The Return of Upcoming.org by Andy Baio

Nobody asked for an argument, and by downvoting any argument on my part was prevented. I can explain why I find it immoral: I think the world has many real and deep problems, and investing in a web application that is not hard to build and solves a superfluous first world problem, is a waste of resources. Conversely, I think profiting from it is dishonest and immoral. You may disagree with my reasoning and you may have a different world view to compare, but the downvotes just terminate the conversation.

It feels good to have a beloved service (potentially) returning, but I believe there's another opportunity here that's being missed. I don't know if it's been tried before, but there's a way to organize a service like this, one that relies completely on user-generated content, that would likely be much more resilient: a cooperative.

Forgive me if this is half-baked. I'm not an expert by any means.

Add a pledge level of, say, $150, with the reward being that you become a founding consumer-member of the upcoming.org co-op. The way co-ops work, the surplus or benefit of the co-op's operations is periodically distributed (as a "patronage dividend") to the members in proportion to their "patronage" of the co-op in that period. In a worker co-op, patronage is usually defined as hours worked and the surplus is basically the profits of the business (cash). In a consumer co-op like a natural food store, a member's patronage is how much they spend in the store, and the patronage dividend comes in the form of lower prices.

You could define patronage in the upcoming.org co-op as participation in the site: contributing content, performing moderation, that sort of thing. The patronage dividend can be distributed in the form of free or discounted admissions to events or other rewards of that sort. Otherwise, it would operate the same as it would as a for-profit corporation (probably ad-supported in some way).

(In case it's not clear, I'm not saying the site should be members-only. Anyone would still be able to have full use the site, but those who pay the $150 membership contribution would just have additional privileges and/or responsibilities.)

As far as operations, it could be a multi-stakeholder co-op, as in a hybrid worker/consumer co-op. There would be two classes of members, one for employees and one for users. Some proportion of seats on the board of directors would be elected by each class (maybe 50/50). The board would then hire managers charged with keeping everything running (monitoring budgets and all that). In that way, the user-members would have a voice in major decisions, via their board vote.

There would be no risk of the founder selling out, because it's a standard part of the by-laws of most co-ops that memberships/votes are non-transferable and the co-op as a whole can't be sold unless it's to an entity that maintains the rights of the members (i.e. another co-op).

The main downsides are more organizational complexity and overhead and the fact that the founder has a much smaller upside potential. In other words, the best-case scenario for the founder is pretty much a stable job.

Obviously a lot of details would have to be worked out, but I can't help thinking that all the talk about building something sustainable for "the community" is pretty rhetorical if you're not willing to actually give the community a stake in it.

Magical Unicorns don't exist. People who distrust Facebook do, including my entire development team (5). It's not outrage porn to worry about the privacy practices (or lack thereof) of these companies.

I don't see how this would solve the problem. What would motivate Facebook users to import the events to upcoming.org? These are people who already have traded privacy for convenience. Hate for Facebook is only motivation for the people that hate Facebook. Are their enough magical unicorns to motivate the added effort of posting events twice? Total internet users - facebook users is pretty small, especially in the US.

There are also sites like creative loafing (Atlanta) or various other city paper like publications which have local events. They tend to be pretty "artsy". Facebook certainly isn't the only place to find these events. These sites/publications have appeal beyond just being an event calendar.

I believe their hope is that they can capitalize on whatever name recognition they have left. Maybe they'll pull it off, this guy has obviously had success in the past.

Making the two top tiers be sponsorships is interesting. Those raised about half the total so far. I wonder if anyone was thinking, hey, this is a pretty cheap way to get good visibility. Especially the $1000 city sponsorship, since you can just pick big cities like NYC.