Abundance Journal/Potential models

• Budgeting thread: http://groups.google.com/group/postscarcity/browse_thread/thread/e654e38d6bfd3d2e?hl=en

• Journal of Virtual Worlds Research (see above thread)

Thoughts

Crowdsourcing

Let's say we have 100 active members. Each willing to donate $20 a quarter, or $80 (upfront) for the year, as well as do some work on the website. That's $8,000. But it's chicken or egg as far as gathering 100 subscribers willing to donate $80 each, or $20 a quarter.

What would be a reasonable way to fund it, given the current economic conditions?

Can the work be crowd sourced?

Can it be hosted on say Google App Engine, which I think has a free quota that is sufficient for the first few months (and after that the cost is probably less than Amazon EC2)

Just wondering...

Marc

Taking it outside the normal economic framework

Are there are there other more contemporary methods in which a journal could be run to avoid significant costs of more traditional methods - perhaps this is an opportunity to be a ground-breaking model for a journal (as well as covering a ground-breaking topic)?! Could the traditional peer-review process take advantage of more modern tools, methods and filters and be brought more up to date? It might be too easy just to ape existing journals as part of trying to gain credibility. Ultimately credibility will be down to quality of content of course.

It would be interesting to have a largely self-sustaining, self- assembling framework as much as possible partly to reduce costs and partly because it would be interesting to operate outside the prevailing economic model that a post-scarcity society will mostly, if not entirely, usurp.

It may not be immediately obvious how to do this in a radically new way and still have high quality articles, but it's worth thinking hard about.

Charles.

Do what RadioHead did

Make the PDF available for free download, but only after the users have clicked through to a particular download page. Don't distribute it beyond this download page. The download page features a plea for donations, saying a lot of work has gone into it, funds needed etc. and has a big, prominent button saying DONATE. Maybe even two buttons to download: one that says something like YES! I'LL CONTRIBUTE! and one that says NO, I'M CHEAP, GIVE ME THE FREE DOWNLOAD.

In other words, you're just giving it away for free, but asking for donations in a pretty hard-sell way.