Sören Auer: "Cofundos is based on the vision that the whole is more than the sum of its parts."
07.01.2008
Despite of impressive efforts and innovativeness of the open source community little attention has so far been paid to alternative financing models of software development. CoFundOs - a project from the University of Leipzig - addresses this problem. Tassilo Pellegrini (SWC) talked to project leader Sören Auer about the status quo and future prospects of community-funded open source software and its spiritual relation to a Social Semantic Web.
CoFundOs is built on the idea of community funding. How does CoFundOs work? What is the philosophy behind it?
The main idea is, that there are quite often problems, which can be only solved when multiple people come together and pool ideas for requirements, solutions and finally also money for their realization. Cofundos currently implements this concept for open-source development. People interested in a certain feature or software describe their requirements on Cofundos and pledge to donate in case somebody develops the software.
The CoFundOs-Site has started in autumn 2007 and has already attracted funding. What are current experiences? How is the service being accepted among the community?
We noticed that the Cofundos concept attracts very much attention. We had in the first two months over 10.000 visitors, almost 200 projects are described and more than €6.000 are pledged for their implementation. However, we need more publicity and contributions to gain a critical mass and raise awareness of this new development concept. In order to do so, we will soon offer a tighter integration of Cofundos into the Web sites of popular open-source projects.
Do you have attracted any major sponsors / financiers by now?
Not yet. But we are definitely working to attract also organizational donations or involvement, especially, since Cofundos could easily support a number of causes such as involvement of woman in IT, supporting experts in developing counties and of course the advancement of free and open-source in general.
Although CoFundOs is not explicitly addressing Semantic Web issues its architecture is entirely built on interoperable standards. How did the idea of Semantic Web influence the idea of community-financed software development?
As the Semantic Web the Cofundos concept is based on the vision that the synergistic combination of a multiplicity of individual contributions is more than the sum of its parts. Also within the Semantic Web movement we noticed, that there are a number of R&D challenges, which would advance the progress towards its realization, but existing reward models (scientific publications, research funding, venture capital etc.) were for quite a while not sufficient to trigger their timely execution. I'm deeply convinced that Cofundos will contribute in future to the crystallization and realization of crucial, bottom-up innovations, which can ultimately lead to the accomplishment of bold visions (such as for example the Semantic Web).
CoFundOs is strongly promoting the idea of Open Source and Creative Commons. Do you think that CoFundOs could be a business model for a participatory web culture - like the Social Semantic Web?
I see Cofundos right now more as a model for triggering crucial R&D developments (also for the Social Semantic Web). For the creation and maintenance of semantic annotations and knowledge bases, however, the Cofundos model might not be directly suited. In the Social Semantic Web we will have fuzzy communities of contributors and consumers, in Cofundos on the other hand there will be ultimately one clearly defined person (or group) designated to perform a specific task.
What are your plans for CoFundOs in the near and in the far future. Doyou think this kind of business model is viable in the software engineering domain over the long run?
I'm very optimistic about that, but have to admit that it will take much more work regarding awareness, publicity, attracting organizational sponsors, fine-tuning the platform etc. Ultimately, I have the vision that the Cofundos platform could be provided and hosted by a non-profit association devoted to the model of participatory R&D. In fact, I see Cofundos also as a step towards a more effective realization of applied bottom-up, stakeholder-driven research. I'm deeply convinced this will make research more accountable and solution oriented.
About CoFundOs ...
Cofundos helps to realize open-source software ideas, by providing a platform for their discussion & enrichment and by establishing a process for organizing the contributions and interests of different stakeholders in the idea.
Go to the CoFundOs Homepage.
About Sören Auer ...
Dr. Sören Auer leads the research group Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web (AKSW) at the department of Business Information Systems (Universität Leipzig). Sören is (co-)founder of several high-impact research and community projects such as the Wikipedia semantification project DBpedia, the open-source innovation platform Cofundos.org or the Social Semantic Web toolkit OntoWiki.