[davideous]

This appears to be working so far.

One sample doesn't really establish a "market rate" yet, so I don't worry about the seller not being motivated by financial profit motive. Sometimes the value provided to the seller goes beyond the financial payment. 18F gets a good deal here because of the intangibles they have to offer.

If they put out more projects than the amount of work people are willing to do at the "$1 volunteer" or "$1 build my portfolio" rate, then the price should go up. How deep is this pool? I guess they will find out.

The big challenge, I think, will be if bad actors start coming in and making crazy bids and then doing sloppy work. Time will tell.

I'm excited to see how this develops.

[kbenson]

Yes, what we have here is the volunteer actually being paid in social capital and personal satisfaction, but not directly from 18F. 18F has heavily promoted recently, and that along with them being a part of the government and the project being open source all contributed to the volunteer feeling it was a worthwhile endeavor at that price. It's an interesting case study of how any market pricing function that looks at purely monetary cost is usually a poor pricing function unless the market is extremely liquid.