Presenting... PrizeForge: a novel crowdfunding model for sustainable open-source and fighting enshittification
I need you to do me a favor: please keep an open mind and reserve judgement until after you've thoroughly digested the ideas I'm presenting here. These are not my ideas, and I have no connection to this project. I hope to do them justice in representing them accurately and as clearly as I understand it all.
Please don't be dismissive. Please don't jump to conclusions. I would not be posting about this if I did not believe it has tremendous potential to reshape the digital economy, and therefore everything that governs how civilization progresses in the next century. Dramatic, much? Yes, but I hope I have your attention.
I'm not posting this as a plain link, because the website looks incredibly sus. Just trust me for a few minutes. Links are at the end.
(No generative AI was used to write this post.)
What is PrizeForge?
PrizeForge is a financial service that can be best thought of as "Representative Crowdfunding" (my term, not theirs). Like direct crowdfunding (e.g. Kickstarter), it lets people pool their money to support expensive projects that would otherwise be impossible to fund. Similar to Patreon, it can also be an effective tip jar for much smaller things that would otherwise go unrewarded.
The innovation is two-fold: first, contributors never move alone. As a contributor, you set a ceiling on your weekly payment. This is the "enrollment" amount. However, the actual amount of money disbursed each weekly cycle is the amount that is successfully "matched" with other contributors. In the simplest example, if I wanted to enroll for Tildes at $20/week, and one other user enrolled at $5/week, the disbursement would be the sum of the matched funds: $5 + $5. In this way, nobody ever pays an unfair proportion of the total, and small donations become an integral part of funding allocation. Additionally, like how philanthrophists often match charitable donations to meet a fundraising objective, matching provides a powerful incentive for individuals to contribute by making individual contributions feel more significant, since any money you part with can be doubled by another contributor. The more you put in, the more others will too. (PrizeForge calls this algorithm "Elastic Fund Matching". The full algorithm gets considerably more complex, but they have a neat visualization on their site and videos.)
Second, unlike existing crowdfunding and patronage systems, creators and companies do not receive fund disbursements directly. Rather, representatives ("Delegates") send the money to the people and organizations that should receive funds to deliver value to the stream's contributors.
"Won't delegates just siphon funds to themselves?" you ask. Well, yes, that will 100% happen at some point. Corruption is a human problem that can't be solved with technology alone. PrizeForge aims to provide mechanisms to allow the community to be very dynamic, so contributors can easily switch to a new representative—for any reason. Additionally, tools for transparency in how the money moves would go a long way in keeping delegates accountable.
In the context of open-source software, delegates should be experienced power users who are well equipped to evaluate features and bugfixes, and then can award the prizes to developers according to their best judgement.
The use of a representative has many advantages over direct crowdfunding. Someone highly invested in a software product has valuable experience and would be more effective at setting priorities for features and bugfixes. An experienced and trusted delegate would save developers time having to parse the requests (...demands?) of individual users who may not be able to articulate what they really want. Also, if a developer or company stops doing what people want (providing value to the people who care), then funds can flow to competing alternatives in a very granular and dynamic way, as the delegates shift funding and/or new delegates arise.
If we could pick a delegate here for Tildes, would anybody really object to @cfabbro?
These trusted delegates already exist, everywhere! We just haven't been able to cooperate in the right ways to delegate our individual power, so they can truly move the needle on funding the projects we care about. PrizeForge is, I believe, the first truly sustainable funding model for community-owned and directed open-source.
Addendum
Watch this video first! Before you get scared away by the terrible scammy-looking website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO46oEdlkY8
The FAQ: https://prizeforge.com/faq
The company's github page: https://github.com/positron-solutions
Looks like just two people, with Psionikus doing all the promotion and running accounts. The company is incorporated in South Korea. They've got a bunch of emacs tooling, and I believe the PrizeForge concept originated out of a desire to improve the funding/development process of emacs, then the lem editor. They also apparently have a bit of beef with the FSF due to emacs politcs. Check out the last FAQ for a fun easter egg.
The sub-reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/PrizeForge/
The Hacker News comment that took me down the rabbithole: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45036360
Bonus thoughts:
- What's really crazy is that this is not a crypto or blockchain project. You can do a simplified version of the elastic fund matching with just money, pen & paper.
- This financing scheme is basically an idealized utopian voluntary tax system. I can imagine a granular delegate system being extremely effective at making politics incredibly boring. Imagine electing a local representative only to have potholes fixed in your area, using only the funds earmarked for fixing potholes. It would be so much simpler to keep them accountable. Either the roads are crap or they aren't! Where's the money, bub?! Why've you got a fancy new lawnmower?! I want my $2 back!
- If this reaches critical mass, it ends surveillance capitalism and digital feudalism. I don't want to live in Black Mirror, and this seems like the way out of that future.
- I would really love it if we can establish a funding stream for Tildes. I know I can donate to Tildes directly, but it would be a great test run to help PrizeForge get operational and build credibility. I only need one other crazy person. Isn't the internet great? (My credit card has not been stolen btw)
- The password login is still in development, so you have to login via Google SSO. I absolutely hate using Google SSO but I get it from a developer perspective. Proper auth is hard and companies like Tailscale took the same path and still don't support password login. (My google hasn't been hacked either fwiw)
I support what it seems like they're trying to do, alternative crowdfunding options are good.
This is a dealbreaker for me. First because nty Google. But no less because auth really isn't that hard. You can find perfectly good auth systems already built in pretty much any language and building your own is really not difficult. Some quick searching will get you comprehensive information about vulnerabilities to avoid but if you don't have someone that already knows how to do it you're a long way from running a software company. Especially a financial service. To me that's a red flag, is this going to be a vibe coding thing? If not, where are the experienced engineers? Skipping auth to do the "fun stuff" first feels first timey.
I want my software made by people who took the time to do it right. It shows good faith.
Here's something else that felt a little off:
Contributors on our platform will potentially get a future product out of their contribution so that's why we have to be for profit. Huh?
If they'd just chosen to be a for profit company I wouldn't have done a double take, it's the weird logic that gives me pause. A nonprofit or public benefit corp will get outcompeted. Why? Kickstarter outcompeted everyone in their niche.
The only way I can think of that a for profit would have an advantage in this space is by accepting angel or hedge fund money and chasing an IPO. Which would be the opposite of the ethos they're claiming.
Caveat: I read a lot of their pitch but I wasn't inspired to really dive in so maybe it's a more exciting idea than I realize. But it's going to be hard to sell to a large market, lots of complication and friction.
I would like very much to believe there's a straightforward solution to corporate control and enshittification, which you seem to see as a possibility here, so I hope I'm wrong.
Well, thanks for taking a look. I think I can provide some clarification on your points, but of course caveat emptor because this is not my company.
Tailscale disagrees. I think I do too. (Tailscale blog: Managing usernames and passwords in-house is so 2020)
Particularly for a functioning MVP (as in, can take Stripe payments), relying on SSO is the smart move. A hack at this stage would completely destroy any chance of the platform gaining credibility.
Being a non-profit usually subjects you to reporting requirements and red tape. I think it's just way harder and would tie one's proverbial hands. I can start an LLC with $50 and an internet connection in 10 minutes, but certainly not a non-profit. (That Deimos started an actual Canadian non-profit for Tildes is legendary IMO.) Plus it's in South Korea? I have no idea what the regulatory environment is there, but I bet it's harder than in the USA.
I don't think it even matters if they sell out in the end. If the idea of representative crowdfunding attracts that much attention by big money, competitors will emerge. It's the idea that matters, not the specific company.
Representative democracy is to direct democracy as representative crowdfunding is to direct crowdfunding.
I don't feel that they make a compelling argument, though. They present reasons but they're very high level.
I need them to be more specific. They kind of are with this list of benefits:
* These amount to "it's nicer to use the corporate giants", but that's true for any product the project hopes to dislodge. I expect a project like this to exist because it's always easier to go with the mature and highly funded vendors, and it's trying to fix that.
** I consider this a valid consideration, but I don't agree with it.
*** This is just about cost.
Their article is also from the perspective of a for-profit business that is optimizing for making money. I didn't think it is good advice to apply to a business that, while for profit, is also trying to mix ethics into their goals.
I happened to have posted something about exactly this recently: companies in the ethical consumption niche need to work harder and pay more to survive. I'm also skeptical that they can ever endure, but I don't want to apply that here because I very much believe in the spirit of what you're sharing here. As a software engineer and spiritual socialist who grew up on Gene Roddenberry's future, I want this to happen.
I generally agree with @post_below. Building an auth platform is not hard. It's also not easy. It's just one of those things that's largely solved patterns (as Tailscale also notes), so as long as you're hiring people with experience, it can be very reasonably done and managed. And an ethical and honest and open with platform would maybe be the most valuable piece to do first: because Tailscale's advice is good advice for every startup, but it wouldn't be if there were a champion auth provider.
It's better to build systems where sociopathic, self-interested actors, produce outcomes that create real value for others. This is the reason why capitalism works so effectively to generate wealth. (caveat: negative externalities like chemical dumping must be controlled out-of-band by other mechanisms, such as government regulation)
I think PrizeForge as a platform can do that... both for itself as a for-profit company, for all of the contributors (who want stuff for their money), for developers (who can code more if they didn't need a day-job), and even for moochers who don't pay anything at all for open-source. Nobody needs to be a selfless hero to make this system generate value for everybody. Everyone's self-interest becomes aligned financially.
I still think this is an unfair criticism of an early-stage product. I don't think it's the red flag you believe it is, and password auth is currently in development. I do appreciate the discussion, however.
Just a quick clarification: I don't see it as a red flag. Any company in this space will have to be really strategic about what to pursue and how, so this conversation/criticism is par for the course. I think auth is an important piece to disrupt, but I am regardless interested in what PrizeForge wants to do.
Oooh, this looks really interesting, I wonder where this is going...
Oh! Nowhere! Sorry (not sorry) to be blunt but wealth is not in any way "real value for others".
You could argue that the individuals strive for wealth can help with innovation (but this isn't very clear IMO) but to say one persons wealth benefits others is not true, quite the opposite actually.
I am not using wealth in this context to mean "hoarded riches", but in the economics sense.
The house I am living in, the tea I am drinking, the chair I am sitting in, and the near-magical piece of technology I am using to post this reply is material wealth made possible (almost) entirely by the aligned cooperation of self-interested people throughout history into the modern day. That is how economies function and is the basis of civilization!
That's true, so I'd be content with something like "Right now we want to see if this is a viable idea so we're going to launch without taking the time to setup a board and apply for nonprofit or public benefit status. Later we'll convert because we believe this service is a benefit to the world rather than an opportunity to make profits and eventually become what we claim to be against."
But from what they're saying it sounds like they're all in on for-profit and want us to belive that's the ethical choice.
I'd even be ok with "we want to make some money from this but we'll open source the core software at some point because our whole thing right now is open source". Instead they're very clear, with more sketchy logic, that they won't be open sourcing.
It's important from my perspective that they're targeting the open source community for funding but seem to be rejecting the community's values. That's going to make it a tough sell.
If only history wasn't littered with great ideas brought to market in the wrong way or at the wrong time. You can take a killer idea and set it back by decades by associating the wrong things with it.
Note that I appreciate your support for their goals, I agree with you in principle, and I'm glad you posted. It's an interesting idea even if their implementation has (maybe fatal) flaws.
I think it is the ethical choice. As I posted above, PrizeForge aligns self-interested actors to cooperate, including the company and founders.
What is the real reason they should open-source?
What I can infer you want is openness and transparency. I think open data with a public API would satisfy that requirement far better than open source code, particularly for a finance platform that is vulnerable to being gamed by bad actors. Third-party security audits would also be good. Making backend code and database schemas available would be a liability.
Thanks. I really hope they manage to succeed with it, because otherwise I'm going to have to pick up the mantle myself in the future. I just don't have the time or the skill right now. I don't think I could do a better job myself, except maybe for the marketing.
To be honest, I'm not really on board with the delegator thing. I get the idea, but I'm not on board with it.
1- What's to stop the delegators from being corrupted? As you pointed out, nothing, but to me that elephant in the room is still in the room. What's to stop creators from bribing delegators? What's to stop delegators from creating a coalition of some sort and only fund certain creators? Is the website going to implement some sort of safety feature that prevents delegators from running away with money before the community realizes the corruption? Etc etc
2- Or another type of corruption, what's to stop delegators from strong-arming the creators? "Either make this feature that I want, or I give these funds to someone else."
3- Why should there be an extra middleman between a supporter and the creator? As a supporter, I'll have to deal with a delegator that may or may not fund the creator I want to support. I understand that, it seems, what a delegator actually is basically a project manager, but to me that seems like.... Look, mixing project manager with fund managing to me is just a odd mix. I can't put it into words but to me it looks like a bad recipe.
4- Follow up to the previous point, I don't really understand this divorce that this website is creating between creators and projects, as >90% of the time both are married. For example, case in point, Tildes. Is Tildes a multi "creator" project? Creator meaning, different independent teams. It's not, I assume? It belongs to a guy or a team, a single creator. If so, what is a delegator even doing here then? Apply this logic to... Well, so many other projects.
5- As a creator, why would I pick this website and deal with this quirk, instead of just using kickstarter and patreon? Sure they're not perfect, but I can trust them to deliver the money that the supporter gave away, without any weird quirks in the middle.
Sorry for the negative comment. I'm not against more options in the market and wish them luck, but this delegator thing is too red for me
Your objections are just as valid against representative democracy! There's no easy solution besides human social interaction, people talking to other people, building and ruining reputations. Like society, it's "trust, but verify". Instead of using technology to replace human social structures, this platform offers a way to smooth it out and scale it up.
This isn't meant as a platform for creators to choose. Creators having such power and ownership is one of the problems this platform is meant to solve! All of us are consumers of most things, most of the time.
Don't like how Firefox has changed? We're all held hostage by ultimately the lack of money to pay developers for the maintenance and features people actually want. If there was a passionate delegate who could point a firehose of money enough to hire some developers full-time, there isn't really a limit on the scale on the kind of open-source projects that could take off.
Want an alternative to Android and iOS? Don't look to VC funding or any existing big tech company. Even if such a thing could be made by a company, its eventual fate is to enshittify so that it can turn a profit.
But we're talking about a monetary website, not a state. I think that's a very important distinction.
To me, it looks more like ignoring the elephant and hope for the best.
Maybe it's an ideology thing but for me, money is the source of many evils. I've seen families torn apart over money, I've seen friends becoming enemies over it, etc.
That's why, when it comes to money, the less ambiguity the better. The less actors, moving parts, points of failure, the better.
But this website instead of making a simpler and more frictionless system, they do the reverse....
Regardless, you need to atract the creators to your website (or are the delagators supposed to be able to transact the money outside of the platform? I sure hope not!)
And if the creators don't come to the website, the investors/donators also won't come, because they want to support their creators, and their creators are using patreon and kickstarter.
I find it odd how preemptively defensive this post is. Please reserve judgement, trust me for a few minutes, the website looks sus... doesn't exactly inspire confidence. Nevertheless, I read your post, watched the linked video, and read their website, trying to understand it all. Their FAQ for some reason also reads as somewhat preemptively defensive...? But generally, their material is hard to understand, and unfortunately, I get some "scrappy web3/crypto startup" vibes from it all.
The fact that PrizeForge is a for-profit startup is the nail in the coffin for me. Being simultaneously anti-enshittification and for-profit is just hypocrisy.
That being said the core idea of matching donations is promising. I hope a nonprofit can take this idea and be successful.
Good products cannot be profitable?
Good products can be profitable, but you can always count on products delivered by for-profits to enshittify.
Well there's the connection. If they had done a better job of not looking crazy, I wouldn't have to be so defensive. It makes me look crazy. But I do genuinely believe they're on to something.
None of my family understands it either. It may just be too complicated for most people to get right away, and the complete lack of credibility makes people tune it out.
I hope you don't have to look back on this paragraph with regret..
I don't have much to lose here besides looking a fool. It's not a crypto project promising to make people rich if only they invest their life savings. It's an interesting and new way to crowdfund open-source and more.
I am already in the habit of using my money to vote for products and ideas I believe in. I've sent hundreds of dollars to GamersNexus in the last year in support of their excellent pro-consumer investigations. I jumped on a Kickstarter for VR treadmill shoes at the tune of over $1000.
I believe that a little money at the right time to the right people with the right idea can absolutely change the world for the better. You don't have to be a billionaire to effect change, you just have to be cognizant of the opportunities and willing to fight for them. It's not blind faith; it's tactical faith.
I've gotten burned before. I was a backer of ConsoleOS to the tune of ~$40 or so. When Psyonikus describes the accountability problem on platforms like Kickstarter, I understand that personally. There was basically nothing I can do to get my money back, even though the creator's identity was public. I'm not going to sue him for $40 he doesn't have anymore.
We have a cooperation problem. Why are we all complacent and willing to have value extracted from us? It's a hard problem that nobody has solved yet. The fundamental problem that PrizeForge addresses is very real. So real that the entire economy has revolved around it for the last 20 years, building the most valuable companies in the history of humanity. I believe their solution is worth trying, particularly when all you need to risk is a few dollars and looking naive.
If you gave your money to a delegate to make ConsoleOS, how does this protect against a project failure? Would they still not incur costs during the development of the failed project, making it impossible to recover your money?
Unlike a Kickstarter, a matched enrollment funding stream would function more like Patreon. Rather than a lump sum payment where you can "take the money and run" after crossing a funding threshold, the capital gets allocated in weekly disbursements. So if an OS dev fails to make enough progress to satisfy contributors, then the delegate can direct funding to a different developer entirely.
A failed Kickstarter destroys the entire crowdfunding initiative, and a competing Kickstarter wouldn't be able to capitalize on the momentum of the failed one, even though the demand was proven real by the scammers. A new Kickstarter campaign would have to rebuild the entire contributor base from scratch–considerably harder, especially because potential contributors would be rightfully jaded from being scammed.
The PrizeForge process would also not be all-or-nothing. Individual contributors are free to join and leave streams for different delegates and projects according to their perception of delivered value and their trust in delegates. If you think a delegate isn't transparent enough, or doesn't want the same features you want, you can simply change where your funds go. Your contributions, in theory, never have to pay for things you don't value.
In practice, you will have to pay some attention to what the delegates are doing. However, large contributors are going to watch delegates like a hawk, because they have a more significant stake. So I believe corruption and inefficiency can be rooted out relatively quickly via human social structures.
This sounds like it would result in weird instability for creators of projects, and another point of failure with the delegate. If my preferred project is making progress that I think is valid but my delegate disagrees, I could withdraw my funding but my delegate could still redirect all other the funds they had accumulated to some other project even though the thing I actually wanted is doing exactly what I want. Now I need to really trust two people instead of just one, but also kind of everybody who has already “pledged” (but not really) funds.
It also makes the project undesirable from the creator's perspective. If they think it will cost $50k to do a project, but people can withdraw their funding at any time, then there's no guarantee that hitting their $50k funding goal will actually mean they get $50k. Now they run the risk of doing a bunch of work and have the rug pulled out from under them by a delegate who decides they want to fund a competitor, or by pledgers who change their mind.
It sounds like this whole project is really geared to creating professional delegates who administer funds. Is that what we want? Middle management for crowdfunding? This sounds about as desirable as creating the insurance industry to interface between patients and doctors.
You aren't accounting for all the people toiling away in open source as essentially free labor, who get virtually nothing in return except complaints and GitHub issues. The delegate system makes possible funding streams for a "concept" rather than a specific creator and their project, so people can pool funding to support developers they may not even know, but would still benefit from their work.
Delegates should be super-users and highly-invested advocates for a software project, not some bureaucrat crawling out of the woodwork. I wouldn't let some random bureaucrat decide what to do with my open-source money.
Yes, it would be possible for this system to become over-financialized. That wouldn't happen unless contributors are apathetic. Unlikely, considering contributions are entirely voluntary!
I think convoluted, or possibly overwrought, is a better word than complicated, and I don’t think it’s the stupidity of readers that is the source of friction in comprehension.
"It's a cooperative crowdfunding model where your contributions are matched by others, so nobody pays an unfair amount, and the people who care the most about <thing> can figure out how to spend the money to make <thing> better."
It's their website that's convoluted and highly technical, not the core model. A lot of people are highly intelligent, but don't parse technical jargon. And they wouldn't even try in this case because the site is awful!
I think it's a marketing issue.
I really think the problem lies in the delegates, that's the weird part. Everything up to that makes sense to me.
You may have cracked the nut of the problem.
Consider:
In most cases, that person is the creator, and the money would be better off going directly to them. Most OSS are single-contributor projects.
However, that doesn't mean representatives are a bad idea all the time. The largest OSS projects could certainly benefit from a representative system. At a certain scale, delegation becomes necessary–just like democracy! When OSS gets gridlocked, a better system for reallocating funding would make forking less costly.
There are some other situations where delegation can enable funding in creative ways, such as streams for categories like "Skyrim VR mods". However, those would function like foundations, and therefore there is no reason to bake a mandatory complex delegation system into the service. It would merely be another funding stream by a dedicated volunteer to raise and distribute funds.
Delegate competition shouldn't be baked internally into funding streams. To compete as a funding delegate, you'd start a new stream instead. Flatten the hiearchy and the system becomes transparent, while being straightforward and simple for the vast majority of single-dev OSS.
If a malicious actor wanted to tank the funding for a project, couldn't they just pledge one cent and force everyone's contributions to match it?
As I understood it, the elastic matching is what deals with this? I understood it to be like a sort of progressive pooled Vickrey auction, so a person pledging $0.01 would go towards a partial match of one of the smallest match pools. Like if I want to pledge $8, then my whole pledge would be committed if two other people pledged $4 each.
I'd imagine they have a one dollar (bob) minimum.
Musing only: then they get a lot of one cents, which was a better than $0, and folks can
vote on excluding the one cent-er next round
Raise the minimum
This just seems like a worse version of kickstarter.
This doesn't make any sense. For one, flat payments are not equal, for the same way that flat taxes are regressive. If someone makes significantly more money than someone else, it makes sense for that person to pay more. Similarly, if someone is significantly more invested in the product than someone else, it also makes sense for them to pay more.
In practice, with such a system the amount everyone is going to pay is just going to be the minimum possible payment, turning a project with 20k contributors - which would be a lot of money on patreon or kickstarter - into at most $20k/yr, which is not even minimum wage in the US.
It more begs the question of why randomly introduce a point of corruption when you can... just give the creators the money?
This feels like a solution in search of a problem.
The explanation here didn’t do the idea justice, the video is more true to actual implementation.
How they intend for it to work is that if there are two donation tiers, $1 and $100, you require 100 $1 donators for every 1 $100 donator.
I couldn’t explain why this meaningfully changes the power dynamic at all. If I’m an $100 donator not seeing my money go through, I’m just choosing a different platform.
I think their vision is that these delegates are more representative of the interests of the donators than the creators. I just have no idea why that would be true.
100% agreed.
I suppose they're trying to enforce a pyramidal distribution. I'm also not sure why this is supposed to change anything. It feels like they're seeing how some politicians brag about getting mostly low denomination donations from a lot of people (e.g Bernie Sanders) and trying to make it some kind of enforced policy? Which seems backwards.
Ironically after mulling on it more, I feel like they're basically reconstructing investment funds. An investment fund is a "delegator" that the investors invest money into and the fund decides where and to whom it invests in. Ironic because, given the verbiage on the site, the word "venture capitalist" would probably make the creators shudder, but it is what they ended up making in the end!
From the perspective of somebody contributing $1, it's more motivating to contribute because your $1 unlocks a big contributor's dollar, making your $1 more like $2. This can happen over and over again.
This matching works recursively down the matching levels following binary decomposition of enrollment amounts into power-of-two fragments. So every contributor can match at their amount or lower multiple times, but a groundswell of support is needed to unlock truly large contributions.
For the big contributor, it provides social validation of your support. Big contributors would also generally be the most passionate advocates who deeply care about the project, and want to get more people involved as users, so social reward is enough I think.
Yeah, Pen, Paper and putting a lot of trust in an Emacs enthusiast. "and for that reason, I'm out"
I was this close to switching to emacs. The only reason I didn't was that the custom keyboard layout I finally was able to come up with was vim/kakoune friendly.
Consider how democratic governments work. People pay their taxes, and representatives decide how those dollars are spent, ultimately hiring people directly or contracting companies to accomplish a goal.
The equivalent to representatives in this case is the “delegate”. This illuminates where the actual power lies; you are not funding the creator, you are funding the delegate.
Consider how much power Google has over Firefox, as Google is their “firehose of money”. The delegate would have the same power as Google in this potential idea. Again, you are not funding the creator, you are funding the delegate.
It’s worth noting that sometimes a similar setup is very useful. Consider a non-profit like FUTO, who primarily just funds other projects and does very little directly. This allows them to coordinate projects with a common goal and increase collaboration in the space. Once more, the delegate is the one being funded.
I think precisely when you want one person or a group of people to have control over a large sum of money, they eventually delegate and become a natural “middleman”, kind of like how politicians don’t implement changes directly. I’m simply pointing out that the delegate isn’t someone who is holding the creator accountable, they are the ones who need to be held accountable (in multiple senses of the word!).
On PrizeForge, there would be less friction for people to choose different delegates who may represent what they want better.
The ad-hoc delegates you describe end up "locking in" the contributors. This is also why non-profits end up with bloated expenses, because the network effect is strong and "regular" people with small contributions don't look that closely at how funds are used. There's little accountability when you can't switch delegates.
In representative crowdfunding, you'd have the possibility of multiple delegates that can collaborate together but also keep each other in check because they are in competition for funds.
Intriguing idea. I hope some nonprofit try it and massively succeed, because we need something like this. (Maybe not this particular one, I'm happy donating directly to Deimos)
I hope you don't take this comment as a massive bummer or personal attack of you giving attention to a really creative solution for a dire problem, because I'm glad to hear of people trying something new.
This is basically the core idea of snowdrift.coop. Unfortunately that project never really went anywhere. But there was a very in-depth wiki that had a lot of good ideas. Let me see if I can find it...
There's really a lot of discourse around the idea but not a lot of progress it seems... hopefully this "PrizeForge" is different--but it seems to be just a slightly worse version of the idea!