[Arm-netbook] Fwd: Funding ideas

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
Date: Sat, Jul 13, 2019 at 4:51 PM
Subject: Funding ideas
To: Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net>


Hey. Sad to say I had little progress on my "Why EOMA for crypto"
article/promo campaign but at least I have some ideas to share.

1. Education

What is a good susbtance for education? Something open and available.
You can't teach and study the making of computers on closed Intel
hardware and software. You can use open platforms like OLPC or Minix
but most of them have a drawback - they are either purely
academic/educational, or unpopular/unsuccessful in the wild.

With EOMA and Libre RISC you (as an educational institution) can have
both: something that is open down to the bone and can be a great
learning substance for studens, _and_ something that is a real
commercial product in the wild.

The idea is to grow partnerships with schools/unis/academia (and
possibly win some grants).

For EOMA there are potential strategic benefits - it will be very hard
to kill something that generation(s) have studied in schools/unis. If
your random geek neighbor can fix or upgrade your device I'd call it a
win.

2. OSS funding platforms

Recently I ran across some OSS funding movements emerging in the crypto space.

One is called Gitcoin. It is a general bounty platform for funding
open source. Recently they had quite a lot of overlap with Ethereum

https://gitcoin.co/blog/radical-results-gitcoins-25k-match/

Another one is GitHub - they recently integrated a sponsorship system
that allows to fund individual developers. Repository admins can now
increase visibility of funding options for their open source projects
via the FUNDING.yml file, which currently supports GitHub Sponsorship,
Patreon, Open Collective, Ko-Fi, Tidelift, Community Bridge, as well
as custom URLs.

https://help.github.com/en/categories/supporting-the-open-source-community-with-github-sponsors
https://help.github.com/en/articles/displaying-a-sponsor-button-in-your-repository

I'm sure there are other such platforms. The common thing is they all
look how to match donors with workers.

3. Grants from specific crypto treasuries

Zcash Foundation grants is just one example. This is obviously not
general and is Zcash specific. Since the focus is Zcash, I guess they
might need clear understanding what will Zcash gain - in our case this
is a non backdoored, fully auditable, cheap device that allows one to
run a light crypto wallet and that you can easily carry around.

Example funded initiative:

https://zengo.com/zcash-foundation-funds-research-project-by-kzen/

The above idea applies to any cryptocommunity that might be interested
in cheap and trusted computing device.

It also applies to Decred - we now have a platform where anybody can
pitch an idea to stakeholders, run a vote and possibly get funded.
Like 10 or 20 initiatives have already been funded. They were all
specific to Decred, but I hope that the understanding of importance of
hardware will grow and stakeholders would approve some joint funding
for decent projects like EOMA.

4. Meta: reuse existing research

The problem is not new. This guide has collected various approaches
and case studies: https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand

Feel free to share this to anyone who might advance these ideas.