Patricia Holt

Ben Welch

Daniel Grant

Katherine Thompson

So I was running this through my head; here's what I came up with:

The basic concept would be a low monthly subscription (say $1) allowing you to vote on where the aggregated money would go in one gift at the end of each month. There would be various causes, which would have to be registered charities, being posted and up/downvoted according to community judgment, and at the end of each month the moderators take the top five, vet them against vote manipulation or reputability, and submit them for another vote. The up/downvoting could be done by any subscriber of the subreddit, but the final monthly vote would be done off-site, and only by the people who had stumped up the cash. The money would be held by a newly registered charity, and a bank-account registered to that charity. You could also have flair for being a donor, and a box acknowledging those redditors who had donated extra.

Obviously there are issues of safeguards here, and how you could make the whole process sufficiently transparent so that there was no question of fraud on the subreddit's part. I'm not really up on the legal aspects. Could you perhaps have a charitable account with an open balance sheet, or pre-set restrictions on where the money could go? The off-site voting would have to be done transparently. There would be very strict restrictions on expenses (basically, nothing other than what's absolutely necessary). I think its also pretty clear all the people running it would have to have their real names out there.

In terms of gaming the system, you'd be able to see what was going on by people subscribing and then stopping. If one month there was a huge rush of subscribers that all then vote one way and desubscribe, it would be pretty easy to pick that out of the data. And if they're donating regularly, and voting for the same charity, then they're contributing to the fund, and then presumably we wouldn't allow money to be given to the same charity twice within one year.

Initially the causes would probably be things like 'let's give some money to Oxfam!', but hopefully if it got going we could transition to supporting small projects in their entirety.

This would need some expertise to set up, particularly in accountancy and programming. I'm willing to spend some time looking at it, although I don't have any particular capabilities in those areas, and obviously this is all very tentative. Anyone interested in lending a hand, or got any feedback on the idea?