moving ahead on the path to a free/libre/open cooperative future! In harmony, Aaron Wolf co-founder, Snowdrift.coop P.S. thanks to Bryan, our lead developer, for getting us to this point prompting this email. We will have more automated notifications of crowdmatch events soon.
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