Following the previous article Time to Shine with Utopian.io, where I talked about Utopian.io's aims and who can join it, I am going to talk about a way to fund an open source project on the Steem blockchain. Sometimes it may be difficult to maintain the development because, unless you are backed by sponsors, or were able to monetize your work in some way, your earnings for the work can be close to zero. Perhaps you have other means of income, but I assume it doesn't come directly from working on the project.
Sharing project updates on the Steem blockchain will give you incentives by receiving community votes. However, building your network of impactful individuals who like your content takes time before you see satisfying numbers in your author rewards, which you can use to fund the project. There must be a faster and more convenient way to fund a project, even for people who are yet to build their network. There actually are different ways to boost your rewards and exposure, and this article is going to discuss one of them: Crowdfunding.
Fundition.io Is Your Crowdfunding Platform
Thankfully, a large set of useful tools, apps and platforms have been built on top of the Steem blockchain. One of those is Fundition.io, which aims to change the daily lives of masses through empowering crowdfunding of exciting projects. It utilizes the Steem blockchain with additional functionality for more natural management of campaigns and ease of use for backers.
Thanks to Fundition, many projects and ideas have been able to boost their funding and find support from the community, which allowed them to reach the project's goal.
Unique Roles
While exploring the platform, you will realize that Fundition recognizes different roles on the website. They include Founder, Collaborator, Backer, and Supporter.
Founder
A founder is the creator of the crowdfunding campaign. They are usually the project owner, maintainer or a trusted person who was tasked to run the campaign. It should always be an individual who is personally involved in the actual project's decisions and roadmap.
Collaborator
When a founder is working on the project's details and preparing all the details for the campaign, they can allow external collaborators. That means that any Fundition user may be involved in providing updates on your project.
If you choose this option, other Fundition users can add contributions to your project as Collaborators (Contributing feedback, ideas, etc.)
At the moment, founders can enable collaborators only before the campaign's creation. Furthermore, you can't control who can become a collaborator. For that reason, think twice before you choose to enable this feature for your campaign.
Backer & Supporter
Anyone becomes a backer when they send liquid cryptocurrency to the project. A supporter is anyone who gives hearts to the project on Fundition. Hearts are the platform's term for upvotes or likes on the Steem blockchain.
First Steps on Fundition
Your role on Fundition is the Founder. You are responsible for creating a winning campaign with all details needed to grasp the attention of the crowd and engage them in exploring and backing your project.
When you successfully log in, you will be able to create a new project on Fundition. You will be given several guidelines what you should focus on so that your campaign is valid and engaging.
You can also add links to lots of different social platforms. Therefore, your first announcement post should be representative of your campaign, followed by regular updates. Making updates is optional, but until you reach your goal, it is highly recommended.
Each of the new projects must be verified by the Fundition team on top of the Founder's identity verification, which is done by linking their Facebook or Google account.
Double Boost with Utopian.io
In addition to the power of crowdfunding that you gain from using Fundition, you may also utilize the support of the Utopian community. As long as you spend your time polishing the updates posts and the campaign announcement post, you are welcome to share it in the Utopian blog section. Remember that Utopian is there to engage contributions for open source projects. Therefore, your project must be open sourced, and you should be willing to accept contributions from other people.
I won't repeat myself here and would recommend that everyone read my previous post and check the Utopian.io website.
Conclusion
The purpose of this post was to remind project owners that they should check out Fundition if they are looking for help with funding the development of their project, and searching for means to have some incentives for potential contributors.
Furthermore, similarly to Fundition, project owners are welcome to share the updates from the campaign with the Utopian community as long as the posts follow Utopian guidelines.
I am looking forward to seeing more projects growing thanks to platforms like Fundition and Utopian.
Previous Posts
References
- Post banner - by Andrew Neel, Unsplash
- Fundition banner - from Fundition assets
- Fundition+Utopian banner - created by @sndbox
Notes
- I am using the Utopian tags. If it is fetched into the review queue, simply skip it.