Community investment manager

Purpose

"Investment" in a project is currently thought of in fairly narrow terms, i.e. large amounts of money. Individuals who contribute other value, such as labor or equipment, typically expect to be compensated right away and do not expect to receive any ownership of the resulting project.

Large amounts of money, however, almost always come from one of two sources:

• family and friends who are not rich and typically cannot invest very much individually
• venture capitalists who expect the project either to make money for them or to be shut down and sold off to pay back their investment

Social benefit may be accomplished while "making" money, of course, but the two goals often come into conflict -- and when this happens, the presence of venture capitalists means that social benefit must be a lower priority.

Furthermore, there are often individuals who might wish to contribute non-monetary value, but there is no way of tracking these resources in a way that allows smaller contributors to be fairly compensated -- either in cash or ownership of the project -- once there is compensation to be had.

It would therefore be extremely useful to have a way of doing this.

Conceptual Design

The basic process works like this:

• member enters their contribution (labor, equipment, supplies, etc.)
• other members vote whether to accept the entry as accurate:
  • abstain -- either explicit abstention or missed the deadline to vote
  • accept -- the contributor's accounting is accurate
  • reject -- the contributor's accounting is wrong: item not received, labor not done or done incompetently, etc.
  • query -- contribution accounting is posted for further discussion
• There will be site-configurable criteria by which to determine whether the entry is accepted or not, e.g. no 'reject' or 'query' votes.
• Any member may propose compensation at any time. This can be in terms of:
  • revenue shares
  • control (voting) shares
  • a payment schedule (which could be triggered by specific events)
  • goods or services (e.g. items produced by the project)

Note

Apparently Sensorica uses such an application, but I've been unable to find any way to obtain it.