Cofundos
community innovation & funding

How does Cofundos work?

Cofundos helps to realize bright ideas by providing a platform for their discussion and enrichment and by establishing a process for organizing the contributions and interests of different stakeholders in the ideas.

The Cofundos concept is based on the following principles:

• Open-knowledge and open-source.

  All ideas and contributions on Cofundos are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License. All project outcomes must be licensed under an OSI approved open-source license.

• Reputation and community.

  Bright ideas and excellent solutions often originate from outstanding individuals. But it needs a community to mature these ideas and solutions and in order to bring the critical mass together for their realization.

• Fairness and trust.

  An open, accountable and transparent environment will foster fair communication and trustworthy relationships between its users.

• Big impacts can be achieved in small steps.

  Conceiving and realising bright ideas does not require many year developments or huge amounts of funding. Their realisation can be achieved by bringing together innovative ideas with clearly defined features and requirements based on community involvement and fostering their accomplishment by committed specialists.

The Cofundos process itself is schematically depicted on the right and works as follows:

1. Somebody misses an open-source software

   tool or library for a specific purpose, a feature in an open-source software or a plugin for an existing software. He describes the project to develop the software.

2. Requirements-Engineering:

   Other people help enhancing the description of the project by adding specific requirements and comments.

3. Bidding:

   Users who also like the project and need the resulting software, bid a certain amount of money, which they will donate to the project performer after its successful completion.

4. Offering:

   Specialists who are capable to perform the project and to develop the respective software offer to realise the project for a certain amount of money and within a certain timeframe.

5. Call for competitive offers:

   As soon as the sum of the bid amount exceeds the money requested by the first offer, a call for competitive offers is started and lasts for three week.

6. Accepting an offer:

   After the three weeks call period for alternative offers is elapsed, all bidders are requested to vote about which offer to choose. Bidders votes are weighted by the amount of their bid. The specialist with the majority of the votes is selected to carry out the project.

7. Voting about project success:

   After the specialist announces the completion of the project or the development timeframe as suggested by the specialist elapsed, the bidders vote about how the initially defined requirements (agreed on by the specialist) are met by the provided solution.

8. Donation to the specialist carrying out the project:

   If the majority of the bidders agree that the requirements are met, bidders are requested to make the respective donations.

   If the majority of the bidders decide that the requirements are only partially met by the implementation, an extension will be granted to the specialist for improving his implementation.

   If the majority of the bidders decide that the requirements are not met by the implementation, the project failed, no donations will be made and the project might be reopened for bidding.

Further, information can be also found in the FAQ page and in the Conditions of Use.

Comments

1. how is "call for competitive offers" made

   It is not specified how the "call for competitive offers" is made. Who is informed?

   by guba on 10 Dec 2007 15:59

2. how is "call for competitive offers" made

   It is not specified how the "call for competitive offers" is made. Who is informed?

   by guba on 10 Dec 2007 16:03

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