I changed strategy and decided to fully disclose my ideas. I can not expect people to just believe in me and have faith ;)
What follows, is a copy of the first topic (updated) on the PAI forums (http://www.createforum.com/pai), summarizing it all. Please check out the forum for full details.
You could reply here, but even better would be to reply on the PAI forums because all thoughts are useful in further developing this project. If they are posted there, everybody can see them and not just me. It is still up to you what you prefer, of course.
Project All-In (preliminary name)
What is the project: creating a non-profit website that a.o. wants to operate as a link between charity projects and their donors in a unique way.
Main goal of the website: increasing support for charity projects.
Your potential added value: comes from sharing your opinion. As a community of volunteers, we can achieve a lot more. You can also carry out certain tasks.
Summary
Hi,
I have an initial idea for a new website. Everything that came to my mind so far, is described in the posts on these forums. The basic function of it will be to increase donations for charity projects by offering donors publicity in return (win-win situation). How exactly is very original and described further on. A very important factor is enabling intensive user interactivity and providing some entertainment. All donations are still directly transfered to the charity project (not first to the accounts of this website). This website will not earn a penny of those donations.
In order to improve the idea and the execution of it, I can use a lot of help of people who want to do something for a good cause without earning money for it. everybody can help, not all tasks require specific skills. Even very small things can help this project, for example simply posting critical thoughts on this forum, or writing something about this new website on your blog, when it launches.
Details
The website we want to create will have 3 cornerstones:
1) A website section that wants to achieve the main goal of PAI: increasing donations for charity projects. Any project can be selected to be helped receiving more donations (of course no project will be supported on a never-ending base). Organizations or individuals that want to donate money to a project, select one on the website. As soon as there are 5 potential donors for a certain project, a poll opens with these 5 donors. The website visitors then vote for the donors they like most. The less votes a donor has when the poll closes, the higher will be the proportion of his offered donation that he has to pay. The money a project receives, increases also with every extra vote. Donors that offer a donation, receive publicity in the sense of people seeing the poll and they also get an own page on the website (as long as the poll is open). Read the full details about this mechanism in the "Project development" forum!
2) A community of volunteers that develop, maintain, expand and run the website. Among others, they select the projects that are to be supported, they think along on how to improve the website, they write news items and other articles for the website, they expand cornerstone 3 of the website (see next), they find donors for the project (but the achievement of the main goal absolutely does not rely on this task, even if they do not actively search for donors, the site intends to attract them anyway!), they promote the website on their blogs and websites, ...
3) A portal aiming for people who want to volunteer in any way. This part of the website should guide everybody who wants to volunteer. There are many ways: helping this website, volunteering for a local project, volunteering remotely (e.g. via the Internet), collecting materials or money to donate to a project, ... This section of the website will not attempt to directly give all information, but will rather link to the best websites around. This section of the website has to be reviewed and updated regularly by volunteers.
How can you help realizing this project?
There are many possible ways in which you can contribute to this project. Really everybody can be of value. Volunteers for this project can chose to invest little or much time in one or more of the following tasks:
[*] First of all, people are needed to give their opinion on the complete functioning of the website. Will the idea work out as intended, how can it be improved, ... Volunteers with all kind of skills are welcome: legal, technical, economical, esthetical, ... aspects all play a role. Actually, no specific skills are needed at all, and there is no limit on the number people helping.
[*] One or more volunteers are needed to code the website. They need to be skilled and experienced in scripting and databases. The website will involve a lot of interactivity by the visitors and by the volunteers maintaining it. Several algorithms will have to be programmed to define all kinds of rules that come with interactivity. The website also needs systems for registration, news posting, interactive content editing, polling, ... So obviously, the skills to create this kind of systems is required (think of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, SQL, ...). Example websites that require similar skills are http://www.last.fm, http://digg.com, http://www.wikipedia.org and http://www.howstuffworks.com, to name a few.
How much weight rests on the shoulders of the web designer(s)? Only that of the actual coding (purely technical). In advance, the community of volunteers for the website will explore my full idea and give comments. Together we will look to fill in the details and try to improve it where that's possible. Of course also the web designer is as welcome as all others to give his opinion. But then, when the main idea is totally clear, me and some others will make a very detailed plan of the website, with layout, functionality, algorithms,... already specified in great detail.
[*] The graphical part of the website can be done by the same people or by somebody else, in cooperation with the rest of the community of volunteers (that for example give their opinion on the preliminary design).
[*] Volunteers are needed to fill up the website with content (see cornerstone 1 and 3).
[*] Finally, many volunteers can help promoting the website at start-up (and later on). This is not as limited as it looks like. This will become clear when you read more about the project. No technical skills at all are needed for this.
In conclusion
Whatever task you do, the most important thing is that you want to be part of a community and think along with the rest of us, or just spend a little bit (or a lot) of time contributing.
Please also do not be afraid that you can't perform certain tasks. For all tasks, clear guidelines will be provided and we will all cooperate.
Feel free to ask further questions or to simply introduce yourself. You can read and post in all forums as a guest. If you post something regularly, please register though. It makes it easier for us to understand yoru background, etc.
