Snowball Charter

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Posted by mlncn on November 12, 2011 at 10:32pm
Last updated by gusaus on Thu, 2018-01-25 00:28

Snowball: Getting projects rolling! Coordinating community initiatives in Free Software and beyond. (Sign up for updates on Snowball.)

We can realize the huge potential in the gap between desired projects that individually people and organizations in our communities do not have the capability or resources to make happen— but collectively do.

Snowball seeks to help people find one other and to reduce coordination friction, transaction costs, and risks. Part of this vision is driven by the idea of the power of everyone being in one network and so able to find one another based on interest and rely on one another based on skill, availability, and past reliability.

Our first step is to provide a platform where project goals and roles can be very clearly defined, so that people coming from various perspectives can move forward together.

Unfulfilled Promise which Snowball Seeks to Fulfill

People deserve cool things.
People creating cool things deserve support.

Problems Snowball Seeks to Solve

People who would like to support an idea but cannot do it all themselves do not have a way to move forward.
Potential collaborators do not have clarity on what proposals exist, who has committed to working on them, and the specification of what is proposed to be done. This lack of clarity can lead to duplication of effort, and consequent underresourcing of efforts.
Potential supporters do not have a good way of understanding the level of technical vetting a proposal has.
Potential supporters do not always have a transparent view of the risks to a proposal's success.
Many good developers are using Free Software, not contributing to Free Software, even though they would prefer to work directly on projects benefiting the community.