---------- Forwarded message --------- Date: Sat, Jul 13, 2019 at 4:51 PM Subject: Funding ideas To: Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@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-w... https://help.github.com/en/articles/displaying-a-sponsor-button-in-your-repo...
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.