Thank you for this write up. As someone who has loved actually doing the mod, and using the machine afterword (hardware and espresso novice for the most part), I’ve felt like I am taking crazy pills following along as an open source maintainer in the past. The weaponizing of CC-NC is wild to me, though I think it might be coming a bit from the 3D printing STL sharing community.
It just all makes my heart hurt. It is a great accessible DIY project with amazing results, but just with insane baggage.
It’s been honestly pretty fun to run this at BackerKit. Sad to say it caught my COO, but actually more inspiring seeing my team banding together and fighting back and letting folks know in Slack. Also, a bonus, a really cool lean use of Drift which inspired us to use that tool better.
BackerKit is the best way for crowdfunding creators to manage their backers, help fulfill their campaign on time, and allow them to focus on what they love doing—making something awesome! We've helped thousands of creators to raise over $115M, supporting them in everything from surveys to shipping.
To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/backerkit
BackerKit is looking for Developers that love to pair | San Francisco, CA | Onsite
BackerKit is the best way for crowdfunding creators to manage their backers, help fulfill their campaign on time, and allow them to focus on what they love doing—making something awesome! We've helped thousands of creators to raise over $115M, supporting them in everything from surveys to shipping.
To learn more about who we are, our engineering culture, and whether this is the right place for you, read our Key Values profile: https://www.keyvalues.com/backerkit
People putting themselves out there, even if it's not quite there, is still something worth encouraging IMHO.
It's hard to get a single person to care. The Creative Fund now is a group of folks want to see people take the leap and try and put new things into the world.
You would be surprised at some of the messages we get. Actually heartfelt responses of folks saying that getting this first pledge pushed them over the edge to push harder. I'm excited that if we get to a point where the funds might be even $5 or $20 per project, that CAN be a material difference to lots of cool projects. Projects don't need even $1000 goals to be compelling.
As we mention in the article, a lot of it IS about the token statement, and we have thousands of KS messages at least of grateful folks supporting. Do you value your $1 supporters on Patreon? Do they have a material benefit for you?
If we figured out how to make the fund work for Patreon, how would you feel?
$1 can be an inspiring start that gets folks to promote their project and get up and get going. It is a bit more about the principle, like a high five to get up and get going.
Also part of the experiment is the Patreon. Every $1,000 we may or may not raise means we can up the amount by ~$1, every month. So that means as an individual, you can pledge ~$12/year and say you contributed to every project on Kickstarter that year.
Happy to answer any questions! This was a fun project to start, and we have lots of crazy ideas how we might make this even more fun (ie Patreon people above a certain level automatically get filled out to get rewards, etc etc)
It just all makes my heart hurt. It is a great accessible DIY project with amazing results, but just with insane baggage.