The other day, I noticed that fundraising platform Kickstarter introduced ‘Curated Pages,’ a way for arts and cultural institutions to feature projects they like on the site. As you know, we’re doing our Future of Facebook Project on Kickstarter, and the ability to showcase other projects you think are cool is a neat feature.

The timing this feature rollout was interesting to me, because I had just been thinking it would be fun to be able to be able to highlight projects that resonate with me on my own website. And perhaps receive a small percentage for every transaction that occurred via my site.

Affiliate programs of all stripes exist around the web – I see them a lot for ebooks (zenhabits offers 50% commission to sell his digital products), and then there’s the Amazon Associates program, which lets you earn up to 15% in referrals if you advertise their products.

But here’s an idea I haven’t seen yet – affiliate crowdfunding.

But what if you could support the fundraising efforts for creative projects and initiatives for social good by posting a widget to your site, and earn a small percentage when a donation was made?

Of course, most crowdfunding platforms currently charge between 8 – 10% to use their service already. Kickstarter, for example, charges a 5% fee, plus it passes on the transaction fees charges by Amazon Payments, their payment service of choice. So tacking on an affiliate fee onto that structure may not make sense for the individual or group trying to raise funds. On the other hand, some would argue that every little bit helps.

What would be interesting is a platform that doesn’t automatically charge that 5% flat fee, combined with a transaction platform that doesn’t gouge you for another 3-5%.

I took a look around, and there actually are a few examples of crowdfunding platforms that take no fees. One is Beex.org, an open source challenge based fundraising platform created in PHP/MySQL by a nonprofit, the Sarapis Foundation. They charge no fees for transactions, and the tool works with Paypal. Another service that takes no fees is Kapipal.

I wonder if a service like Beex.org could be modified to allow a user to enter in a % they would take for promoting a crowdfunding campaign on their site. To keep things from getting exploitative, that % would have to be transparent to the public, and would be based on an agreement made by the fundraisers and the affiliate. Then combine that with a payment service, either online or mobile, that charges a very small fee for transactions.

I can think of a lot of projects I would love to see get off the ground – from open source projects to sustainability initiatives to social enterprise and business ideas – all things I believe in. This would be a mechanism that would help get those things funded, while also supporting an affiliate’s effort to promote them. On a larger scale, it would be cool to see this kind of thing appear on huge sites with massive traffic.

Perhaps it would create a category of advertising that directs people’s attention (and microdonations!) in a socially useful way, verse just encouraging people to consume more stuff. 🙂

Over the upcoming months leading up to the Contact Summit in October, I’ll be highlighting various projects and initiatives working to construct a globally networked society. As humanity and technology co-evolve into higher orders of complexity, it can be said that social media is now facilitating the emergence of new forms of culture, commerce, and governance. We want to bring attention to the great and liberating stuff that’s happening, and encourage connections, conversation, and collaboration.

The past few weeks have been focused on technology infrastructure, starting with the Towards A Distributed Internet post and the resource list of mesh networks, and continuing on with the formation of a Next Net google group that’s thriving with over 90 members already!

We’ll continue to circle back and revisit conversations and progress, but for now I’ll move on to another hot topic: money and value exchange.

What is the future of money? And not just money, but currencies in general – from virtual currencies to timebanks to social currencies based around trust, identity, reputation, expertise and relationships. And not just currencies, a.k.a. tools that are supposed to represent a unit of measurement in order to transact, but also value exchange in general and the social behaviors that precede them.

So we’re really talking about The Superfluid Economy, the set of tools and behaviors that are developing to make economic exchange, transactions, payments, commerce, distributed collaboration, resource allocation, and social enterprise formation as frictionless and fluid as possible.

To kick off the conversation, I pulled up 10 projects that are innovating in this space which are either developing new products and services, or raising awareness through art and media. We’re excited to know that some of the initiatives below will be represented at Contact!

1. The Metacurrency Project

“We will not have an equitable nor a healthy economy in an information age, until we have information technology which empowers us equitably — that is decentralized, peer-to-peer and operates by mutual agreement.”

This project gives a broad definition of currency as “a formal system used to shape, enable or measure currents.” Beyond money, they describe currency as a form of social DNA which shapes flows of attention, trust, participation and value. They seek to build the technology platforms and protocols that would allow people to transact directly with each other with no segment of that interaction relying on a centrally controlled system.

Here’s a nice prezi they created to create a framework for this thinking: Continue reading →