Race 2: OpenBounty.org
OpenBounty.org will be a site where people can open up bounties on a variety of tasks. Initially I’ll be targetting open source software development but I will leave it open for anything from software to community assistance. Users create a bounty by pledging a set amount of money. Other users can then contribute to that bounty with their own pledges. Bounties will need to have an expiry date at which point an unclaimed funds would be returned to the users.
There will be two types of bounties and the type of bounty set will determine the selection process. In service bounties, claimants will write a proposal which will go out to all those who have pledged. Those individuals will then get to vote based on the percentage of the pledge they’ve committed on which proposal to accept. Once the task is complete the users will then vote again to determine if the bounty task has been completed. If it has then the funds are released to the claimant. If not then it will go to a site arbitrator to try and resolve the problem. This method of bounty would be useful for community projects like "Clean up the basketball courts".
The second type would be useful for projects like "Add feature X to product Y". Users create bounties just as before but this time the first step is skipped and the vote only on the completed project. First to complete it and pass a vote of pledged individuals collects the bounty. If the pledged individuals reject a claim the claimant can choose to go through an arbitrator.
OpenBounty.com would handle and financiall processing through paypal, google checkout and amazon payments and possibly with direct credit card payments in the future. It would also take a capped percentage from each bounty to cover costs.
For this project I am giving myself 1 week. This could be tough as I am expecting to start a fulltime contract this week but I think even working part-time I should be able to get it going.
Site: OpenBounty.org
Deadline: Sunday August 10th as 1pm GMT+10
Goals:
1. All features outlined above except for payment processing
2. Paypal payment processing only