Making Open Software Massive

When millions of people need something, it doesn't make sense to wait for solo volunteers to build it. With tools to coordinate, large groups of users can drive development of important programs, especially those too complex for lone programmers to make for themselves.

The New Format of Social Finance

The biggest change to our funding solution is adding delegates to control funds, separating creators from control over the funds and making it easier for groups of contributors to move between different creators.

1. Enroll

Enroll into one or more streams, each of which have a general purpose. Streams match funds together using our Elastic Fund Matching system, creating a fund to reward people who build nice things.

2. Delegate

Choose experienced users as delegates based on how well they can advise you and other users on important questions, including regular support. Smart delegates give good support and can be trusted to spend funds wisely, making your money smarter.

3. Reward

Every week, the delegates award funds to programmers who built something that the community values and wants to encourage more of.

Introducing Elastic Fund Matching

Enrolled ➛ Matching ➛ Matched

Above is a simulation of many users of all different budgets enrolling in an Elastic Funding stream. It uses our matching rules to demonstrate how partial and full matches proceed through multiple levels. Every run is unique. Sometimes there are more large or small contributions.

Every Enrollment Has a Recruitment Effect

This prototype demonstrates the kinds of innovations we're bringing.

• Funds match a little bit at a time
• Small enrollments enable bigger enrollments to match in higher levels.
• Every step we take together is bigger. More people means more recruitment effects.
• Fully automatic, no negotiations or notifications.

Read the full terms of Elastic Fund Matching 1.0.0 for a more detailed breakdown. Our social finance terms contain more generic definitions that should vary less between versions of Elastic Fund Matching.

Matching Recurs Weekly

Week after week, matched funds will go to the right places without having to raise funds over and over. Every Sunday, the streams automatically begin matching again.

Delegates Make Being Smart Easy

Delegates can create accountability and clear communication so you don't have to log in every week or have a PhD in Wayland Compositor programming. Want to support Linux Gaming? Let someone else worry about whatever the inverse transform worldview matrix is.

Make PrizeForge Happen

While we find our message, prototype our features, and develop the feature-complete service that we want you to have, we opened a self-funding stream stream so that you can help us gain operating experience, recruit users by matching funds, and make this happen faster.

1. Top up your account with a 2-3 weeks of your choice of enrollment amount
2. Enroll in the self-funding stream for your maximum weekly amount.
3. Recruit other users! We will match your funds with other users a little bit at a time until more users show up.

Use of Funds

We are first focusing on features that can deliver value to user communities immediately while improving on what we have with Elastic Fund Matching. We can do a lot of good while completing our vision.

• Metered Billing & Post-Pay - We want to support only paying as much as what was matched each month. Post-pay does involve a little bit of trust from other users, so we are going to move a bit carefully, but we want to support more than just pre-pay.
• Streams - Raise funds for explicit goals. Streams can be broad, like Linux Desktop Environments or very specific, such as critical features in PipeWire. A stream for Linux Gaming can support improvements to VkD3D. Language ecosystems like Rust and individual programs like Emacs and Blender can have streams.
• Delegated Payout Authority - While we have big plans for new social decision models, the first step is to delegate authority so that not every contributor has to evaluate every single git repository. We will start with simple systems and build up.
• Expanding Elasticity - We are moving to quickly support sub-dollar matching and to add an at-least half rule that has cost-averaging behavior when higher levels become too small relative to lower levels. Another feature, Elastic Momentum, is in the design phase.

We believe our solutions can expand well beyond software and that we can build a business with massive impact. All of the founding team will remain deeply incentivized to put every available dollar back into the company.

Elastic Means Big!

Elastic Fund Matching is a tool for financing big things, things that can only happen when lots of people want it a lot. It creates cooperation between professionals, prosumers, small businesses, and beyond. If a Fortune 500 company puts a million dollars into a stream, they can be assured that it will only become fully matched when it has bought massive cooperation in return.

Support Economy Recruits Even Your Neighbor

Every user needs an reason to jump in. Users have questions. They need support. With PrizeForge, good support turns into control over more funds. There is a natural market for collecting delegation of funds from other users by giving them support so that you can use their funds to drive development of features and programs that are more important to you. Your neighbor wants to know which checkbox they should pick. You want to control a bigger tip jar. They want someone smart to use their tips wisely. Users will collect easy support wins in order to ask their own harder questions. We all win.

Get Involved!

Until we develop our on-platform communication features, we are relying on 3rd party platforms like Reddit and will continue using it later as an out-of-band relief valve. Subscribe to the sub-reddit to keep up with development and give feedback on new features and plans. We post short updates on BlueSky @positron26. Links to our YouTube and others can be found on our company site where we also plan to have a blog with an RSS feed to discuss our tech and perspectives on unfolding trends.

Can you tackle work in our job listings? Meet up with the team in Busan, South Korea, while we navigate out of the garage phase. Generous equity and career advancement opportunities are available for the right people.