Grants:IdeaLab/Kicking Kickstarter
Project idea edit
What is the problem you're trying to solve? edit
Kickstarter is a popular community fundraising site which is special because of its community and the amount of media attention it gets. In Kickstarter, people can request funds for all kinds of projects, and the website itself is a platform for the community crowdsourced funding of those projects.
Many well-meaning people on Kickstarter promise to create free content. The Wikimedia Foundation and this Idealab rarely or never fund the creation of content, so these kinds of projects are not to be seen in the Wikipedia community. Some example projects are listed below.
- Musopen and Set Chopin Free
- Fantasy portraits
- cartoon illustrations for computer science studies
- Creative Commons search
An example of an excellent Kickstarter project which is contributing content to Wikipedia is the Vanamo Online Game Museum.
What is your solution? edit
The Wikimedia community sends some kind of outreach team or welcoming committee to those Kickstarter participants who are promising free content, but who themselves have no plan in place for actually delivering that free content to their audience, and who need coaching or guidance on how to apply free licenses to the content they are producing.
This would entail people watching Kickstarter projects and messaging all of them which are producing digital media to commit to apply free licenses to it in cases where the creators are promising free content, and to offer to help them migrate their content to an appropriate Wikimedia project for distribution when it is completed.