This is part of a series of Discussions of "Difficulties for Commons-Based Development".
We've already covered
Any fascile solutions are probably half-solutions at best – anyway, the suggestions that we've come up with so far include:
1. doing local interpersonal networking by random or targeted outreach (which I've had some luck with along the 'philosophical discussion' dimension)
2. "creating" new programmers from the collection of site users by a targeted educational programme featuring documented code and praxis (which I would say is underway on the noosphere mailing list)
3. generating involvement/support from Google's Summer of Code philanthropy (which has already supported several of our projects in the past)
4. setting a goal that can be broken down into small segments that ONE can actually do, and doing a little bit at a time (e.g. my mega-pagecount creative writing project that I've broken up into 3-page daily or other manageable segments)
5. using good collaboration tools (which is a problem that we've worked on many times, and which is one of the central problems of CBPP)
None of these heuristics seems particularly relevant to the problem of raising funds, although item 4 seems like it could be applied – once we had a list of potential funders/benefactors in hand, which in fact we do, and someone with the time and interest to go down that list. (And I think we could do this, and could presumably justify paying someone to do it, much like we're paying someone to get the membership system up and running.)
As we've had pointed out to us, Marnita's suggested approach is rather different from the grant-seeking approach. In grant-seeking (which I think is very similar to the fellowship-seeking I've tried), the fundamental difficulty or bind is that (a) /you are asking for money to fund work that you haven't done/, and unless (b) you have a substantial track-record to show that you can do that work, and unless (c) the hithertofore unheard-of result is actually in demand, funding will not appear.
Succinctly, working on (c) is called "creating a pitch", and working on (b) is called "creating a resume".
In the parenthetical remarks attached to items 1-5 above, I've made a tiny "resume" of my own successes, and I'm sure that collectively we could note down many other successes we've had collaboratively.
A good pitch will of course take features of its audience and the broader landscape into account. For example, after several years of bad results, we could well ask whether CBPP is really in demand at the NSF – or maybe it's approach that's wrong – but either way, other audiences may be more enthusiastic about CBPP, and finding them seems like the best way to make a good pitch.
But (a) is the crux of the matter, and the more I think about it, the more I come to believe that the way people do work traditionally is just wrong for the kind of work that needs to be done for CBPP to thrive.
For one thing, people tend to be paid for well-understood tasks – but when I say that we'd like to fund work we haven't done, I mean that sometimes we only have the barest outlines of what the work will look like in advance – the perimeter of an unknown territory, so to speak. Someone funding this work would have to be comfortable funding people to solve a boundary value problem, and presumably for that to happen, they'd need to be fairly well acquainted with the specific boundary or research frontier in question.
And for another thing, I mean that in a fairly global sense. While it is OK to pick away at one part of the frontier – which is how traditional research presumably works – CBPP is such a heterogeneous topic, ideas and contributions will presumably be coming from all over the traditional map. (My own approach, as reflected in the above parentheticals, includes philosophical anthropology, free software development, creative writing, and nuts-and-bolts administrivia – and of course that's very far from being all.)
In this sense, funding CBPP is a bit like a koan – how can you get funded to take on the global aspects of a global problem? (which is to say, a problem that in many aspects is best addressed in small pieces by disparate individuals).
Please make sure you're looking at all the right meta-levels in the above sentence!
One answer that occurs to me is to solve the problem backwards in this fashion: examine the economy of successful CBPP or meta-commons project – figure out where money is going to come from – and then just borrow money (perhaps from a suitable micro-lender) to be paid back when the money flows in later. (Presumably this is called "creating a business model".)
But another answer is to just do the work without borrowing money, and without being sure where or whether funding will come from later, and trust that it will. (This is frequently described as borrowing the money from yourself, via the marketplace that determines the opportunity cost of your time.)
A final answer could kick off a whole new essay – so I'll put it in the form of a question. To what extent does the search for funding and thinking about funding actually detract from one's or one's community's ability to do work?