Talk:Crowdfunding

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Crowdfunding as an alternative to investment through the accumulation of capital is an incredibly important subject to study, and some fantastic research has gone into this page. However, this is the first time I've seen 'P2P lending' put under the category of 'crowdfunding'. To avoid confusion, I think there are at least four distinct styles of 'P2P finance' that each need their own page:

  • Crowdfunding: people make donations towards a project, usually many small ones, which might attract some kind of reward (eg KickStarter.com, IndieGoGo.com)
  • Equity Crowdfunding: people make a small investment in a project which buys a share of ownership (http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/positivenews, https://www.pledgeme.co.nz/investments/97-ooooby-limited), and sometimes a vote in company decision-making (eg PositiveNews). Equity crowdfunding already has a stub page on this wiki, and because it involves law changes to investment laws, it's a more complicated topic in many ways than the original, small donation crowdfunding
  • Peer-To-Peer Lending (P2P Lending): a person loans a small amount of money to a small business, usually a lender from the Global North lending to a borrower in the Global South, or many people loan many small amounts to a small business (similar to equity crowdfunding but represented as debt not equity on the books), usually lenders from the Global North lending to a borrower in the Global North (eg Grameen Bank, Kiva). This wiki already has a number of pages referring to 'P2P lending', which could be aggregated into one page.
  • Micro-Patronage: people subscribe and make regular donations to a creator, either per item published online, or per week/ month (eg Patreon, Gratipay)

There is also the older term 'angel investment'. From what little I've read this is synonymous with 'equity crowdfunding', and if so, I think it's a shame the original meaning of crowdfunding (small donations) has been fudged together with this form of shareholding investment instead of using the older term for it. If I'm wrong about this, then whatever 'angel investment' is, needs its own page too.

The list of crowdfunding sites that people have put together on the crowdfunding page is impressively large. It would take some work to go through and figure out which ones fit into which page(s). I'm willing to spend some time doing this, but before I do, I want to get some feedback on whether people agree it's a good idea to separate 'crowdfunding' and 'peer-to-peer lending' into separate articles, especially from those who've put a lot of work into the page already.

While going through the list, I think it would be worth aggregating some information about the organisational structure and rules of each platform:

  • Is it for-profit or not-for-profit/ non-profit (do these last two have a different meaning?)?
  • What sort of incorporated structure does it use, registered in which country(s)?
  • Are its own costs funded by taking a share of successful campaigns on its platform, by donations, by advertising, by running campaigns on its own platform (eg Gratipay, PledegMe), or by inviting donations from satisfied users (eg https://crowdgift.ca/page/what-we-do)?
  • If it's for-profit, is it totally self-owned (privately-owned, worker-owner, customer-owned) or are there venture capital investors (eg Flattr http://blog.flattr.net/2012/02/cats-out-of-the-bag-yes-flattr-now-has-investors/), shareholders, or a parent company?
  • Are there any rules for projects using the platform, such as an obligation to release projects under libre licenses (eg http://www.goteo.org/)
  • Is the underlying software the platform runs on free code (eg Goteo.org)?

--Strypey (talk) 03:26, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

It would be great if you could do this . i.e. separating P2P Lending and Crowdfunding and Equity Crowdfunding does make sense. I think most of them already exist though, and see our whole Category:Peerfunding for what we have on funding alternatives.

Angel investment though is more a classic form of risk capital, by individual early investors.

--MIchel Bauwens (talk) 07:16, 26 March 2016 (UTC)