Call for feedback: Kickback Integration of Native Donation (KIND)
In my previous blog post called “Is Freemium viable for Web 3.0 companies?”, I discussed the difficulty of Web3.0 companies (companies which has most of their data and logic on blockchain and their software open sourced) incurring fees on their services.
In one way, I may be overly worried. As Eric Conner of EthHub tweeted, people won’t fork as long as the fee is reasonable.
The tweet brought lots of debate.
The alternative approach is to rely on tips/donations which Eric doesn’t believe.
Ironically (in a good way), EthHub is one of the top donation earning projects and it was the highest matched project in the last round of Gitcoin CLR.

An interesting fact. Apart from open source software projects, they were mostly podcasts such as EthHub, zeroknowledge and #humansofethereum which made to the top list. It’s probably because they get lots of spotlight due to the nature of the communication medium. Podcast is now the new band!
People often say the community is the Ethereum’s killer app yet none of the community organisers are on the list. It’s very rare that someone like Jamie Anson (the organiser of ETHLDN) receives a spotlight, let alone rewards.
This is where Kickback can add value (while we can make sustainable revenue). When I explained the idea of the tipping feature to my wife (who knows nothing about crypto), she dismissed my idea by bringing the example of Uber tipping, when did you ever tip to the Uber driver?

Umm, that’s true (and my wife is always right). But the difference is that you already paid to the Uber ride, but you (as an attendee) haven’t paid anything to Kickback nor the event you attended (apart from the gas cost) and you almost always get more than you committed.
Why don’t people just donate?
To tell the truth, people can donate directly to the event they support. Any group can have their BTC/ETH address (or ENS name!) on their meetup page. However, our hypothesis is that meetup participants would feel the most generous right after they participated in the community event (in most cases they gained lots of knowledge, network, and free drinks).
With this and our observation of how Kickback users behave in mind, I came up so-called “The Kickback Integration of Native Donation (aka KIND)”.
The Kickback Integration of Native Donation
One of the “Bad UX patterns” of Kickback is the fact that users have to come back to withdraw their commitment + no show payouts. The 10 % ~ 30% of attendees do not withdraw within seven days after the event was finalised.

A few weeks after the Devcon5, I sent an email reminder to 150 people urging that we send back ETH/DAI to the users subtracting 1 DAI admin fee if they don’t do it by themselves. After that, we still had over $3000 worth of commitments stack on our smart contracts some of which I already sent back.

While handling these leftovers in the past, I received several requests sending to different addresses apart from the account they used which makes us a bit difficult to automate to sending back to the address they did RSVP.
- Please give my portion to the organiser.
- Why not donate the no shows to charity?
- Give it to Kickback for further development.
- I accidentally pushed my seed to GitHub so please send to a new address.
- I don’t want to receive no-show commitments because I don’t want to worry about the tax implications.
So, to solve the automatic send back issue as well as giving some choice for each attendee to decide what to do with their commitment, I came up with a mock UI.

The gist of the idea is that you can either send to the organiser, Kickback, or some arbitrary addresses. The donation split between the organiser and Kickback (currently setup up to 90/10 in the mock UI) is arbitrary for now and you can opt out.
The step by step explanation of the slides is here.
Do people actually want this?
How much would it cost to build, who would need such a feature, would it even worth building? We don’t know yet. Would anyone want your favourite meetups to use Kickback and tip/donate after the event if you enjoyed it? We don’t know either. To gauge the interest, we are considering a Kickstarter style crowd campaign to ask for donation to cover the development and its marketing cost. Instead of asking for a pure donation, we are considering pre-service sale where you can gift Kickback annual membership to your favourite meetups (and we can adjust the donation destination split between the organiser and Kickback depending on how much has been raised to support an meetup).

We are in search of best tools/frameworks to do this. It’s much easier if I resort to fiat solution such as Kickstarter, IndieGoGo etc, but I’d rather use crypto/smart contract if doable. If we decide to roll our own or use crypto solutions, then the key would be to comply the local regulations (we are based in UK). If you know anyone who is averse to rewards-based crowdfunding law in UK, please intro to us. We’d also like it to accept fiat or at the very least have an onramp solution so people can use their credit card.
The Power of match funding
We also liked the matching fund style Gitcoin did with Consensys and Ethereum Foundation.

By doing match funding, can we turn these match funding companies into patrons of local meetups where they occasionally sponsor beers and pizzas as well (reach out to us if you are one of these organisations)?
3 calls to action
To kickstart, I have 3 ways to support us and I hope you can do one of them.
Do you often go to meetups?
If so, let us know which meetups you would like to support by tweeting the following.
“Hey @wearekickback, please add @NAMEOFMEETUPTWITTERACCOUNT into your list of #kickback2meetup https://medium.com/wearekickback/call-for-feedback-kickback-integration-of-native-donation-kind-b74586af4e36“.
Do you organise meetups?
If so, please tweet the ETH address (or ENS name) from your meetup account.
“Hey @wearekickback I am the organiser of MEETUP_URL, and our ETH Address is 0x…. #kickback2meetup https://medium.com/wearekickback/call-for-feedback-kickback-integration-of-native-donation-kind-b74586af4e36”
Does your organisation want to support match funding?
Then simply email us at hello@kickback.events. This could be a perfect use case to summon another MolochDAO to join and discuss exactly how to make match funding work. If your org wants to know how to play a DAO, this could be another use case besides joining OrochiDAO.

