Re: GNU Herds micropayments, microdonations, job offers, etc. -- Initial analysis

John Sennesael wrote:
> It would be interesting if donators could sign up with an account and
> 'deposit' an undefined amount of money, then receive back credits to
> distribute among projects/pledges/whatever whenever they want to.

> The advantage of a system like this would be:
>     1) You can donate to multiple projects/pledges with only 1 paypal fee.
>     2) This would allow for micro-donations. People can donate $1 or
>        less to as many projects as they want. Since normally, a low
>        donation would be absorbed by paypal fees.

* joboffers

* micro-payments,
  micro-donations or
  pledges to:
      an specific task (job offer),
      person,
      project (gnome, kde, ...),
      organization (FSF, FSFE, ...)


GNU Herds has already job offer support. IMHO it could be good idea to add the 
micro-payments feature be able to sum lots of 2 cents to create a user's 
predefined job offer.

When the micro-payments feature be ready it could be easy get the 
micro-donations feature too.

Anyone can contribute to add the feature they like more. I would contribute to 
get the micro-payments one.



> The author of that site has written an interesting article reflecting
> one year of the site's operation which includes some interesting
> observations related to the dynamics of donations:
>     http://www.donationcoder.com/Articles/One/index.html

At section 6.1 "The future of micropayments/microdonations ..." it reads:

 "we're likely to see a standardized micropayment system where any
  user can buy anything on any web page, from any computer terminal,
  with a simple click or thumbprint swipe. When that happens, it
  should make micropayments considerably easier for individuals to
  make a living off of, rather than depending on the filters of large
  corporations, news organizations, software companies, music labels, etc."

Could GNU Herds use the same micropayment system?



> I have been involved with that site and community for a few years now,
> and I'd love to see a similar system implemented for Free software.