excuse the long email.
I always felt that the open source world lacks a good donation system. I've been thinking about it for years, but now i think I'm onto something.
The basic idea is the idea of what we're currently calling 'flux'. Basically you don't donate to a person, but you donate to sort of a 'pipe' from which money will go in different directions.
For example, instead of donating 1 euro to many projects, i can add them to my flux and then donate to my flux; the money will be divided among the projects, resulting in less transaction fees.
Now keep reading because this is where it gets good.
Project are fluxes too. For example if my project is based on a certain library i can set the project flux so that 10% of donations will directly go to that library, 5% to my favorite linux distro and so on.
Then... wait for it... meta-fluxes, the most important being "The FLUX".
When you donate to 'the flux' the money is divided among all projects in the world. "The flux" is basically the sum of all people's personal fluxes.
For example say i add ubuntu to my personal flux, i set it to 100% (that is, all donations that i get will go to ubuntu) it doesn't matter if i personally donate money. Ubuntu will start immediately getting money from "The Flux". This means you can support a project without actually donating money, and the project will get real money in change!
This really lowers the barrier of entry to the donation system imo and is the major catalyst to attract people and make this system work. Aside from "the-flux" other meta-fluxes can exist, for example automatically-generated 'tag' fluxes, that are similar to "the flux" but restricted to a certain tag (eg. "open source", "europe"...). There will be many possibilities thanks to the API. (The API and the whole website/system will of course be open source btw). People can directly donate money to a flux, or set a recurring monthly amount to put in their flux, or redonate some money they received, or maybe even put ads on their websites and choose which flux will get the money from that ad. (eg. i put an ad on my blog and i choose that all the revenue will be divided among projects tagged "open source").
There are many more details but the email is really getting long. I already found a couple of people that are willing to help, one offered a server where we're now hosting a wiki:
http://178.254.1.64/ . Please, if you're interested, contribute with ideas, or code, or anything, and become part of the team. We're not looking for full time developers, we just need more people's feedback and ideas, and if you can write two lines of code on a wednesday night... why not?
We're not doing this for money (it will be completely free). But a project like this could help many more projects making money, even YOUR projects, this is why i think working on this is not wasted time at all. We aim to build The de-facto standard donation system, open source, frictionless, highly customizable, no fees. We need you mind to help us.