Idea: A free crowdfunding site for Creative Commons projects

What about a co-op of sorts? You could take your cut while people are donating, and then you give back the extra money in the form of a voucher or something that can be applied to another crowdsourced project (that way you don't have to exchange it back to their account and get hit with the transaction fee going back in).

As someone who has largely failed to make money while trying to give away what I have to offer, I have to wonder where you think the money will come from? What will be the motive to donate? I've known other webmasters, in some cases of fairly large sites, who just couldn't get the funding they really needed. They were idealistic and didn't want to "commercialize" it and didn't want to "beg" for donations either. I guess they thought people should just give out of the goodness of their hearts and, yet, in one case even when members were trying to find ways to give, the owner was turning them down due to his idealism, which was such it simply put a strangle-hold on any means to fund the site.<p>Do you have experience with the not for profit model? Are you familiar with the challenges that most non-profits face in trying to fund their work? Non-profits work on a similar basis to business as far as asking for money in exchange for something of value. In other words, the pitch is usually "we offer a valuable service to the community and you should fund us because it does positively impact your life in X way (such as reducing the number of homeless people on the street)"<p>I'm all for idealistic projects but many of them are so idealistic that they simply don't work. And frankly I kind of resent how much other people have benefited from my work while I got little in return. I have serious financial problems and could use the money. I wish I could find a way to crowd fund what I do. If I do, most likely that won't be called "crowd funding". It will be called "sales to the public", perhaps in the form of t-shirts, merchandising, etc.