JoshyPHP has a pretty good grasp on the general concept.
Mick, I have no problem with phpBB being free. My problem is with development being determined by voting. Just because a lot of people vote for something doesn't necessarily mean that it's truly important.
This music video on Youtube has received over 5 million votes (thumbs up). Obviously a lot of people like it. But this doesn't mean that it's really important to them. I doubt that most of the people who like this video would decide that it was more important to them than a can of soda. Basically, the interest is really wide, but it isn't very deep. Of course this is just my guess!
The point is that it's a problem when we can't see interest
depth. It means that too much time and talent will be wasted on developing things that aren't truly important. If phpBB replaced voting with donating, then we would see and know the breadth and depth of interest. The broader and deeper the interest is in some idea/project, the higher a priority it should be.
Stevemaury, the main point of the money is to reveal interest breadth and depth. Let's say that spam protection is really important to you. You'd paypal $20 dollars to phpBB and indicate that it's for spam protection. PhpBB would update its idea list. This list would be sorted by the total amount of money that had been donated to each idea. So by donating $20 dollars to spam protection you'd move it higher on the list. Unless of course it was already at the top of the list. PhpBB would take a reasonable cut of the $20 dollars to help pay for things like administration and advertising. The rest of the money would be passed on to the developers who helped improve phpBB's spam protection. Although I'm not exactly sure how this last part would work.
I see somebody recently replied to
a thread I started a couple of years ago. It took a lot of work (for me) but I kinda succeeded at creating a very ghetto micropayments version of phpBB. I wanted to do some more work on it but the thought of battling the code dissuaded me.
Early this year I developed something similar but super basic...
Classtopia's Best Entries. My friend teaches 5th grade and that's their blog. The students can use donations to their "Communications Dept" to help determine the order of the blog entries. The information is stored on a Google sheet and I wrote the javascript to display it on their blog. You can still see all their blog entries sorted chronologically but you also have the option to see their best entries.
I think it would be a really great idea if there was a super basic version of phpBB that 5th graders could use to learn how to code. But perhaps even the simplest possible version would still be too advanced for 5th graders? Would it be simple enough for 8th graders?
Anyways, it should be easy for us to use donations to help determine the social importance of different ideas.