We haven’t given our community any updates for quite a long time — and now it’s time to tell you what we have done in a recent few months.
First and foremost, we have changed the business model: now we are enabling any company or individual user to place a requests for the development of new software or the modification of existing software on the OpenGift platform. The requests can be submitted in any form: from idea to the elaborated technical brief.
Then, the request will be processed by independent project managers called ‘curators’, who will clarify the content of the task and the purpose of the proposed solution, translate the contents of the task from the customer’s language into developers’ language, and break the task into small modules and libraries.
Some of these units of code will be either specific for a certain customer or represent a significant product value for his business: such orders, if approved by the customer, will be forwarded to the closed task pool. Access to the closed pool is granted to OpenGift partners, i.e. companies professionally engaged in software development. Companies submit their estimates of the cost of tasks to the platform website, and the customer can choose any of them for further work and pay directly on the website.
The modules and libraries, that can be used by multiple companies and do not represent a significant product value, are placed in an open task pool. For this pool, the OpenGift team collects co-financing from potential users of the product. Thus, for a task worth $ 1000, ten companies can allocate $ 100, saving 90% of their costs.
Together with co-financing, the developers evaluate the cost of the tasks. Thus, customers can see how much they have yet to gather before a particular developer can start the task. After the expiry of the term set by the curator, developers can publish links to their solutions to the task. In this case, customers vote for the best solution and the developer, who has gathered more than 50% of the votes, collects the entire amount of the sum minus the commission of the curator and the platform. At their own discretion, customers can also purchase testing and evaluation of the code by randomly selected independent experts.
The platform allows paying for the services of OpenGift partners — localization, bug fixing and integration of the completed solution.
When a project is created, it is placed on the open-source marketplace of OpenGift projects, while the authors of the project, its co-sponsors, curator and developers receive tokens, which enable them to receive revenues from the subsequent financing of this project. Financing is carried out by transferring the task, stated in the technical roadmap of the project, to the smart contract, or by directly requesting new functionality from the project owners. Thus, those involved in co-financing can get a refund for the money allocated on development or even make profit.
We have discussed our new functionality in a bit more detail in our newly updated whitepaper, please refer to this document for further information.
Glad to say that we already tested the new functionality: we managed to cut costs for calendly-like booking system for three companies and a module showing a client the closest office on a map (in Russian)!
If you’d like us to help you to realize your idea 5–10x cheaper, just press “Create a task” button on the main page.
If you are a developer who’d like to earn some money completing tasks on our platform, you can start by giving your price estimations to already existing tasks.
