Free More Awesome Than Money by Jim Dwyer

trader and a nursery school teacher, tried to put on a concert during the New Orleans Jazz Festival, but could not risk twenty thousand dollars of his own money. There had to be a way to round up people online who supported good music. He moved back home to New York and found a job in a Brooklyn diner. Wouldn’t it be good, he would occasionally muse out loud, if there were a way to use the web for lots of people to provide small-scale backing for creative projects? One of his regulars, Yancey Strickler, a music critic, thought it was a fine idea.
    With Charles Adler, a graphic designer, Chan and Strickler created Kickstarter, a website where people could pitch projects and perhaps collect enough small change to launch them.
    The setup was simple and ingenious: the artists or inventors could post a description of what they were working on, how long it was going to take them, and how much money they needed to raise. The pledges could be made to Kickstarter through a payment system operated by Amazon; the website kept 5 percent. A strict rule gave the fund-raising drives a thrilling, or harrowing, edge: no money would be distributed unless the goal had been met in full by the deadline. It was all or nothing. If people said they needed five thousand dollars to do their project, and they got only thirty-five hundred dollars, well, that wasn’t enough. In that case, the donors would get their money back. The requirement was to drive those seeking support to set realistic goals, and to hustle for contributions.
    Kickstarter permitted the drives to go on for ninety days, but a performer or inventor could set an earlier cutoff, if, for example, a show was a few weeks off.
    Artists typically used Kickstarter to raise a few thousand dollars or so for videos and comic books and music. So did people like the ecoentrepreneur with plans to rejigger old gum-ball machines that would dispense wildflower-seed bombs; a graphic designer who proposed to fly cameras on kites and balloons along the coastline to create intimate, bird’s-eye maps of the big 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico; and the young cook in Kansas City who hoped to fix up a trailer so she could expand her sales of 100-percent-natural snow cones. In short, Kickstarter was a way for the far-flung to find and support the far-fetched, the charming, and the essential. It was distant from the kinds of gift giving that result in concert halls and libraries being rebuilt and renamed—the megaphilanthropy that could be seen as an expression of love for humanity, or the graffiti tags of wealth.
    One early project backed through Kickstarter was a hackathon run by HackNY, a daylong binge of coding, pizza, and Red Bull, a scheme hatched by Korth and his friends to connect college kids with start-up tech companies.
    Teams of students from all over metropolitan New York would havetwenty-four hours to hack together a cool project, then demonstrate it. To feed and water the hackers, Korth and company went to Kickstarter for $2,000. They got $5,005.
    Convened at the beginning of April, the hackathon was a roaring success, with delegates from schools all around the city.
    The Diaspora guys, of course, were there; the event was being held in the building where they had spent most waking moments since abandoning their application for the Y Combinator camp. They had written swaths of code to create the frame for Diaspora, and were starting to build in essential social network functions, but they were miles from being done. So they came to the hackathon with no notion of having a clever app to display after twenty-four hours. Rather than chop off some little piece and put it into the hackathon competition, they seized a chalkboard and worked as if they were in the ACM room, continuing to tunnel toward Diaspora, amiably answering questions from people strolling around.
    Fred Benenson, who had spoken with Max after the Moglen talk, spotted them and came over to chat. He had recently