October 19, 2012 at 19:37Microfilance for programmers without the hassle
Bountify startup is a cross between StackOverflow and freelance trading. The principle of operation is very simple - the customer publishes a task or question and makes an advance payment from 1 to 250 dollars. Within a week, anyone can offer a solution. The reward goes to the one chosen by the customer. If several approximately equivalent options are proposed, or someone made valuable comments and additions to the winning decision, the customer can additionally reward those who contributed. If there is no solution, the money goes to charity.
A key guarantee of quality is openness - in contrast to freelance services, discussion of options takes place publicly, anyone can point out a mistake or improve the solution. Openness also works in the opposite direction: in the customer’s profile, you can see how generously he gives out additional rewards to the participants in the discussion.
Registration takes a matter of seconds (especially if you have an account on the github). A great option when you encounter a problem at the edge of your sphere of competence, which someone else can completely solve in 5 minutes, and you yourself may have to mess around for several hours with an unpredictable result. And vice versa - a good way to make money on beer and nuts by sharing your knowledge.
By the way, this is not a unique site. Opened three months agoFreedomsponsors.org uses a similar approach, but instead of arbitrary tasks and questions, it specializes in open source bug reports. If you desperately need to fix a bug or implement a feature in any Open Source project that has an open bug tracker, you can offer a reward for this. Instead of describing the task, just leave a link to the bug report.
There is a similar functionality on the Russian IT Rockout , whose alpha version was launched this spring. This is a crowdfunding site, but in addition to the standard “I want to make such a cool thing, I need so much money”, you can choose “I want someone to do such a thing, I’m ready to pay that much.”
Unlike Bountify, which is closer to the simplified freelance version, FreedomSponsors and IT Rockout allow co-financing.
A key guarantee of quality is openness - in contrast to freelance services, discussion of options takes place publicly, anyone can point out a mistake or improve the solution. Openness also works in the opposite direction: in the customer’s profile, you can see how generously he gives out additional rewards to the participants in the discussion.
Registration takes a matter of seconds (especially if you have an account on the github). A great option when you encounter a problem at the edge of your sphere of competence, which someone else can completely solve in 5 minutes, and you yourself may have to mess around for several hours with an unpredictable result. And vice versa - a good way to make money on beer and nuts by sharing your knowledge.
By the way, this is not a unique site. Opened three months agoFreedomsponsors.org uses a similar approach, but instead of arbitrary tasks and questions, it specializes in open source bug reports. If you desperately need to fix a bug or implement a feature in any Open Source project that has an open bug tracker, you can offer a reward for this. Instead of describing the task, just leave a link to the bug report.
There is a similar functionality on the Russian IT Rockout , whose alpha version was launched this spring. This is a crowdfunding site, but in addition to the standard “I want to make such a cool thing, I need so much money”, you can choose “I want someone to do such a thing, I’m ready to pay that much.”
Unlike Bountify, which is closer to the simplified freelance version, FreedomSponsors and IT Rockout allow co-financing.