I think both of these sites are the same thing: ChipIn & Pledgie. They seem to act as web 2.0ish gateways to facilitate your blog/site readers becoming active financial contributors to some designated project, etc. Pledgie uses this kind of language to describe itself, which I rather like:

“Pledgie.com is a framework of services which creates an open collaborative context around the act of giving.”

It’s just on the verge of meaningless though because its so non-specific and jargon laden (as if I should be one to talk!). But it also seems to plug in pretty closely to a lot of the “shared value community” stuff that I have been going on about lately.

The thing that sucks about both Pledgie and ChipIn though is that they are powered by PayPal, which is an absolute behemoth of suckiness. I haven’t looked in so long at any of that stuff, is there even a close competitor to PayPal any more? Has anybody out there in listener land ever used Google Wallet? Weren’t they going to connect it all together so you could plunk your AdSense earnings right into your Google Wallet? What’s the hold-up on that stuff, or did all these changes already pass me by?

What if we created a non-profit “bank” that could hold our money through fund-raising efforts like this, so that we could circumvent PayPal all together? I don’t know shit about how all that stuff works, but it seems like there are a lot of interesting technological possibilities that could be explored in these areas.

Also, one other thing: if we’re going to make a non-profit bank to exchange value between members of shared value communities, we’re going to need to figure out a good way to add non-monetary value into the system. And I’m not just talking about the skills bank idea either, though that could certainly be a step in that direction. {More thoughts on this on-going…}