Welcome to the Open-Source Community, Hyperloop

The fifth mode of transportation or, the "hyperloop," from Elon Musk made a splash in the news today with word that El Segundo, Calif.-based JumpStartFund is presenting it as the company's first project for its new, crowd-sourcing" venture capital platform.

As you recall, Elon Musk provided provided a white paper on the hyperloop concept last month to much fanfare—deservedly so—and instructed developers (tech community) to pick up the ball and run with it.

JumpStartFund funnels capital to startups and has been around since 2002, but they just unveiled its crowd-source platform (portal) for startups a week ago. It's in the Beta stage. From their press release, this is how their platform works: :

"ideas and patents, which can be submitted to the site for vetting by both JumpStartFund community members and the JumpStartFund team, are evaluated for marketability. Those ideas and patents that have potential are selected and moved into a “work in progress” state where members can collaborate in every aspect of bringing them to reality - participating in market research, voting on a number of issues (i.e.: design, naming, manufacturing, marketing, etc.), coming up with additional ways of using the patents and ideas, and eventually turning them into viable companies.

JumpStartFund "reached-out" to Elon Musk before the announcement, but the really interesting element is the open-source angle. According to the JumpStart release, the  community will have "their initial say (voting and commenting), vetted the Hyperloop concept and expressed interest to get it to the next steps, the project is then moved into a “work in progress” state where members will be further asked to collaborate on every aspect of bringing the concept to reality." 

I have contributed to a couple crowd-sourcing project, but what strikes me about this open-source approach is the commercial ramifications and a lot of "meat on the bone," if you will. Recently I know there was an example of crowd source project in New York that was so compelling that the creators turned or tried covert it into a company (hear Clay Shirky talk about it here, among other things).

However, the contributors in this crowd source project thought they had stock in the company, but that was not the case as SEC rules prohibit it.  

With that aside, it's great to see the ball move forward. Onward and upward