Digging through wikipedia, I turned up Brian Camelio[1], who founded ArtistShare in 2001. It seems he's listed as a potential "father of crowdfunding" but I wonder who else was integral.<p>[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Camelio
Ashkenazi Jews have been doing crowdfunding for books for hundreds of years. It's called Prenumeranten (פרענומעראנטען) and the standard backer's reward is the backers' names published as a thank you in the book, sometimes mentioning their hometowns too.<p>This link is temporarily offline, but has a ton more information once it's back up:
<a href="http://www.jewishgen.org/Rabbinic/infofiles/prenumeranten.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.jewishgen.org/Rabbinic/infofiles/prenumeranten.ht...</a><p>Prenumeranten are a very useful resource for genealogists.
The underlying concept of a community of people working towards a common goal isn't something that was recently invented. I grew up in a neighbourhood that would regularly hold events involving the street to raise money for particular causes. Churches and community groups have been crowd-funding donations towards causes since forever, as have charities.