Problem/Motivation
As I described
previously in more detail →
, convincing about highly innovative ideas can be hard or impractical before it is proven as highly impactful in real life, or ideas fail in real life even if people believed in it before (circumstances change).
Therefore, it is great to fund actual results after project is a success. Create reward and incentive structure which motivates to try, and try, and try again until some variations of ideas work to get some reward. That would motivate people to try and keep trying to create public goods which otherwise may not have a business model. Instead of seeking for a profit (as in business), here reward would be "retroactive funding" (an actual term I found for this).
Apparently, "retroactive public goods funding" is an existing project initiated by Vitalik Buterin which may (or does) work together with his another
Quadratic funding →
project:
As a bonus, this seems a good use of public money, because that would fund innovations which actually created most value, with a simplified innovation process.
This also would solve another problem: success in open source is not attractive - there are countless stories of poor and burned out developers of widely adopted open source projects. This funding model may help to promote success as attractive and help find, recognize, celebrate and reward innovations retroactively people achieved within Drupal community, which may not have gone necessarily through an approved innovation processes.
Proposed resolution
Created this issue to keep exploring this idea in more depth. It is not to replace traditional crowdfunding path of innovation hub, but to explore an additional funding path.
Challenges probably are creating the fund itself and measuring created value retroactively in a good way.
Next steps are to explore and learn from all the cases when this idea was already tried and what were the results starting with Vitalik Buterin project.
Remaining tasks
User interface changes
API changes
Data model changes