Kickstarter 2013 Revisited

[Richmond]

On 10/05/15 21:46, Mark Wieder wrote:
> On 05/10/2015 02:56 AM, Richmond wrote:
>
>> Let me pause for a moment to have a few thoughts about the nature of
>> contracts:
>
> Without disagreeing with anything else in your thoughtful missive, I'd 
> like to point out that Kickstarter is not contract-based. You pledge a 
> certain amount of money towards projects you're interested in seeing 
> move forward. If that pledge goal is reached within the predetermined 
> time frame then your account is charged, otherwise not. The maximum 
> value you can request for a project is $20 million, and sadly the only 
> unsuccessful project I helped fund didn't reach that amount, thus we 
> have no Death Star today.
>
> But your pledge is not a guarantee that a project will succeed, wholly 
> or partially. The expectation, of course, is that it will, and the 
> pledge reward levels are based on that expectation. The originators of 
> Kickstarter projects are under no obligation to produce said rewards, 
> and even if they succeed other circumstances may cause unexpected 
> delays. As yet not all the Kickstarter projects I've helped fund have 
> completed. They may or may not... I see progress on all, some have run 
> into scheduling conflicts with publishers, deaths have intervened; as 
> with any project, life happens.
>
> The HTML5 pledge drive, on the other hand, was not on Kickstarter, but 
> on some other platform (indiegogo? I forget), with different rules and 
> different expectations. I didn't follow it that closely, but indiegogo 
> is also not contract-based.
>

There is a written contract and there is a spoken contract, there is 
also an unspoken moral contract.

While a Kickstarter campaign may not constitute a contract as such, it 
does resemble something of the sort.

And, whether contract or not, when the recipients of the funds from a 
Kickstarter campaign write about
a "few months" and that turns out not to be a few months but a few years 
I do think it is not entirely
unreasonable for donors to feel disgruntled.

Just the other day I was helping out in the Ivan Vazov library here in 
Plovdiv helping prepare a GANTT chart for
an EU funded project. Now all the participants at that meeting were well 
aware that a GANTT chart is a road map
rather than something cast in stone (after all if all dependencies of a 
deliverable are not satisfied in time things have
to be readjusted), but it was mentioned that the chart should something 
that came near to what should actually happen.

Richmond.