… Stuff we found around the Web that Google Alerts was not telling us about:

Henrik Moltke: “[VODO wouldl] enable a work to be reliably connected to the creator, despite the free and unrestricted sharing of the work on the Internet. VODO would enable appreciative fans to send donations in an easy, frictionless way to creators—more conveniently than PayPal, for example. It would begin to help finance a new commons-based sector of production. If I had any money to invest in this, I would :”

OpenDemocracy: ‘Steal this donation, donate this theft.’ Tony Curzon Price discusses our plans for a future ‘Donation Incentive System’, first presented at iCommons in 2008.

Alex Tarkowski: The Amateur, the Audience, the Crowd, and other strange forms of journalism (and the crisis too!)’

Project VRM Blog: What’s the Overlap Between VRM and VODO? A commenter to this post mentions The Contingency Market. This then links to the 1p2u.com, which has similarities to Peter Sunde’s Flattr project and Kachingle.

From there, I note that Crosbie Fitch from Brighton, UK, who’s behind both The Contingency Market at 1p2u.com, offered these principles on the Project VRM mailing list:

Publish it – and they will come.

If people think it’s worth paying for, let them pay. If they don’t, improve the product.

Make the decision to pay easy – a token amount – a penny.

Make the intention to pay easy – a click of a button – the actual payment invariably isn’t (save it up for a rainy day).

Payment is voluntary, but not a donation – make the deal clear – value for money.

Your customers are not your enemy, but your ambassadors.

While our ideas are a bit different here, I think Crosbie Fitch has some sensible things to say:

Moreover, and this is what I think people are still missing (cf Kachingle), it’s ‘wanting to micropay’ not ‘wanting to be microcharged’ – a dominant, not a submissive act. Moreover, it’s ‘wanting to pay for work to be produced’, not ‘wanting to be microcharged for consuming content already produced’. The latter still reveals contamination by the copyright mentality, that if one benefits from or consumes another’s art one becomes indebted (a disturbingly pervasive mindset that has polluted contemporary culture).

The micropayment must be captured as close as is possible to the decision to pay, because that is precisely the moment at which the payer has sunk the cost of the decision and can absorb the minute friction of executing that decision in the form of a button click. What Shirky explains is that we cannot impose the cost of a decision upon members of an audience (microcharging). However, as I contend, this does not mean that a member of the audience will not wish to make such a decision of their own volition (micropayment).

Even so, we must remain vigilant that we don’t slip back into the misadventure of inviting people to submit themselves to microcharging, e.g. “Give us your credit card and we’ll charge you a penny per page view for consuming our premium content”. That touches on another critical aspect – are you paying for the production of the art, a copy of it, or its use?

Payment: “This is good. I want more. Heck, I’ll pay you to produce more. Where do I click?”

Charging: “I feel indebted to you each time I consume your work. Please keep track of my consumption and bill me later.”

Through Crosby Fitch/ Project VRM we also learn about PayChoice although it’s not clear how it works.