Week 17, invention, intellectual property, and income. The assignment of the week is to develop a plan to disseminate the final project. My final project will be a machine. It will use open source software and the whole machine could be shared in open source files using the MIT license.

I see crowd funding as potential environment to develop and disseminate the machine. I have heard of platforms, such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Latter claims to be the biggest platform. According to Wikipedia, there is as of 2012 over 450 crowd funding platforms, of which the biggest is Kickstarter.com. It claims to have 8.9 million people who have backed up a project and it forms active community around the project. The Finnish legislation does not allow "keep it all" type funding, but "all or nothing" is legal if it's carried out as preorders. That means no money is moved unless the goal of the funding is reached. A person having a credit card can start building funding to his project in this platform. They suggest the following procedure:

1. Build your project
Build a guided web page of your project onto Kikstarter. Give a name for your project, put a picture and description along other important details. Add a video and a budget. Budget should take account all the costs you can imagine, including less obvious ones such as packing materials for the rewards. Kickstarter applies a 5% fee to the total funds raised. There are additional credit card processing fees (about 3-5%) and every project’s tax situation is different.
2. Get feedback
Previev the project page for friends as it's build. Get feedback.
3. Launch it to the world!
Publish the project page when you are satisfied of the result.
4. Track funding progress
Check your dashboard for statistics on where your backers are coming from. Promote your project actively.
5. Funded!
If you reach the goal, you can start to make the project.
6. Keep backers in the loop
Tell the story of your project as it unfolds through project updates. It is important to keep a blog of the development and let your backers to know what is in progress. Give estimated delivery dates for the rewards.
7. Send rewards
Take a backer report and send the rewards.
8. You did it
Done! Congratulations!

The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2015 Jani Ylioja

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.