There's always a business model question hovering around iSummit, and 08 is no exception. Jamie King talked about what he'd learnt from Steal this film -with some great pidgeon pictures - but also talked about VODO, a platform for users to donate for cultural production on peer-to-peer networks. Each work has a paypal account linked to it, and the community can identify files as being tokens of a "work''. Donations get aggregated. Now, the nice twist I liked here was Jamie's idea of giving works the option to specify that some percentage of donations will be spread back into the community of previous donors - by donating you are buying a share. This will appeal in some places and in some communities. You will need to fix the shape of pyramid, etc - and you could let donors specify _who_ their share was going to go to --- good, for example, in communities where the scheme seemed too Wall Street -like for comfort.
More generally, it struck me that getting good ways of chanelling funds for specific types of production is something that all publishers on the commons are trying to do. So here is another opportunity for iCommons to think about shared infrastructure.How about iCommons created buttons -- and systems behind -- that I could embed on a piece of content and which said:
``I'd like to support this piece of content''
``I'd like to give general support to this organisation"
``I pledge $x to this project as long as total pledges amount to $y"
In all these cases, I think that standardisation across Commons sites would be useful - the donor would come to learn what a button meant; could have an account at the shared piece of infrastructure , etc.
OK, and iCommons could have a pyramid-shaped button for VODO :)
