The idea behind this is to research and experiment with "smart contract" funding for open source and free software.
- Allow less-known developers / projects to earn the public's trust ("cautious funding" — helping them build a reputation of being able to deliver; mechanisms may vary. could be based on bounties [see below] or funds release confirmations if bounties are not suitable for any reason... or something else entirely)
- Allow direct organization/person funding (simple token transfer)
- Allow funding specific goals (bounties)
- Allow branding [sub]tokens for a specific project (bragging, voting, other kinds of rights)
- Allow continuous support pledges (recurring payments)
- Allow nominees to exchange tokens for the amount they were originally bought for (backed by ETH, the funding is deposited through an ICO, or a series of offerings)
- Allow project maintainers and developers to publish their expenses in IPFS and refer to hashes of the receipts
Yes. We have a #crypto channel on our slack to talk about it. Feel free to join (https://slack.opencollective.org)
The future of open collective is definitely on the blockchain in the same way that the future of Uber/Lyft is with self driving cars. But we need to build a staircase towards that future. That's why we have been focused so far on the well established technologies of credit cards and the likes.
We played with the idea of an open source coin that we could deploy across the 250 open source communities that are already under the open source collective umbrella https://opencollective.com/opensource
Biggest problems that first need to be resolved:
We would love to support experiments that will go in that direction. It's a fascinating topic but there is still so much that needs to be learned. And the best way to do that is to just "do".