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when i did short term freelance work, i always preferred fixed price jobs and bounties. they mostly let me find gigs that i had some sort of comparitve advantage for, or particular interest in learning more about.

back then i thought a lot about the nature of bounties, and how to build robust systems and tools using a bounty model for funding and prioritization.

bounties sort of crowd source market research, but a bunch of people saying “i want a tool to x” doesn’t provide a solid criteria for what a satisfactory tool woud look like. producing a specification that would satisfy everyone who is funding a particular bounty may be a significant of work, so it may make sense to set aside part of a bounty for producing a specification, and maybe breaking up the rest of the bounty into chunks based on how important different pieces are to people.

i have this vision of a directed graphs of bounties, allocating funds from the very high level “tool that does x” all the way down to “library that does z” or “widget that does q”.

now if only i had a good bounty marketplace that i could post a bounty for building a really good bounty marketplace in… and maybe that really decent project specificaton tool i want.