[shkkmo]

I think your goal of crowdsourcing funding for the education of aspiring developers is great. But I think you are using the wrong model.

I think asking aspiring coders to run a "kickstarter" style crowd funding campaign for themselves is a mistake for the reasons the jtheory mentions.

I think it would make more sense to allow funders to organize themselves into scholarship groups with shared goals.

Then match aspiring coders to these scholarship groups using a process similar to the "National Resident Matching Program".

Then there is no binary choice of "you are deserving, you are not" about aspiring coders being made by funders. It's more of a "this coder exemplifies our ideals better than this coder"

/edited for clarity

[jtheory]

A bonus aspect of this kind of approach -- funding can favor the disadvantaged over the people who could probably fund themselves with a little extra effort, (like "live in Mom's basement for a year").

A kickstarter approach effectively blocks people who don't have friends & family with spare cash (and whose mothers don't have houses with spare rooms either).

[dalibrandi]

this is really interesting. regardless of how our first campaign goes, we're going to seriously examine this as a possible iteration/pivot of our service. We've encountered a lot of people that like the idea of getting more people to learn programming, but a decent amount of hesitation to the current model.

big fan of moving away from anything that buckets individuals into "you are deserving, you are not." creating a group around a specific coding goal provides a nice layer of abstraction away from the individual.

[shkkmo]

One of the potential advantages with organizing funders into groups is that it can allow you to tie the aspiring coders into an expanded support network of funders and past funded aspiring coders.

Another potential advantage of a model like this is that aspiring coders who "fail" to find the funding level they were looking for can be put in contact with groups than can help them refine their appplication, skill set, and goals so that they may be able to succeed in finding funding in the future.

This sort of funding paradigm could also be used to support quality educators who want to volunteer to go into schools, non-profits and other areas that are lacking skilled CS educators.

I think this sort of model could also be used "on top of" the more traditional "kickstarter" crowdfunding model. You could still allow traditional, one person to one person funding model, but at the completion of the campaign, match funding groups with individuals who have not raised sufficient funds.

[dalibrandi]

Totally, it encourages networking of like minded individuals as well, which could turn out to be a long lasting support system if the community is continually fostered. Really like the early ideas floating around this model, seems like there is good potential here.