Big Economy: Group-to-Group

Enable collections of unincorporated open source developers and open source users to do business as coherent groups. Work on bigger problems. Raise serious revenue. People don't need to be in the same legal entity to share the same needs. Groups with lightweight organization can solve problems faster and more efficiently without waiting on the usual third parties (capital) to pick whoever has the best toll-gate. PrizeForge is about production finance. It only pursues value creation. It pursues it directly.

We Do The Busy Work

Positron's business aims will meanwhile focus on the onramps and offramps to make company-less cooperation legitimate in a concrete world that has laws and regulations. We want to abstract away the busy-work, the taxes, the compliance etc. Let users and programmers focus on what matters. We want to introduce models of finance and social-decision systems that enable this kind of lightweight cooperation efficiently at every scale, all the way from consumer to B2B.

Open Source First

PrizeForge is particularly well-suited to the challenges of funding the production of consumer Open Source. We think this is a deeply under-served market that could easily see billions of dollars of eager user funds flowing into creation of software that has value propositions second to none:

• Once it is created, you can't be charged for the same thing over and over
• Exclusively value driven, never distorted to fit a business model or exploit a susceptible customer group
• Lowers the cost of competitive disruption, enabling newcomers to fight stupid competition that hurts almost everyone

Industry today adds massive friction to value delivery all the time because of trying to stuff product ideas into business models. They destroy value by pursuing only products that can be marketed to low-information customers who are easier to take advantage of. Everyone can easily see how Open Source is better for them. It just needs a production finance model that fits, and we think we can deliver that model.

High-Scale Support Network

Organizing our decision making around who knows the software best will naturally gather up users who are best suited to answer hard questions. In a world where the low-end support is readily taken care of by generative AI, the need will shift to organizing users who have the expertise to provide the small amounts of high-quality support. That content can belong to the public domain or to the users who created it, but either way, that is where value is going. That is the new source of demand for value that only humans can create.

PrizeForge can create a support network like no other, one that crosses all language barriers and timezones, one that enables open source software to be used by billions of people around the world. Sometimes the right answer is to build a new feature or piece of software. When that time comes, the people who provide high-end support can translate customer needs into funding objectives and specifications for programmers. Open Source can build. Open Source can integrate. Open Source does what's best for the customer, not whoever wrote the software years ago.

New Kind of Social Finance

Continuous

Self-Organizing

Social Finance

Industry has matured a lot since 2009 when Kickstarter first launched, when Amazon payments and 10% fees was the only viable implementation for a startup. Still yet, first generation platforms out there have hit a ceiling because they avoided accountability problems instead of solving them. We are shaking things up. Elastic Fund Matching alone, our prototype feature, is already recurring, creates meaningful cooperation across wildly different budgets, and expands to capture total demand. This market desperately needs innovation and disruption to reach its full potential.

Contributor Driven Decisions & Priorities

PrizeForge puts the demand side in the driver seat. Individual creators should not own the communities that support them. It doesn't make sense to force communities to reorganize in order to switch between different creators. Like an ant colony switching between multiple sources of food, we want organizations of users to freely fund whoever is creating what they value without moving the whole colony. PrizeForge will enable contributors to independently organize in a bottom-up way, to effectively communicate what they need, and then create accountability while choosing which production to fund.

New Decision Models

Making this kind of cooperation efficient requires new purpose-built social decision systems. We call our solution Delegate Social. Users can self-organize socially along their overlapping interests and then delegate authortiy to create decisive efficiency and clarity. We are confident that we have solutions for the well-known problems such as whale and sock-puppet attacks.

New Communication Models Built-In

Cooperation depends on effective communication. We designed pluralism into the foundation to alleviate tensions between majority and minorities and to allow high-level conversation between large distinct groups. We can solve problems in complex overlapping communities.

Legacy SNS platforms are no match for emerging AI challenges, but Deligate Social will enable online communities to have coherent conversations at internet scale, keeping humans in the driver seat even as AI and algorithmic content feeds are increasingly challenging to the individual. We believe our solution will change the operation of every SNS (Social Network Service) today and how every new SNS gets built.

A Product of Positron

PrizeForge is Positron's first product. Check out our our mission and values. PrizeForge is our first step. We aim to evolve it and other products in order to connect demand for downstream value creation with upstream enabling technologies. That means real, hard technologies that improve our lives, technologies built to satisfy downstream demands, not only limited to what can be a good upstream product. Only the future is certain.