Micropatronage Aggregator

From Micropatronage

Here's the idea: You decide how much money you want to allocate to micropatronage per month. As you run across people you want to support, you add them to your micropatronage list. At the end of the month, your monthly allotment is automatically divided up between those people.

Brad Graham (and no doubt many others) has already done something like this, but manually:

I booted up Quicken last year and told it to divert a little bit—not a lot, but not an insignificant amount either—from every paycheck I deposited into a separate account. I called it "Medici", told Quicken to fill it and tried to put it out of my mind. But then, throughout the year, when I saw a chance to help someone on their way to a dream or a passion or a way to bring beauty or interest into the world, I took a little out of my Medici fund and I gave it away.

That's a beautiful thing, but even slicker would be to automate it and weave it throughout your online experience. This would take a few components:

• A standard way to publish payment receivable details
• A browser extension that can take those details and add them to your micropatronage list
• Something to manage the list and make the payments

...and the whole thing has to be secure, of course.

The automation and aggregate nature of this system eliminates one of the biggest problems with micropatronage today, what Clay Shirky calls the mental transaction cost. With today's system, each act of micropatronage is a separate transaction. Even if you're only giving a dollar, it's something you have to think about. With the aggregator, you only have to think about it once a month, if that.

A variation on this system would work for music: something pays attention to all music you listen to, and your monthly music budget is divided up between those artists, based on how much each one played.

Is anyone working on something like this? If not, does anyone want to help make it happen?