Wednesday, August 15, 2007

micropledge.com

Erik Moeller wrote on his blog "Micropledge.com & paying for free culture". In many ways it is a really nice idea. All the Micropledge projects as they currently listed have one big failing, they do not state how much money is needed for any of the projects.

Erik proposed and probably pledged some money for a project called "RSS extension for namespaces with smart quality filtering". Twenty dollars have been pledged (US / Canadian / Taiwan it does not say..) and two people bothered to comment on the project .. they like it :) . I however would not pledge money to it as it is completely unclear how much money is needed for this job.

Micropledge is a young project and it deserves a chance. So I asked the CTO of Open Progress to come up with a budget that would allow an expensive developer to do the job. Some money would also be set aside for the necessary overhead. The point is not that Open Progress wants to do this job, the point is that there will be at least one Micropledge project that has a target amount associated with it.

In many projects like Rentacoder, you can post a project and developers can bid for the project. I sincerely hope that a good developer will want to do the job and will do it for less then the amount we will post. Bidding for projects is however not something that Micropledge caters for at this moment in time.

When in the end it turns out that enough money has been pledged, Open Progress will do the job. For us it is an experiment as well. Will posting a realistic amount of money get more pledges, will we in the end be asked to do the job ??

Thanks,
GerardM

5 comments:

kamen said...

It is fair to warn about the pitfalls of rentacoder.

Please note with bigger/serious projects rentacoder staff are INCREDIBLY STUPID PROFESSIONAL LIARS.
They lie even with their slogan.
The DUMMIES in rentacoder staff are proficient to blame someone else for their mistakes in attempts to hide their stupidity.
PERFECT evidences at http://kamen123.blogspot.com

With different words if someone tries to make serious project he will stumble in the incredible stupidity of rac staff. People interested to make serious projects have to go far away from rentacoder.

Do you see what I mean? Would you like to have more details and evidences?

GerardM said...

When I try to read Kamen's blog I read rants. The noise to sound level drowns out if there is something at all.

I am not impressed when others are called stupid and liars, certainly not when I read it time and time again.

Get a life and write better prose.

Thanks,
Gerard

NB Rentacoder is used here as an example ..

kamen said...

Hi Gerard

I'm not professional writer and my blog may not be perfect

But if you look at all articles you will see very funny evidences of the incredible stupidity of rac staff...

It is fair to warn about the pitfalls of rentacoder

Feel free to propose better text for my blog with the same content

Ben Hoyt said...

Hi GerardM, thanks for the feedback and encouragement. I thought I'd just answer a couple of questions you raise:

All funds are in USD. You're right, we should have made it obvious on each project page. Fixed now!

Actually, we not only support bids but encourage them. :-) On our site they're called "quotes", though. For instance, to place your quote, if you're signed in, go to that RSS MediaWiki project and click "Get paid to develop this project".

When you quote you choose a money target (say $1000) and a time-frame target (say 3 weeks).

After two weeks the best quoter (according to various rules) will be chosen. Or if only one person has quoted he can wait for others or start developing with his quoted target. See more info on our development process.

Hope that helps. If you (or someone you know) wants to quote for this project and get some more pledgers, we'll be right behind you. :-)

TakeReal said...

The insulter Kamen Kaburov (aka "kamen123") has been banned from RentACoder
Main reason: "He insulted other parties numerous times".
"kamen 123" spoil perfect site in revenge.