What I’m imagining is that all pledge sites could implement a query where you could ask for a list of project fields changed or added since a specific date. The report would include title, subtitle, tags, amount pledged, target, progress, and optionally description and additional notes. This info would let a search engine search all crowdFunding sites in one hit with meaningful results — or browse by tag. The search engine would only have to fetch changed data once a day or so to update our indexes. We could each implement such a search engine on our own site. In fact, I’d be happy to collaborate in the development of search-engine code.

We may want to make it a condition of a crowdFunder being included in the search results that they also include all the others. We have to discuss boundaries.

In summary:
* all of us publish critical project facts in an agreed format
* all of us implement a search engine that searches all of our sites

Your idea of a wiki may be a good forum to post JSON output formats. Something that allows comments would be better for proposals & discussion: maybe even a blog entry here on openinnovators.

I can honestly say that back in May of ‘06 (when we registered bountyup.com), I couldn’t find any discussion of social commerce or crowdsourcing at all, so I totally understand what you mean.

As far as featureset, and especially the separation between charitable and commercial projects, I understand what you’re saying. (Although IMO there’s more difference in user experience than featureset - BountyUp’s multiple contracts is an analog to the progressive payment scheme that you’ve developed, I think.) And in the spirit of good, old-fashioned capitalism, I think we should pursue those differences.

The specific project that I see as good ground for collaboration is in the LEXICON - the more we can establish, clarify and promote a universal set of user-friendly terms, the better it will be for ALL these projects.

Where we do it (and what tools we use) is still up in the air - hopefully I’ll be getting together again with the GiveMeaning folks in the next few weeks (watch http://barcamp.org/DemoCampVictoria for proposed dates, etc.) - and we can brainstorm on the “digital venue”. Some obvious options:

* Wiki
* IRC
* OpenInnovators blogging and comments
* Hack-and-slash of wikipedia entries (I started on Social Commerce, but it obviously needs a lot of work).

Other ideas?

Joshua

PS - Yeah, the title got a bit cutesy. I was going for “tongue-in-cheek” mockery of the mess of our terminology, and I missed.

Thoughtful post.

We definitely didn’t set out to stifle the “crowdsourcing competition” — mainly we didn’t know it existed (much less did exist a year ago when we started out).

But I think you need another point on your “reasons” list: Each site has different features, and thinks they’re doing it better than the others (in certain ways, at least). I know we did, and still do think that to some extent.

We knew about PledgeBank when we started, but they didn’t do money handling. We’d seen Cambrian House, but again, it didn’t really do pledges/money (they do the ideas and commenting thing very well, though). There were others (Fundable, ChipIn) but they focussed mainly on fund-raising for charity stuff, whereas we focus on software, at present particularly open source.

Anyway, you’re right that all of us need to think more about working together. We’ve had some informal but friendly discussions with various players, but as soon as we get to talking about concretes and specifics, we get kinda stuck. I wonder if some kind of group chat between some of the players would be possible. Or is that what Open Innovators is intended to be?

Also: IMHO your title is too clever. I much prefer the more straight-forward title you gave it on del.icio.us: “Challenge to the ‘champions of collaboration’ — to collaborate themselves”.

Cheers,
Ben Hoyt (microPledge.com)