View source for Abundance Journal/Potential models

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

*[http://jvwresearch.org 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.