Fundraising New Idea: Online Payment "Smart Codes" That Can Reproduce

by John S. James

Summary: While exploring better ways to sell information online, we developed a design that we believe will be important in online commerce generally -- financial accounts each with its own Web control center, allowing each account to have its own settings for dozens or hundreds of options and services offered by the server, and also to reproduce children accounts without limit, through any number of generations. Each new account will inherit the options and services of its parent, and allow owners to make inherited changes if they wish -- leading to family trees of related accounts that can evolve through practical use. This article shows how organizations can let people give as much or as little as they choose, without breaking out of the moment to do all the steps usually necessary to pay money.

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Introduction

While looking for better ways to publish a newsletter online, this writer, who designed and wrote software in a previous career, invented what looks like a new tool for online commerce. This article outlines fundraising possibilities of this "smart codes" design for computer-controlled money, with financial accounts that can reproduce without limit, inheriting options and services and forming family trees. Believing that this approach may be a fundamental advance that should not be patented and owned exclusively by one person or company, I published it online for anyone to use, and am encouraging open-source software development.

This article focuses on fundraising -- on making it convenient, engaging, and rewarding to donate as much or as little as one chooses. The details needed to do everything described here are already published at http://www.MicropaymentSmartCodes.com. But that site looks less at fundraising than at how musicians and other artists could use smart codes to market their work independently through social networks worldwide -- allowing friends, supporters, and other donors to buy bulk prepaid downloads as gifts, for sharing in smart Web links through networks, so that most downloads can be free while the artist still gets paid for them. (For our readers, the same system could also make medical-journal articles more accessible, as journals could easily sell thousands of downloads at a time to third parties who could market them effectively to small organizations and others now excluded because they are not part of a big university, corporation, or other institution.)

This article considers four fundraising scenarios:

Instant Web pages automatically born with the ability to accept payment by credit or debit cards and in many other ways -- regardless of whether or not an organization already has a presence on the Web;
Allowing anyone to reward good work online by giving large or even very small online donations by using a single payment code, and with almost no transaction cost;
Direct links from music to practical ways of getting involved; and
IV. Turning an individual donation to an historically important organization into a collectible investment as well -- creating digital collectibles, which could add an entirely new incentive to conventional fundraising appeals.

At this time (July 2005) the smart codes described are only a design; the software to provide and manage them has not been written. I am committed to AIDS Treatment News, and would like to use smart codes in our fundraising, but am not in a position to develop this accidental invention as a business. I can develop it as a conversation, and am looking for others to help explore next steps. Perhaps you know someone who might be interested.

Here we cut this article for length, and prepared the following bullet points from the remainder of the text. You can find the full article at
http://www.MicropaymentSmartCodes.com/fundraising

Smart Codes: Benefits

* Anyone with a smart code can immediately pay money online, receive money (including from credit cards or any other means provided by the smart-code server), use the code's control center on the Web to change any of dozens or hundreds of options, and create any number of new children codes (with those options) to give or sell to others. These children are fully powered smart codes that can also reproduce, through any number of generations -- forming family trees of related accounts that can evolve through practical use in social, business, or other networks.

* Anyone with a smart code can also create any number of public codes -- limited smart codes that can only receive money (which credits the parent), but can never pay money. Each public code automatically has its own dynamic Web page with its own funding stream and accounting; it can accept payment from smart codes, credit cards, and other means through the server (subject to restrictions). Public codes, each of which may represent a donation appeal or merchandise offer, can be given memorable names and published widely. They will usually be included in Web links, so the public can use them without knowing anything about the smart-code system. Their owners can simply check a box at the control center for such services as a color cartoon display (on the public Web page) showing fundraising progress so far, and the donor's or any other new contribution going into the pot.

* Each server will be able to manage many thousands of codes, and offer smart-code service throughout the world, even to people using different languages and currencies. International users will be able to change their choice of language and currency if necessary at their code's control center, probably by clicking on a row of flags, and on a row of currency symbols. Smart codes do not do language translation, but could provide system messages in many languages -- and also standard business, etc. phrases, allowing anyone to click a flag on a public-code site to refresh the display with those phrases in their language. All the work is done on the server; smart codes will not need to run any software on the end user's computer.

* Note that a server might issue only a few codes, which could reproduce into millions if the code owners and their business or social networks wanted that many. The server might charge a small fee for each new code created, to prevent uncontrolled growth.

* Smart codes will have many uses besides fundraising. For example, they could let artists and performers even in remote villages, far from any computer or online access, sell downloads of their work through networks of fans and supporters worldwide, with essentially no startup cost beyond recording and editing the work. Web links with smart codes in them will allow donors and supporters to buy any number of discounted bulk downloads -- charging up smart Web links with free downloads that instantly pay the artists or their village when anyone uses the art. Smart codes could even compute and pay taxes or other fees automatically the moment sales are made -- and mail paper checks (through a contract service) or otherwise transfer money to the artists. Code owners will just check boxes at the control center for these services, provided the server offers them.

* This smart-code design provides unprecedentedly flexible financial accounts that can be created, have children, be shaped for special purposes, or die, in an instant. The children can inherit dozens or hundreds of options and services (financial and otherwise) that the server has made available, creating family trees of accounts that evolve as users' needs change. End users will have ultimate control over most of these options and services, in case they want to make any changes -- but in practice they may never need to change anything or even know that the control center exists. This is because smart codes will usually come into their lives not randomly, but through business or social networks, or for special purposes. So all the options an account owner needs will often have already been set by other people, in ancestor codes, before the new code was born.

* The estimated processing cost per smart-code transaction is less than a tenth of a cent -- so even small donations like 20 cents become available for constructing rituals of community and participation.

* Some of the most important business and fundraising uses for smart codes (including three of the four fundraising scenarios noted in this article) have no need for any critical mass of users. They will work perfectly well even if only one person or organization in the world were using smart codes, and no one else had ever heard of them -- greatly facilitating the introduction of this technology.

Next Steps

Could something so easy do so much, yet not have been invented already? Yes, for two reasons. First, this system of computer-controlled money could not have worked at all until recently, when Web access became widely available. Also, today's business mindset would be unlikely to invent it, due to the focus on elaborate registration. In practice, conventional registration destroys the flexibility of account reproduction, with its inheritance of options and services. And without inheritance, the control center with dozens or hundreds of services would be unfeasible, as codes could not evolve in the community without the tedious work of manually setting the options required for each new code.

In case I'm wrong about the potential of this smart-code design, that should become evident quickly in a public conversation, so not much effort will be lost.

For more information, see the full text of this article at
http://www.MicropaymentSmartCodes.com/fundraising -- or see http://www.MicropaymentSmartCodes.com. Write me at aidsnews@aidsnews.org with "smart codes" in the message title, with comments or just to keep in touch on this project.

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