Toward an Economy of Open Abundance: Why FLO funding needs donor coordination and how to do it

There are four categories of economic goods: private goods, club goods, commons, and public goods. FLO (Free/Libre/Open) software and other similarly-licensed digital works are public goods — meaning they are open and abundant. So, they don't fit our market economy which relies on the opposite — scarcity and exclusion. Forcing software into the standard economic system leads to reliance on paywalls and ads. Can we do better? In the first part of this talk, Aaron will provide an updated understanding of the economic dilemmas with public goods. He will explain how standard language and models of economics make assumptions that work against the goals of software freedom. From there, we can see how to frame a new economic understanding of sharing and abundance. To get the key concepts, we need to distinguish between goods and services, exclusive vs open, and scarce vs abundant. We can see these as traits on continuums (between clearly open and clearly exclusive are examples of partly-open). With these core ideas in mind, we can more easily see the issues with FLO projects today (along with many related parts of the economy). In the second part of the talk, Michael will argue that crowdfunding for FLO projects is not effective enough as is. That's why we see appeals to donate often couched in terms of merely buying someone a coffee and similar. To become a game-changing economic force for good, we need to improve one critical feature: donor coordination. We believe that many more people would happily donate modest amounts to support FLO projects whose works they use and value — if only they could be confident that it would make a real difference. Most of us cannot give enough individually to change the game, but if large numbers of individuals can coordinate and donate together, the collective funding power could have a massive impact and even ultimately change the nature of our economy. The basic principle of donor coordination is simple — what you donate can be tied to what others donate. But exactly how best to do it is not a simple question. There are many ways it can be approached, each with different pros and cons. Michael will present the key "how" variables, discuss their significance, and outline some of the pros and cons of each. And he'll describe the work he and others are doing to develop usable platforms to test these coordination ideas with real funding. The panel following this talk at 3pm will provide an opportunity to explore these ideas further in interactive discussion.