Appeal to the Habr community
We welcome the community of Habrakhabr!
Friends, we launched the campaign of popular funding Dhar-dara! For 80 days, we want to raise funds that will allow us to radically improve and transform our service. And today we are asking the Habrahabr community to support our crowdfunding campaign, to help us collect the required amount.
In this article we want to tell about the Gift-dar is now, the way we came to his current state, and also how we want to see him exactly one year after we collect the necessary funds.
')
Brothers Maxim karaboz and Anton brutto Karakulov, the founders of the Dar -dara
The gift-dar is an Internet service by which people give each other their belongings and services without requiring anything in return.
We launched our service at the end of 2008, inspired by the idea that the Internet allows you to create services with the help of which people can work together where previously it seemed impossible. We thought that if people had already learned through the Internet to share information with each other free of charge, then in the same way they can learn to share their material resources. It is enough to create a suitable tool for this. And we created daru-dar.
And now, after 4 years, Daru-dar is a rather large and active community, in which there are more than 150 thousand participants from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. To date, almost 2 million gifts have been donated, and more than 2 thousand gifts are given daily.
The geography of the mail directions of the Dar-dara and their intensity
Dara-dar was able to emerge and begin his journey primarily because immediately after its launch, people began to join and share our aspirations and are ready to experiment with the new social practice that we have proposed. And the participants of the Habrakhabr community became one of the first pioneers of the Dhara-Dara!
And today we are again asking for support from you. We ask you to become patrons of Dhar-dar , to support the development of the service with the amount that you consider possible for you.
The gift of the gift allows you to give to people whom you have never seen before. Some time ago it seemed impossible and incomprehensible. We are all accustomed to give only to those whom we personally know. However, at Dar-dar we managed to create conditions under which donation to strangers became absolutely real. In this we see a real social innovation of our service.
This is achieved, including due to the fact that in the profile of each participant the history of all the gifts that he gave, desired and thanked, is preserved. This story allows the donor to meet with everyone and choose the one who is more sympathetic to him.
Also, each member of the community can leave feedback about another member. So around each profile is created a set of opinions. This public reputation helps including blocking off potential fraudsters or inappropriate users from other participants.
The necessary things can be searched using the classic search. And you can discover the gifts you are interested in through the prism of pre-configured filters. Additionally, you can track gifts through groups whose members collectively select gifts on specific topics. You can also follow the gifts of people added to the contacts.
You can leave the desires that gift-gift shows to donors when publishing their gifts, if it detects similarities in the descriptions of the gift and desire. The donor may recommend his gift to those whose wishes are shown to him, and those who wish will receive a personal notice.
For four years, we, a small team of like-minded friends, have been creating and developing a service with great energy and enthusiasm. But we were convinced that one enthusiasm is not enough to realize our plans. We understand that the Gift-dar, which is now - only a simplified model of the service that we want to do and which we see in the future.
Logo Dara-dara on the occasion of his four years. All holiday doodles 2012
We were lucky. At the start of the project there was a philanthropist who supported the development of the service for the first one and a half years. During this time, we laid the foundations of Durdara - created its basic functions and designed the initial interface.
But since the beginning of 2010, we have been left without the funds we were counting on, and without the monetization model, the production of which was postponed until we deal with the main product. Suddenly there is nothing to pay for hosting and moreover it is not clear how to further develop the service, because we can no longer contain a team. The best solution we see then is to ask for support from our community and open a regular help section for the project.
We do not know for sure what amount of assistance can wait for us. But after several months it is obvious that this form of financing does not support the necessary pace of development. Over the next many months, we are trying to find alternative sources of funding, including we are engaged in third-party projects in the hope that we will be able to provide Gift-Gift thanks to them.
Unfortunately, the plan with external projects worked inefficiently. This almost completely distracted us from developing and improving our favorite service. Developers blog news announced less and less improvements and new features. For a year and a half, from the beginning of 2010 to the middle of 2011, we did only the following of the less significant one:
During this period, our resources are depleted so much that we make a collective decision, that each of us finds outside work and continues to support and develop the project as far as possible. Due to the fact that we have made contextual advertising as aggressive as possible, we have the opportunity to leave one developer in the Gift-house on an ongoing basis. We hope that the strength and energy of one person will be enough to maintain the service.
Postcard on the occasion of the fourth anniversary of the Dara-dara. All postcards 2012
However, in practice, it turns out that the strength of one person is only enough to support an existing service, and any development or improvement moves extremely slowly and inefficiently. It also becomes clear that it is difficult for a person to engage in service and the community alone, without constant communication with the team. Therefore, six months after the dissolution of the team, the person who remained in the gift-dar is also forced to go to another project. At some point, another comes to replace him, but even he does not stand for more than six months. From the significant we have only managed for all this time:
About a year ago we began to look for an investor, but we have not yet achieved the result. Since then, we have got some practical ideas on monetization of the service, but for their realization we need concentrated teamwork. Now Gift-Dar receives money from two sources: contextual advertising and patronage contributions of community members. It is about 70 thousand rubles a month. But in order to develop the gift-dar, we need about 300 thousand rubles a month.
Charity Aid Chart for February 2012
We were at an impasse - months go by, and the service stands still, as well as the community, which needs to be engaged, so that it does not become stiff and lively and dynamic.
About half a year ago, we got carried away with the idea of ​​crowdfunding, which has become incredibly popular abroad lately. We were also inspired by the experience of Wikipedia , which annually conducts campaigns of public funding and collects 70% of the amount needed to support and develop the service throughout the whole year.
We thought that the Gift-Dar is inherently close to Wikipedia. In Wikipedia, people give knowledge, and on the gift-giving people donate services and things. The experience of Wikipedia shows that it is easier and more effective for us to unite once a year in order to collect the necessary amount rather than deal with it regularly and separately throughout the year. And so, we decided to take a chance and raise the necessary funds in this way.
There are three areas that we want to do in the gift house next year:
We want to make Gift-dar easier and more accessible.
It requires a thorough reworking of the interface, taking into account the comments of users and our own observations, in order to clarify the basic mechanics of the service, simplify and speed up the implementation of the main donation scenarios: from publishing a gift to choosing a gift, promise and transfer of the gift - on the one hand, and from the gift to his desire and receiving - on the other.
We want to fundamentally revise the principles of human interaction with the service. So that a person can spend less time on manually finding the right, and could more articulate his specific desires and respond to the wishes of others. Those. so that you could just once look for the thing or service you need, and if it is not immediately found, forget for a time about the gift in general. And the service itself will find a person who will be ready to give you what is needed, even if he himself had not thought of offering it as a gift before. Those. we want to apply the concept of social search on the gift house.
We want to make a qualitative leap in reducing the noise level of “unnecessary” gifts, which is individual for each accomplice. To do this, we want to rebuild the principles of circulation of information in the community. For example, gifts will be distributed according to the themes corresponding to the current "key words", and these topics will be edited collectively - thousands of other people will fill them manually. You can subscribe to topics that interest you, and not customize filters that find everything that contains the word you specified. In other words, we want to implement our version of the graph of interests , and the task is complicated by the fact that most desires are short-term and regularly replace each other - unlike hobbies or hobbies.
Cabinet of the postman Gift-dara with general premises
We want to create a full-fledged tool for voluntary postmen - people who give their service to transfer gifts between cities. Postmanship should become more accessible - so that any person could participate in this, when he has such an opportunity, and less sacrificial - that the postman should give more of his service than perform public works. With the new instrument, gifts will not be sent by a shapeless mass in general premises, but as concrete gifts between specific people. The history of postmanship will accumulate; it will become clear what kind of gifts this person helped to convey. Finally, you can thank the postman! We expect that the new tool will significantly increase the flow of gifts between cities and reduce the time of their transfer.
In addition to global changes, we will deal with improvements and corrections of what is already now: increasing the transparency and visibility of the profile, dividing the ribbon of gifts into global / group / individual, simplifying the form of publishing a gift, the possibility of combining the same type of gifts in the series, recommending gifts to each other, the ability to moderate group members and their activity, simplifying work with a large number of gifts, creating roles of guardians and gift managers, more transparent work with self-organization tools tion, partial user the ability to lock.
Meet the giver and the giver. Moscow, Trubnaya Square, 2012. Photographer: Daria Karakulova
We want daru-dar to become more stable.
This requires the modernization of the internal architecture with a full selection and atomization of internal services. We need to create a predictable, scalable platform that is resistant to random failures.
First of all, select a service that serves media files (illustrations for gifts and thanks). This will allow you to completely isolate the application layer, making it independent and easily scalable. For the user, working with downloading images will become pleasant and painless: they will no longer be bothered by sudden failures, which periodically occur because of the ended space on hard drives, which requires stopping the entire service to be added.
Then upgrade the storage system and interfaces to work with them. Prepare them for separation, transfer part of calculated data to noSQL storage for faster access to them. Make it possible to scale this level by simply adding new databases, tables, collections — without interfering additionally with the application logic and periodically stopping the service to increase the computing power of the servers that serve this level. This will speed up the writing and reading of data, and as a result will speed up the application response. Eliminates errors and pauses associated with the inaccessibility of the data storage resource during peak times.
Unforeseen situation October 26, 2009
It is also extremely necessary to reorganize the application logic associated with the asynchronous execution of certain tasks. This is necessary for easy scaling with peak loads on internal services - to ensure their continuous availability when processing any user activity and significantly reduce the application response time at such times. For example, downloading images, then creating thumbnails, sending e-mail notifications, recording user activity, timely indexing gifts published for search results, processing votes and recommendations, etc. Introducing queues will solve such questions and make Dar-gift more alive and fast.
We want daru-dar to become significantly closer.
The gift dar should go beyond the browser and enter everyday life. To make this breakthrough, we need to make the service mechanisms available to third-party developers — open the API and gradually increase its capabilities. This will allow everyone to create their own services with similar mechanics, to make local or niche "gift-giving", to build them into their communities.
Moreover, based on this API, we want to create convenient mobile applications that people can use, no matter where they are now, what they do, what devices they use.
These applications, in the first place, should facilitate the moment of transfer of gifts between the donor and the donated person, provide them with quick access to contact information about each other, as well as remind about upcoming meetings or general premises. They will simplify the publication of gifts, make the digitization of things that a person would like to give, an easy process. They will also allow the participant to quickly receive information about events related to the gifts he gives, wishes or promises. Such applications will make dar-dar a part of our daily life.
We strive to make Gift-dar useful not only to the direct participants of the service, but also to benefit the wider community.
We will share the technologies of social interaction that we open and try out in Dar-dar with all the teams that also create new tools for cooperation. So, for example, some time ago we created the Social Design Laboratory , with the help of which we want to organize closer interaction and exchange of experience between social services.
Dar-dara activists. Trubnaya Square, 2012. Photographer: Daria Karakulova
Crowdfunding is a new social practice in the Russian-speaking space that we ourselves are forming right now. This method of financing seems to us an interesting alternative to the methods that are now common everywhere. We are very curious to explore this little-studied territory and then share the acquired experience with others. We invite you to support Dara-dar and go this way together!
We have chosen the world crowdfunding service for our campaign, because we saw in his team an insistent desire and courage to create a new social practice of popular financing. And we want to help them in this, to contribute their experience and energy to the creation of such a service, with the help of which Russian-speaking people will also learn how to be patrons of projects that create the future. Support us!
Friends, we launched the campaign of popular funding Dhar-dara! For 80 days, we want to raise funds that will allow us to radically improve and transform our service. And today we are asking the Habrahabr community to support our crowdfunding campaign, to help us collect the required amount.
In this article we want to tell about the Gift-dar is now, the way we came to his current state, and also how we want to see him exactly one year after we collect the necessary funds.
')
Brothers Maxim karaboz and Anton brutto Karakulov, the founders of the Dar -dara
- About Dar-dar and how he was born
- What we have achieved in 4 years
- What difficulties have we encountered
- What do we want to achieve in a year?
- What else are we aiming for?
- Crowdfunding in Russian
About Dar-dar and how he was born
The gift-dar is an Internet service by which people give each other their belongings and services without requiring anything in return.
We launched our service at the end of 2008, inspired by the idea that the Internet allows you to create services with the help of which people can work together where previously it seemed impossible. We thought that if people had already learned through the Internet to share information with each other free of charge, then in the same way they can learn to share their material resources. It is enough to create a suitable tool for this. And we created daru-dar.
And now, after 4 years, Daru-dar is a rather large and active community, in which there are more than 150 thousand participants from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. To date, almost 2 million gifts have been donated, and more than 2 thousand gifts are given daily.
The geography of the mail directions of the Dar-dara and their intensity
Dara-dar was able to emerge and begin his journey primarily because immediately after its launch, people began to join and share our aspirations and are ready to experiment with the new social practice that we have proposed. And the participants of the Habrakhabr community became one of the first pioneers of the Dhara-Dara!
And today we are again asking for support from you. We ask you to become patrons of Dhar-dar , to support the development of the service with the amount that you consider possible for you.
What we have achieved in 4 years
The gift of the gift allows you to give to people whom you have never seen before. Some time ago it seemed impossible and incomprehensible. We are all accustomed to give only to those whom we personally know. However, at Dar-dar we managed to create conditions under which donation to strangers became absolutely real. In this we see a real social innovation of our service.
This is achieved, including due to the fact that in the profile of each participant the history of all the gifts that he gave, desired and thanked, is preserved. This story allows the donor to meet with everyone and choose the one who is more sympathetic to him.
Also, each member of the community can leave feedback about another member. So around each profile is created a set of opinions. This public reputation helps including blocking off potential fraudsters or inappropriate users from other participants.
The necessary things can be searched using the classic search. And you can discover the gifts you are interested in through the prism of pre-configured filters. Additionally, you can track gifts through groups whose members collectively select gifts on specific topics. You can also follow the gifts of people added to the contacts.
You can leave the desires that gift-gift shows to donors when publishing their gifts, if it detects similarities in the descriptions of the gift and desire. The donor may recommend his gift to those whose wishes are shown to him, and those who wish will receive a personal notice.
For four years, we, a small team of like-minded friends, have been creating and developing a service with great energy and enthusiasm. But we were convinced that one enthusiasm is not enough to realize our plans. We understand that the Gift-dar, which is now - only a simplified model of the service that we want to do and which we see in the future.
Logo Dara-dara on the occasion of his four years. All holiday doodles 2012
What difficulties have we encountered
We were lucky. At the start of the project there was a philanthropist who supported the development of the service for the first one and a half years. During this time, we laid the foundations of Durdara - created its basic functions and designed the initial interface.
But since the beginning of 2010, we have been left without the funds we were counting on, and without the monetization model, the production of which was postponed until we deal with the main product. Suddenly there is nothing to pay for hosting and moreover it is not clear how to further develop the service, because we can no longer contain a team. The best solution we see then is to ask for support from our community and open a regular help section for the project.
We do not know for sure what amount of assistance can wait for us. But after several months it is obvious that this form of financing does not support the necessary pace of development. Over the next many months, we are trying to find alternative sources of funding, including we are engaged in third-party projects in the hope that we will be able to provide Gift-Gift thanks to them.
Unfortunately, the plan with external projects worked inefficiently. This almost completely distracted us from developing and improving our favorite service. Developers blog news announced less and less improvements and new features. For a year and a half, from the beginning of 2010 to the middle of 2011, we did only the following of the less significant one:
- Deduced the causes of user locks
- Introduced a system of public reviews
- Introduced gift giving service on behalf of companies
- Made it possible to indicate the cause of "Nedar"
- Introduced the concept of recognized donors and the best gifts in groups.
- Laid the foundation for translating the service into other languages
- We connected the Copiny community support system
- Introduced the status of a voluntary postman
- Made it possible to publish the gift is not for everyone
During this period, our resources are depleted so much that we make a collective decision, that each of us finds outside work and continues to support and develop the project as far as possible. Due to the fact that we have made contextual advertising as aggressive as possible, we have the opportunity to leave one developer in the Gift-house on an ongoing basis. We hope that the strength and energy of one person will be enough to maintain the service.
Postcard on the occasion of the fourth anniversary of the Dara-dara. All postcards 2012
However, in practice, it turns out that the strength of one person is only enough to support an existing service, and any development or improvement moves extremely slowly and inefficiently. It also becomes clear that it is difficult for a person to engage in service and the community alone, without constant communication with the team. Therefore, six months after the dissolution of the team, the person who remained in the gift-dar is also forced to go to another project. At some point, another comes to replace him, but even he does not stand for more than six months. From the significant we have only managed for all this time:
- Add search for friends from other services
- Enter the status of a patron
- Create a notification system on the site
- Add comments to thanks
About a year ago we began to look for an investor, but we have not yet achieved the result. Since then, we have got some practical ideas on monetization of the service, but for their realization we need concentrated teamwork. Now Gift-Dar receives money from two sources: contextual advertising and patronage contributions of community members. It is about 70 thousand rubles a month. But in order to develop the gift-dar, we need about 300 thousand rubles a month.
Charity Aid Chart for February 2012
We were at an impasse - months go by, and the service stands still, as well as the community, which needs to be engaged, so that it does not become stiff and lively and dynamic.
About half a year ago, we got carried away with the idea of ​​crowdfunding, which has become incredibly popular abroad lately. We were also inspired by the experience of Wikipedia , which annually conducts campaigns of public funding and collects 70% of the amount needed to support and develop the service throughout the whole year.
We thought that the Gift-Dar is inherently close to Wikipedia. In Wikipedia, people give knowledge, and on the gift-giving people donate services and things. The experience of Wikipedia shows that it is easier and more effective for us to unite once a year in order to collect the necessary amount rather than deal with it regularly and separately throughout the year. And so, we decided to take a chance and raise the necessary funds in this way.
What do we want to achieve in a year?
There are three areas that we want to do in the gift house next year:
- Convenience (design and engineering)
- Stability (refactoring and scaling)
- Availability (API and mobile apps)
Convenience (design and engineering)
We want to make Gift-dar easier and more accessible.
It requires a thorough reworking of the interface, taking into account the comments of users and our own observations, in order to clarify the basic mechanics of the service, simplify and speed up the implementation of the main donation scenarios: from publishing a gift to choosing a gift, promise and transfer of the gift - on the one hand, and from the gift to his desire and receiving - on the other.
We want to fundamentally revise the principles of human interaction with the service. So that a person can spend less time on manually finding the right, and could more articulate his specific desires and respond to the wishes of others. Those. so that you could just once look for the thing or service you need, and if it is not immediately found, forget for a time about the gift in general. And the service itself will find a person who will be ready to give you what is needed, even if he himself had not thought of offering it as a gift before. Those. we want to apply the concept of social search on the gift house.
We want to make a qualitative leap in reducing the noise level of “unnecessary” gifts, which is individual for each accomplice. To do this, we want to rebuild the principles of circulation of information in the community. For example, gifts will be distributed according to the themes corresponding to the current "key words", and these topics will be edited collectively - thousands of other people will fill them manually. You can subscribe to topics that interest you, and not customize filters that find everything that contains the word you specified. In other words, we want to implement our version of the graph of interests , and the task is complicated by the fact that most desires are short-term and regularly replace each other - unlike hobbies or hobbies.
Cabinet of the postman Gift-dara with general premises
We want to create a full-fledged tool for voluntary postmen - people who give their service to transfer gifts between cities. Postmanship should become more accessible - so that any person could participate in this, when he has such an opportunity, and less sacrificial - that the postman should give more of his service than perform public works. With the new instrument, gifts will not be sent by a shapeless mass in general premises, but as concrete gifts between specific people. The history of postmanship will accumulate; it will become clear what kind of gifts this person helped to convey. Finally, you can thank the postman! We expect that the new tool will significantly increase the flow of gifts between cities and reduce the time of their transfer.
In addition to global changes, we will deal with improvements and corrections of what is already now: increasing the transparency and visibility of the profile, dividing the ribbon of gifts into global / group / individual, simplifying the form of publishing a gift, the possibility of combining the same type of gifts in the series, recommending gifts to each other, the ability to moderate group members and their activity, simplifying work with a large number of gifts, creating roles of guardians and gift managers, more transparent work with self-organization tools tion, partial user the ability to lock.
Meet the giver and the giver. Moscow, Trubnaya Square, 2012. Photographer: Daria Karakulova
Stability (refactoring and scaling)
We want daru-dar to become more stable.
This requires the modernization of the internal architecture with a full selection and atomization of internal services. We need to create a predictable, scalable platform that is resistant to random failures.
First of all, select a service that serves media files (illustrations for gifts and thanks). This will allow you to completely isolate the application layer, making it independent and easily scalable. For the user, working with downloading images will become pleasant and painless: they will no longer be bothered by sudden failures, which periodically occur because of the ended space on hard drives, which requires stopping the entire service to be added.
Then upgrade the storage system and interfaces to work with them. Prepare them for separation, transfer part of calculated data to noSQL storage for faster access to them. Make it possible to scale this level by simply adding new databases, tables, collections — without interfering additionally with the application logic and periodically stopping the service to increase the computing power of the servers that serve this level. This will speed up the writing and reading of data, and as a result will speed up the application response. Eliminates errors and pauses associated with the inaccessibility of the data storage resource during peak times.
Unforeseen situation October 26, 2009
It is also extremely necessary to reorganize the application logic associated with the asynchronous execution of certain tasks. This is necessary for easy scaling with peak loads on internal services - to ensure their continuous availability when processing any user activity and significantly reduce the application response time at such times. For example, downloading images, then creating thumbnails, sending e-mail notifications, recording user activity, timely indexing gifts published for search results, processing votes and recommendations, etc. Introducing queues will solve such questions and make Dar-gift more alive and fast.
Availability (API and mobile apps)
We want daru-dar to become significantly closer.
The gift dar should go beyond the browser and enter everyday life. To make this breakthrough, we need to make the service mechanisms available to third-party developers — open the API and gradually increase its capabilities. This will allow everyone to create their own services with similar mechanics, to make local or niche "gift-giving", to build them into their communities.
Moreover, based on this API, we want to create convenient mobile applications that people can use, no matter where they are now, what they do, what devices they use.
These applications, in the first place, should facilitate the moment of transfer of gifts between the donor and the donated person, provide them with quick access to contact information about each other, as well as remind about upcoming meetings or general premises. They will simplify the publication of gifts, make the digitization of things that a person would like to give, an easy process. They will also allow the participant to quickly receive information about events related to the gifts he gives, wishes or promises. Such applications will make dar-dar a part of our daily life.
What else are we aiming for?
We strive to make Gift-dar useful not only to the direct participants of the service, but also to benefit the wider community.
We will share the technologies of social interaction that we open and try out in Dar-dar with all the teams that also create new tools for cooperation. So, for example, some time ago we created the Social Design Laboratory , with the help of which we want to organize closer interaction and exchange of experience between social services.
Dar-dara activists. Trubnaya Square, 2012. Photographer: Daria Karakulova
Crowdfunding in Russian
Crowdfunding is a new social practice in the Russian-speaking space that we ourselves are forming right now. This method of financing seems to us an interesting alternative to the methods that are now common everywhere. We are very curious to explore this little-studied territory and then share the acquired experience with others. We invite you to support Dara-dar and go this way together!
We have chosen the world crowdfunding service for our campaign, because we saw in his team an insistent desire and courage to create a new social practice of popular financing. And we want to help them in this, to contribute their experience and energy to the creation of such a service, with the help of which Russian-speaking people will also learn how to be patrons of projects that create the future. Support us!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/155219/
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