non-proffit developer membership site ?

filn

so i was reading in another thread about how people in the opensource community give alot of blood, sweat and tears to their projects and rarely get any monetary rewards.im not a developer myself, by i can feel you pain. so i was thinking i may have the solution to the problem of opensource developers having to live on mac and cheese..

so here we go:

the community non-proffit membership site, the concept is fairly simple, you take a nice health board like this one and you slap it behind a membership login. you charge a few bucks a month ($4.95.. everybody can afford $5/mo).. then at the end of the month, you devide the months proffits amongst the sites members who meet a certain requirement. my idea was some kind of "helpfulness rating" that the users could vote on each month. then the top X number of people with high ratings could split the money. i think this is good cause the really dedicated people would get something back and everybody else would still get the quality information they come to expect and the additional good feelings of helping the opensource community.

thats just my $0.02.. i hope it inspires somebody to do something to help out.

Elizabeth

Good idea, but a potential problem I see is that the majority of people who visit a site like this make 1 or 2 posts- they ask a question, get it answered, and probably won't come back. So for them, a monthly fee might not be something they are interested in paying.

But then again, what do I know? 🙂

-Elizabeth

jazz

You ain't getting rid of me that easy Liz 😉

filn, there's a heck of a lot of free resource sites and boards out there (l help run 4 of the things and we don't charge). However it depends on what you are after.

I come here for php answers and cause it's a nice community as opposed to some other places.

Not sure if you are allowed to mention other sites (but will mention this one as l have no staff involvement in it). www.alicebot.org have some funky things happening to raise needed dollars.

You can join the Alice Foundation for $100 a year and get some cool stuff, or you can purchase Dr Rich Wallace's book online at a very reasonable price.

Liz, any thoughts you guys could put out a php book for us newbies that explains things in plain english. Would defiantly make a purchase there. Maybe use PayPal or something.

Just some other thoughts on this.