Funding - future directions

These are my thoughts about the results of the funding proposal.

In a few days circa 250 pageviews on the blog, and 7 comments. The voice spread quite a lot and soon.

Through the mailing list, circa 20 people have let me know their approval and that they could have pledged 20 euros or more.
It is worth something around 400/500 euros.

Someone could very well have read the proposal and be willing to pledge, but he just did not send a response/comment.

Anyone of those, at the moment of a real crowd-funding effort, could be able (and more willing than now) to spread further the voice and convince more friends of theirs.

I was skeptical about this idea. But in the end, I believe that the response of the community has been good.


Anyhow, I've the feeling that at the moment it's not worth the effort of registering the project on a crowd-funding platform.


I assume that the reason is that we currently have too few results that can be presented to non-techy audience.
We have the working prototype written in python, which is not very simple to deploy and suitable only to desktop-class nodes.
We are not much far from having a prototype in vala, which can run on a router. But we're not quite there, yet.


I think that we have to settle for some more work on a spare-time basis.
I hope that we will succeed to produce soon a working prototype with just the very basic functionalities of netsukuku runnable on many models of affordable routers and access point.
When this will be the case, I will test the waters again for a crowd-funding, because we will still need a lot of work for the other features.


In the meantime, I decided to start accepting donations on my blog, with the aim of putting aside money for the next tentative.
I assure I will report on the blog the current amount of received donations, and I will not use any of them until we make another tentative of crowd-funding.
The aim of the crowd-funding, I confirm, will be to free a part of my daily duties with my current employer and let me concentrate on netsukuku for more time per day.

I decided, also, to use Bitcoin as the mechanism to receive donations.  So you don't need to pay fees to banks.


In other news, look at the situation in Europe.
The financial markets crisis and the many corruption cases in various kinds of centralized authorities.
This makes me more convinced than ever that we do have to find new ways of freeing us from the need of centralized control in as many aspects as we can, of our lives.

That is why I also looked for some informations on Bitcoin.