Thank you for your interest in supporting the rbutr project! rbutr is a non-profit, (soon to be) open source project driven almost entirely by volunteer effort, so your support is incredibly important to the success of the project.
There are three main ways you can support rbutr:
1. Volunteer your time and skills
We’re looking for people to help with things like managing our social media channels, writing for our blog, helping promote rbutr, actively adding rebuttals, working on visual design, usability and artworks, and programming new features for the plugin or website.
If you’d like to help out, please get in touch through email (shane at rbutr), or our Facebook working group: rbutr workgroup on Facebook. From there we can get you an invite into our slack channel where we discuss everything happening with rbutr.
A list of jobs which volunteers can work on can also be seen in our Trello boards:
The Trello lists are not comprehensive, nor very detailed. They are mostly used as placeholders of jobs which need doing. If there is something you want to improve about rbutr which isn’t in any of those lists, then that is great too! Just get in touch, and we’ll make it happen.
2. Promote rbutr to your network
rbutr needs to grow a lot. We also need to meet the right people to help this project deliver on its potential. If you can help either of those happen, then we need your support.
If people listen to you, the please tell them about rbutr. Tweet, blog, podcast, vlog – whatever your medium, please spread the word. Shane is available for interviews and always happy to answer the hardest questions.
As well as needing to grow, we also need to meet the right people.
Do you know someone who might be able to help us turn rbutr from a small project of passion into a global force to be reckoned with? Someone who could connect us with decision makers at Facebook, for example? Someone who could help us connect with grant giving organisations that fund projects like rbutr? Someone who would want to promote rbutr to their massive audience?
Strong introductions can be one of the most powerful ways of helping a small project like rbutr. So please keep us in mind, and reach out to us if you have someone in mind that you would like to introduce us to.
3. Financial Support for rbutr
You may have noticed that rbutr has no ads anywhere. We also don’t sell anything, nor offer any ‘upgrade’ options. rbutr is completely free and we hope to keep it that way forever. We’ve survived for four years now with next to no money so far. rbutr has been self-funded by Craig and Shane this entire time*.
That makes rbutr resilient, but it has also limited our progress. Unable to hire anyone and unable to support ourselves, we have had to work rbutr around other projects, gigs and jobs, relying on a lot of volunteer support. Progress has been much slower than we would have liked.
We are now actively seeking financial support in order to take advantage of the global attention that is finally on the problem of misinformation (“Fake news”). rbutr has one of the most important parts of the solution to the fake news problem – rbutr ensures that the work done by fact checkers to correct misinformation actually gets delivered to the source of the misinformation. Without that piece of the puzzle, the misinformation continues to spread as if the correction was never published.
To bring this vision to life, we need to hire people to improve the rbutr interface, fix fundamental features within rbutr, and implement new upgrades to the system. We also need to fund travel to high impact conferences where Shane can present rbutr to the right people to form powerful connections and collaborations. Integrating rbutr into third party platforms (like Facebook) will amplifying its impact incredibly.
To this end we will shortly be launching a Crowdfunding campaign. Please subscribe to our mailing list (most important!), like rbutr on Facebook, and follow rbutr on Twitter to be informed when this campaign is launched.
In the meantime, if you want to offer your financial support to rbutr right now, you can send bitcoin to the following address:
Bitcoin: 1ByaA8hiyTh9HSL2FtW5TAX4uhgwUFzfZz
Note: At this point in time (16 Jan 2017) rbutr is not incorporated in any official manner. We are now looking into officially incorporating as a non-profit.
Also, please tell us about grants and competitions
There are many organisations out there who offer grants and funding to projects like rbutr for various reasons. rbutr often fits in to those reasons (we’re trying to make the world a better place, using technology, tied to journalism and informing the public… we actually tick a lot of the innovation boxes). The biggest problem we have is finding all of the great grants and competitions which are available, and being able to apply for them all.
So if you know of any, PLEASE do email us and let us know.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT!
*rbutr is currently completely self funded by Craig and Shane. For the first 6 months or so of rbutr’s life though, we had some financial support from the Startup Chile program which is exactly the sort of thing we need to keep applying for and getting accepted into!