Sloan used Kickstarter, a social fundraising platform, to garner patrons for Annabel Scheme prior to publishing. By offering a number of incentive levels with varying amenities, Sloan was able to raise just shy of $14,000 for the project – over $10,000 more than he had originally asked. Had he not been able to raise the original goal of $3,500, no backers would be required to pay, making the process low risk for those looking to fund, as Kickstarter puts it, “creative ideas and ambitious endeavors.”

Towards the end of the fundraising round, Sloan decided Annabel Scheme was to be released under a CC Attribution-NonCommercial license – more than that, he chose to devote $1,000 of the excess budget to a remix fund. Sloan put out an open call for pitches on interesting ways to take the book and build something new from it. These pitches are now being voted on by the book’s backers, with an announcement on fund allocation forthcoming.

A unique project all around, it is no wonder Kickstarter awarded Annabel Scheme best project in their 2009 retrospective. You can download the novella for free at Sloan’s website.

Kickstarter is a funding platform for creators, and represents a refreshing way of thinking about supporting cultural production and creators. Most importantly, Kickstarter, like Creative Commons, offers a real mechanism for creators to connect with their supporters and share their work in a way that acknowledges the inevitabilities of digital media. Having launched and successfully funded my own project through Kickstarter, I know this platform works and I’m incredibly excited by its potential. But Kickstarter is also something that many of us in the free culture community have always dreamed of — a way to directly fund cultural production and its creators without resorting to leveraging scarcity and exclusivity.

I’m going to be doing very similar things at Kickstarter that I’ve been doing at CC: outreach, advocacy, some product, some community, some biz dev, and lots of pondering the future of culture and collaboration. But I’m also really looking forward to sharing a lot of the principles and relationships I developed at CC with my new colleagues, so if we’re currently working together on something, I’m sure we’ll still have plenty to talk about.

Working for Creative Commons has been fantastic, and I really couldn’t have imagined a better way or a better group of people to spend the last couple of years with, so it is not without some sadness that I’m leaving. So let’s stay in touch! Find me on twitter, check out my blog, or just drop me a line at fcb at fredbenenson.com.

See you on the ole tubes!

Fred