Can micropatronage save the net?
<p>How can we fund common Internet infrastructure without risking that it will be captured by corporations or governments?  He who pays the piper tends to call the tune, which is a bad thing when you don&#8217;t actually want the content of your network to be controlled.</p>
<p>This is a problem I&#8217;ve been worrying about a lot for the last couple of years.  I&#8217;ve been working on one organized attack on it that I&#8217;m not ready to talk about in public yet (but will be soon; some of this blog&#8217;s regulars are already briefed in). I&#8217;ve just found something else that might help which I <em>can</em> talk about: micropatronage.</p>
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<p>There&#8217;s a site called <a href="http://gittip.com">gittip.com</a> that provides a way for people to give small recurring gifts, weekly, to a person or project team. Donors give it payment system information; weekly gifts are then automatically shipped unless donors elect to stop.  It&#8217;s meant to handle small amounts, with an upper limit of $100 per patron/client pair per week.</p>
<p>Gittip has the interesting property that, as a patronage receiver, you don&#8217;t know who your patrons are &#8211; all you know is the total amount you&#8217;re being gifted.  So people can fund you, but they can&#8217;t attach any strings.  There&#8217;s still a kind of market check; if you&#8217;re not doing work that your donor base as a whole finds interesting, your patronage volume will drop.</p>
<p>As a mechanism for funding commons development that is insulated from political and commercial pressure this seems very promising.  Of course it has other uses, too; creators of all kinds might be able to use it to turn reputation into a steady cash flow.</p>
<p>That is, if there are enough patrons.  Chad Whitacre and his team are betting that a lot of people will actually <em>prefer</em> making small recurring donations to single lump-sum gifts.  So far there is one piece of objective evidence that suggests they&#8217;re right: gittip development is itself funded through gittip.</p>
<p>Watch this space.  Soon, the gittip team and I will try an interesting social experiment&#8230;</p>
