Pledgebank

One suggestion for peer funding of OSGeo projects is to run a pledgebank system. http://pledgebank.com/ is a public online service which anyone can use to create a pledge. Pledges don't have to be financial committments, though they usually are; they take the form of I promise to do thing X if N other people also agree to do so before time T.

While the Fundraising Committee is not planning to offer direct sponsorship to Foundation projects, a pledgebank could be useful both for community fundraising and for gauging 'interest level' among OSGeo members and supporters in specific goals and features.

What could be supported by a pledge

 * Feature requests for specific projects
 * Documentation / packaging requests
 * A person's work ongoingly on a project

Precedents

 * Open Rights Group used the pledgebank.com service to collect 1000 volunteers to sponsor a regular monthly amount, which is used to pay a fulltime staffer.
 * Perl Foundation, though not using a pledgebank system, ran community sponsorship funds to support developers to take time out from their day jobs and work on specific new parts of the perl core.

Source code
CVS for pledgebank.com's source repository is at

https://secure.mysociety.org/cvstrac/dir?d=mysociety/pb