Episode: 1797
Title: HPR1797: An Interview with Aaron Wolf of the Snowdrift Co-op Project
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1797/hpr1797.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 09:25:08

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David Whitman, I'm at Linux Fest Northwest and I'm talking to and I'll let you introduce
yourself.
This is Aaron Wolf and I'm a co-founder of a project called Snowdrift.coop.
Yes, and I heard about you, oddly enough, from when Lord Dragon Blute was at scale and
did an interview for HBR so we're kind of repeating that but I think this project is important
enough to get another mention of it and talk about its goals and objectives and how it's
going.
So we'll go ahead and give some updates then since scale.
We are a work in progress so we're not a functioning site yet but we're getting volunteers
involved and we have a new lead developer who's working full time on getting everything
set so people who want to come and hack on the site can now do a quick instant build
and we're doing everything we can to be welcoming to beginners and why should anybody come
hack on this particular project.
The answer is that we're really trying to do something meaningful that will affect
everybody in the free and open world.
So let's start from the beginning, what is the Snowdrift project about?
Well, what we're doing is creating a coordinated funding system for the community to support
freely licensed projects and that's not necessarily software.
It could be music or other types of things, other art textbooks or educational resources
of other sorts or science but freely licensed projects are something where once the work
is done, everybody gets the results so whether or not you chipped in to the development,
you benefit and that's how public goods work and there's a question of how do you get
everybody to chip in and fund them in the first place.
In our system, a project that is a free licensed project will be listed for support and as
a supporter you can say, I will chip in a little bit each month for each other's supporter
who will help with me.
So at a tenth of a cent minimum pledge, if I say, hey, I'll match you, if you help me,
I'll add another tenth of a cent and the next person who helps, I'll add another tenth
of a cent.
There were a thousand people I'd put in a dollar and if there were a thousand people
doing that, you'd have a thousand dollars a month, you could pay somebody part time to
work on a project.
But if there were five thousand people that joined me, it would be worth it for me to put
in my five dollars.
Of course, five thousand people at five dollars, we get twenty five thousand dollars a
month.
We can fund a team of people to work on our favorite free and open projects.
Now we're also trying to make the scale to work where if you're a wealthier patron or
extremely enthusiastic about a particular project, you could maybe make a higher level based
pledge.
But the core idea is if you just donate all you can right now, it doesn't actually do
anything.
I use Inkscape as an example often because I made some illustrations for the initial logos
and sketches of what we're doing for building the site.
And it's a great piece of software, tons of people use it, but it still doesn't compete
on future parity with the proprietary competition.
It still has tons of room for improvement.
It's not got anywhere near as much resources as it should have.
And if I donate five hundred dollars today, it won't change anything.
I'll just be out five hundred dollars for the most part.
I mean, they'll appreciate it.
Maybe me and a bunch of other people who donated a little bit, you know, it does do something.
But really, we're not going to see a different world.
But I want to see all of the people who are giving all of their funds to proprietary projects
to give them to projects that treat us better.
Essentially, if we could get the community coordinated, we're putting more economic power
in the hands of the people who are providing the funding at the end of the day and funding
projects that treat us as better by using free licensing and by using terms and policies
that are actually good for the interests of the public.
So basically, you're setting up a system where you can fuel the engine that'll make free
software better and improve it and build it.
Right.
So today, the strongest free software is supported by very powerful companies who use the free
software in their back end things.
So we have a lot of upstream and very technical sorts of things like the Linux kernel that
are well supported.
And we don't see as much downstream end user-focused things, apps on your phone or, you know, really
useful, normal things that lots of normal small businesses or individuals use or, for
that matter, cultural products like, I said, music or journalism.
We always see those things being all rights reserved.
We don't have the normal sort of cultural process respected.
We have ads and other sort of malicious things covering everything and getting in the way.
Nobody likes that stuff.
And yet, as a society, we keep giving our money to those projects that put this stuff
like these extra ads and trackers and stuff that we don't want.
And if we could coordinate everybody better, we could all continue to pay for the valuable
development work and get the results on better terms.
But when the terms are freely licensed, we have this dilemma, which is the name, the
Snowdrift dilemma comes from, for our name, the Snowdrift.coop, is that if there's a snowdrift
blocking the road, we all want the clear road and we all benefit once it's cleared, the
question is who's going to do the work to clear it?
Because each of us may have an incentive to see if somebody else will do it while we
get to do something else.
We have other tasks and other chores to do and hope somebody else will get to clearing
the road.
And more people say contributing to clear the snowdrift will make it, it can be done in
a different way.
It's much more sustainable, right?
If you have one guy trying to do this because he happens to be the most desperate, it not
only does not get cleared as effectively and as efficiently and as quickly, but people
burn out because they are basically minimizing their losses, they're volunteering their
time, and other people are benefiting but not helping to support the work in the first
place.
Okay, so where can people find out more information about snowdrift.coop?
So we have a website, of course, snowdrift.coop.coop is a sponsored top level domain that's only
for cooperative organizations, so we're running the whole thing as a democratic cooperative
or will be fully once we actually have everything working.
So the website snowdrift.coop has a lot of writing, you can test the system with fake
money and we have a mailing list now and a number of other ways for people to get involved
and if they have questions, people who are on free node can also check out our IRC channel,
it's just snowdrift at freeno.net.
Very good and then I'd like to ask a little bit about yourself, how you got involved
in the project and what your personal goals are.
Well I was, and still am, one of the general members of the general public that's an end
user.
I'm not a programmer by trade, I don't have much experience with any of these things.
I was, I basically hate advertisements and I hate all of the sort of very surface level
consumerist junk that I see in our society and I really like a lot of the things that
I've gotten out of some of the free software that I've used and I have a background in
teaching music.
I teach guitar lessons mostly for a living and I found it extremely frustrating to make
the best teaching materials out of the basic resources out there because even though there
is some public domain resources, most of the relevant cultural material is all rights
reserved, copyright controlled, the best teaching materials are that way and most of the
materials are all mediocre because they have some good ideas and some bad ideas and I
can't mix and match them.
The most valuable thing I could do as a music teacher would be to make better educational
materials from the wikipedia things, the wiki books and wikipedia articles and that's
not a way for me to have a living or make a career and so I haven't spent tons of time
on that but it feels very frustrating and at various times some of these things led me
to try a Linux system in 2012 and little by little I got involved in the community a little
bit and saw some of the amazing promise and the amazing things that have already been achieved
and was encouraged by other people to get involved and little by little I ended up in
a situation where I was talking about these fundamental problems and somebody with actual
technical experience who was a friend of mine said you should write down more about all
of these ideas work and I will do the technical work and I'll make a website for you and
he still had to spend some time convincing me to go ahead and actually do it but eventually
I gave up the idea of actually going to this musicology PhD I was considering doing
and dedicating my time really to making this project work because I think it's a valuable
thing and I really couldn't have done it without the support of a bunch of other technically
experienced people in the community but we're getting there and I'm now learning a lot
of things that I didn't plan to but I'm actually learning the Haskell a little bit because
we use a Haskell based web framework called Gisode and I've been learning more about
how websites work and web development and all these other things because it was needed
to be done and I'm there and I'm doing some of it.
Very good and so this is how much of your I guess work time or percentage of your life
work is dedicated to the Snowdraft co-op project.
Well it really has taken over my life to a large extent I gave up grad school in order
to do this and then for about four or five months I was sort of half time or maybe a little
more than half time still teaching and then working on this and my wife got a position
after she finished her grad school in Michigan moved out to Portland, Oregon and at that
time I left all my students behind who are in Michigan so I spent about a year mostly
on sabbatical if you will just working on Snowdraft co-op in which we worked on the cooperative
structure, the legal ideas, writing things, doing a bunch of other bigger broader development
things that happen when you're building an entire entity and an organization and a website
and I spent some of that studying and learning about different tools.
After about a year I went back to figuring out that I need to have some income because
the site's not operating yet and I don't know if even after it is whether I will get any
income out of it that's not my purpose of it, it's an on-profit so I'm not going to
get a return on my investment but hopefully I will get to benefit from all of the results
of all the projects we support if we succeed.
So I'm back to teaching now and I have about 15 or 20 students that I teach and it's hard
to figure out because I'm self-employed you know which how many hours or what I don't
quantify everything but basically I work probably a little more than half time teaching
music lessons and then I spend most of the rest of my time working on snowdrift.co
up.
Okay, so you're from Portland, Oregon.
I live there now.
Yeah which I'm in St. Helens so we're basically neighbors so if I'm just going to ask you
people want to get a whole of youth from music lessons they can contact you how.
Well I have a personal website at wolftune.com.
There's also a, I'm one of the listed as one of the co-founders at snowdrift.co up and
on my user page there's some other links to things.
I wrote an essay that some people have appreciated with a lot of other useful links about the
nature of copyright and especially how copyright relates to music education and music and
some other links to my website and another more extended version of my personal narrative
dealing as a music teacher with these issues is actually at my user profile on snowdrift.co
up.
I've worked really really hard to try to consolidate everything when I find links or useful
references I'm trying to keep that all together so that although it's a little bit cumbersome
that we need to make the navigation easier there's a lot of resources on the site already
and a lot of people have found it very valuable despite that it's not operating they find
the writings and the resources that we've put together useful probably the most notable
one is that we actually looked at all of the about about 700 crowdfunding related sites
that we do about on the internet and then credit a review of all of the existing ones
specifically in relation to free and open projects pretty much because I felt it was
important that we do our due diligence and don't just be one of those things where we
put up another project without knowing what's already being worked on and so I can say for
sure that there wasn't anything and isn't anything comparable to what we're doing that
somebody else who's already trying to do that we could have helped with we there really
was this need for a new direction and that's what we're working on and we wanted to respect
what people are already doing and what's working and not working in other projects.
Very good I think you have an interesting project and one it's worthwhile and I will encourage
people from the hacker public radio community to log on and get to know in your project and when
you get up and go and let's get it's these projects supported because I think that's an important
part of the open source community and I would point you to one of our HPR contributors John
Culp is a music professor from somewhere but he has some episodes on hacker public radio and
of course as always the hacker public radio technology podcast it relies on contributors
from people that send in shows it only lives when another show is sent in and so I'm here today
making a show by getting an interview from you from you for your project and you or anyone else
that's listening can contribute just by going to hacker public radio org and going to the
contribute page and finding out how that's done thank you Aaron thank you
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