[MMO] Bounties

You could invent a fictional currency which can be exchanged for some virtual service. Promises of advanced information in the future, first crack at thing stuff like that.

yes, yes you should reward people for creating PD stuff

Improvement is subjective so take a vote of a set group of ppl, if they agree in majority that the new version is preferable ot the old, it's an improvement

Cheating would be eliminating an obstacle that was intended to be there with methods which were not.

You believe but what you see
You receive but what you give...

Hmm well i thought we would get more people posting and i was going to wait to see what everyone else suggests however i suppose i could post now,

right my views...

1) I think that we should have some sort of system for example if you have 10 points you can post one blog or something along them lines.
2) If i understand it cheating is like posting in the improvements when they dont have anything decent to say and are just doing to get the points? well i think druids should be able to delete a point or something of course this may difficult as you may delete a point then another druid comes alone and deletes a point again, so there would need to be some sort of rule or something.
3) To be honest this is prob the main question does rewarding people actually make people post more? I think if you find this out then you should go from there, to be honest it doesnt effect me and i wouldnt mind if i didnt get points, some may have my view point others may not, but i think we need to really see if offering rewards for posting will actually effect the amount people post etc.

Hope that makes some sence

Ang

AHEM?!

It's not posting that I care about, it's content creation for the MMO.

In general, incentives... provide an "incentive" for people to do stuff, so they do it more.

My thoughts on this were much as you said: we pay people who make stuff in virtual points and let them trade those in for something... but what? What is worth stuff, to a player? Here are some ideas.

System resources. If you make a lower-polygon optimised version of an object, which is, say, 2kb smaller, then your own resources for creating your own stuff could be increased by 2kb. This gives an incentive to people not just to make "stuff", but to make optimised, elegant stuff.

Programmer time. You could use your points to vote to move a project higher or lower in the dev team's to-do list, so you can earn points and then use them to speed up bugfixes or new features.

In-game "stuff". You could buy stuff that's only worth something in game - a +5 sword or a really nice looking dress.

Happiness of others. For me, this is the motivation for helping people. Unfortunately, I can't sell other people's happiness to people. If I could, it would make so many things so much easier. So this one's out as an option for direct rewards, though the system should be made so that people can *see* other people's happiness with their work: good feedback mechanisms and so on.

Badges and recognition. If you do something cool, you should be recognised for it. A mark as a "cool item creator", your name always attached to that item if someone queries it for its object properties, things like that. Again, this isn't something we can sell, but it should be built into the system.

What about people who want to "cheat the system"? Who deliberately create a really badly-optimised object, then optimise it, to get both rewards? Or who submit their card as a wheel and a cart body and a horse, each separate, to get in under the polygon limit? I dunno. I think anyhow it was done, people will cheat it. The voting system to get stuff accepted into the central archive should help though. Possibly have it so that everyone gets a set number of votes per unit time, and they can allocate them, and people get rewarded in proportion to the votes tehy got. Or something. I dunno.

I am a bit new here so don't fully know ins and outs of site and activities but the nature of currency or any medium of concensual exchange seem principly consistent whatever the forum.
Gold has no intinsic value other than that which people agree upon. ( "Making money" highlights interesting points re the use of potato as currency as it is both edible and if needed self replicating). To avoid inflationary problems the cheating issue would involve one common issuer and currency controller.

A mutually agreed unit of exchange is only likely to be agreed if there is both product or service that is desirable to purchase and an equitable pricing system to create equivelances of value between say one haircut = half a lamb leg... supply and demand is basically the issue and opportunity cost (the next best thing foregone by the purchase/spending of currency units) becomes a function of choice.

If the desire is for folks to post things, what does that entail?
Improvement as content, chats, ideas for discussion, computer programming improvements or things that bring in actual cash?
Does one directly lead to the other to help sustain the site and its creators (good job by the way). I am on the latter topic gratified by the conspicuous lack of advertising irrelevancies present on this site.
Number of hits does in that realm add up to potential advertising cash. In my opinion relevant tasteful informative adverts rather than combative deceptive or irrelevant ones can add texture and connection to the experience, a sence that there is a world interfacing this flat one without the threat of dungeon dimension style breakthrough invasion.
You already seem to present link to thud board purchase, what other Disc or roundworld 'of interest' things could you present?. Cripple mr onion for exmple is a good game, F***********.com produce a deck for it that I bought and enjoy using.

So what is the common marketplace? How cross field contextual is still relevant?
What is for sale?
Who issues currency and curiously what do you get from people posting stuff? Whats it really worth to the site?
I assume by the context of the initial post that you want to encourage contribution of creative content and ideas for code improvement. For what purpose and what is best for you/the site and the people who share this space.
Is thud the only ganme played here? reference to a +5 sword earlier hints at adventure style multi player things.For lovers of all things Discworld, the chance to hang out in a second life style Ankh Morpork environ with a pocket full of $AM to pay off the thieves and have a bevvy in the "Drum" sounds appealling if not a huge undertaking that I am sure many would share the load of the code or pay to enjoy. Thud points I gather sort of equate to Earth cash, how extendable are they in terms of the currency of choice. Would the Ankh Dollar be accepptable everywhere? Underwritten by the Golem standard , Golems equating to the workers, what services could druids offer to the popualtion specifically purchacable by the "bod in the street" ?

Puzzles, problems, tests of trivia, signed paraphanalia, questions answered by characters portrayed as interviewees (pay thudpoints/ $AM to have questions asked by William de Worde grilling Sam Vimes in public interview- (Druid character acting or TP's responses)). Second life sell virtual real estate for ACTUAL CASH!!! amazing really. I am not suggesting this level of madness but the principle is interesting and it must take time to produce and manage this site for us to appreciate and if some cash for real pleasure can meet the cost of time and skills involved then I see no wrong in that.
Additinal:
Sorry to ramble on, I just reread previous post and the terrain question forum and realised what you are getting at so the above is a bit irrelevant. Are you trying to produce a virtual disc?
Wen

Wonderful, well thought out post with lots of good questions! Welcome, Wen, and with insightful posts like this, I'm very happy indeed to have you here.

I'll answer them completely out of order

As you guessed after reading the terrain post, stuff I post to the MMO Development forum relates to my continuing efforts to create something like an MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online game). If you're interested, click that link and read the posts, I've written a ton of stuff on my plans and grand designs, and then made a little application which shows just how far from making it all a reality I really am

There's a "breadcrumb trail" at the top of each post that says what forum it's in, so you can know to ignore them Sadly, the "New forum Topics" and "Active Forum Topics" things don't show what forum you're posting in: perhaps I should start putting "[MMO]" in the topic titles. Yeah, think I'll do that.

Inflation is an issue in all MMOs. Actually, you have various tradeoffs, such as:

* Free market vs fixed prices.
* Open economy vs closed economy

Free market means that prices change according to supply and demand. Generally means that players find something profitable, are happy, they do it a lot, other players join them and also do it a lot, it stops being profitable, outraged players scream "Your STOOPID game NERFED pottery!"

There are also then ways to game the system, and to attack other players' profitability. An example from Bartle's "Designing Virtual Worlds" - a large guild sets up a bakery in a city, and gives out free bread. Eventually, all other bakeries have to close. Then the guild's bakery hikes up prices of their bread, because they are a monopoly. Any time someone tries to open a bakery, wham, they drop the prices again, so no other bakeries can compete.

Fixed prices in an open economy mean that as more and more wealth enters the system, to the average wealth per person increases, the fixed price items become basically free. Great if you're in the market to buy stuff, lousy if you're playing a trader.

Fixed prices in a closed economy are very very difficult to design and maintain and will drive the admins insane. They may even be impossible, since a truly closed economy would require that no players ever arrived or left or advanced.

There's a reason that economy has a reputation as being the most nightmarish part of designing an MMO and that's because it is.

In the context of this thread, it's 3D art, and other MMO stuff. But there should be overlap to other areas: people playing Thud should be rewarded in ways that would be useful both on the site and in the MMO. People posting to the forums, too. Would be nice if we could reward Druids and other community admins and helpers. Basically, anything that contributes to the community, any behaviour which we seek to encourage.

The actual plan for user created content is here: http://www.thudgame.com/node/1732 - it should be a lot of fun to write.

Thanks We are still trying to find ways to make a profit from the site that we feel morally comfortable with. So far nothing we've tried has "taken off" to the point where it's become profitable and worthwhile.

Unfortunately, number of hits also increases hosting costs, and in our experience, the money from Google ads doesn't cover the hosting. We tried them, and removed most of them because they weren't even worth the extra time they added to the page load times.

Yeah - about the only ads I'd feel really happy with would be ones from the community itself. Classified ads sorta thing. We've been toying with the idea of adding in an auction module, so people could have a little mini-Ebay for Pratchett stuff. Wouldn't be profitable, neither would classified ads, but it would build the community, make more people come here, make them stick around.

What is F***********.com and why is our system autocensoring it? Please try to dodge the censor so I can figure out what the word is and fix it I can't even think of any 12 letter curses beginning with F!

Your grammar slipped, so I don't understand the second question there. But the "common marketplace" would be the site in general and the MMO in particular.

Care has to be taken for legal reasons. The "points" must NEVER be redeemable for cash, otherwise we are in trouble if we have ever allowed the points to be, for example, used for any form of gambling. And they also immediately become taxable and stuff too. Anyone we have ever given points to in thanks for their help then becomes an "employee" instead of a volunteer, and becomes due minimum wage (Ultima Online got hit with this one, and lost a ton of money in a class action suit). And there are other legal repercussions.

People's time and effort and the creative products thereof.

At least for the time being, I have given up ever making a profit from the site, and that's fine. It's a really fun hobby and a great way to meet friends, and a great way to write cool stuff and have people enjoy it.

But that means that the only thing that comes out of the "stuff we want to encourage and reward" is possibly growth of the community, and extra data. Which is actually a cost to us, since it increases bandwidth and hard drive use!

Still, it gains community size and stickiness, and in the MMO it makes for more detail.

That's the trouble - I don't want people to have to pay to enjoy it!

I mean, sure, I'll have made the engine, and paid for the stuff to be stored, but the world won't be mine, it will be the product of work by the community, and Mr Pratchett, and a bunch of random numbers. I can't charge for that!

And if I can't charge for it, how can I reward people to create content for it?

I'm glad you see the appeal, though

I think to begin with, I would let people just use the world, and see what they were exchanging for what, and then build systems around the way they were using it, to make that easier to do, and harder to scam people with.

Yeah, and real estate is one thing I thought we might be able to charge for. Maybe. But not at first, because I want people to build stuff, and charging them money to do something I want them to do seems a tad bit counterproductive, y'know?

Thanks for the food for thought, interesting stuff, producing a realm of human creative interaction. I am not a financial person (i share most of my skills for next to nothing cos I like using my brain and talking to people) . This is truly a fascinating area. You are making a self sustaining world and the system needs to be perfectly metaphorically fractal/chaotic. It can go on for ever without solving itself and thus coming to an end and yet does not actually repeat.

The following are just thoughts on the fly:

Re issue of:
* Free market vs fixed prices.
* Open economy vs closed economy:

Sounds like the fixed price closed economy was what communist governments of 20th century struggled with. It seems somehow stifling for a replica of a disc world environment where excess control could restrict the creation of loose tyrant guarded free form human soup of the likes of Ankh.

Fixed price with open economy seems to contrast static and dynamic systems. Your projection that all products end up underpriced/virtualy free seems likely.However, if the prices are set, they must be set by someone originally. Fixed price may however not need to stay the same. If the admin system automatically measured key economic markers in the environment and set price changes (with notice to traders and consumers for their convenience) across the system to be in line with currency in circulation then the disincentive to traders of selling below market value could be solved.

Under this system, If the traders themselves could not use price as a competitive method then business incentive would be focussed on increasing purchases by other means. This in turn could inspire greater creativity of sales and marketing without the disadvantage of one organisation with too much of the pie to start with being able to 'price war' style sink little businesses that give a city character and community. Basically price is the easiest and least imaginative influencer of consumer choice and control. It wiould be interesting to watch a system devolop without it as a key competitive factor. The more human ingenuity goes into the trading and consuming system, the more authentically organic the envirionment could feel- maybe.

To adopt the free market supply and demand model would also include the advantages of reward for creative activity and incerntify the development of a virtual economy but by including price you do have the problem you described above- price war and monopoly potentials.
How complex is it to set an auto price adjustment system deriving data from the environment and communicating calculated inex linked price changes to the economy and people. That way everyone is in the same boat and no human biasses the preferences of costs and sectors.

Automated fixed price updates would also minimise your admin hassles and lets all of us get on with interactions rather than tinkering with the realities in which they occur
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Re grammar derailing- So what is the common marketplace? How cross field contextual is still relevant?

What I meant was how far removed from directly disc world stuff would be acceptable for community stuff, forums and trading?

eg. thudboards -> chess boards->chess pieces- disc figurines- movie figures- toys - games- movies- videos- artwork- lectures and info- study fields- science discussion- virtual labs for thought experiments- magical applications of disc reality science (imps and demons rather than atoms and quarks).... etc.

I really meant -Where would you want it to have its boundary interface between the round and flat worlds?

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Quote:
That's the trouble - I don't want people to have to pay to enjoy it!
I mean, sure, I'll have made the engine, and paid for the stuff to be stored, but the world won't be mine, it will be the product of work by the community, and Mr Pratchett, and a bunch of random numbers. I can't charge for that!
And if I can't charge for it, how can I reward people to create content for it?
****
I totally agree and think along the same lines in my own world. how do you feel about donations? It has come to my attention that people feeel better if they are Giving something back out of appreciation of the effort that provides them with enjoyment. (not everyone obviously, i am not that naive)
If its easy to offer donation at the click of an icon then if people get the pang to do so they can act on it immediately.

And so your back to each member of the community bringing something of themselves to it and being mentally invested in it to the point where a common virtual currency has value in its own right. That probably takes time to build. Offering products, services and experiences in that realm increases experiential value the more time and interest a person expends in that realm.

Does seem to make sense to see what people do , like and write and pick up and run with the organically grown ideas.

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...adding in an auction module, so people could have a little mini-Ebay for Pratchett stuff.

Ebay has such a dominant status though I like the idea. Maybe publish a version of the AM Times as classifieds forum and do a version as a news letter so people can know whats happening in MMO (meetings, adverts, classifieds, activities etc) and report news from what has happened around the MMO.

You could have reporters wandering the environment picking up gossip and sharing it in compelling ways. If "the times" was accessible through retail outlets / foul ole Ron etc in MMO and also could be emailed to friends of community members in a way that they can forward it to others, it may be a good vehicle to attract people via links to the site. Would need to be non-disc-aware-people friendly enough to not read like madness to them, funny appealing and interesting enough to inspire sufficient curiosity to visit the world and point them via links to entertainment and interaction so they would come back again (as I did to this one). There is a member who wrote a thud game report that read like a sports commentator in the frenzy of their art. very cool, a good writer for the Times sports pages?

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The site didn't auto censor F***********.com and my own expletive range is limited to a max of 8 letters. I didn't want to make ref to another business site on your forum in case it is a taboo behaviour. The site is fatpackcards.com, they do a generic 8 suit card set that works for cripple mr Onion as well as potential to invent interesting variations of canasta and bridge. A cripple Mr Onion game for pc or MMO (casino or backroom style) would be great especially considering world wide popularity of poker variations and card game sites. Thud, Chess and strategy game players often have different mindsets to card game gamblers (I think it's the self reliance Vs Luck thing)- CMO is by far a better game than Poker, appeals to the vast Discworld familiar community and associates directly to the idea of playing the Librarian, Death, Granny, Nanny, Wizards or even Dibblah. (This latter I would personally recommend as a programmed lucid dream or a creative hypnotic visualisation fantasy experience. Very enjoyable.)

Unlike Thud, CMO is notm as quick to pick up and start the playing experience because the rules are more detailed and have already started to evolve through the minds of tinkering players. If a basic version were isolated with optional rule variations to select complexity level at start then people could start basic and learn faster. A forum available to watch others play may also make it easier to pick up. Incidently, it would be nice to be able to spectate live thud games between experienced players visually rather than through algebraic representation. Is this currently possible?

I started writing some ideas re Thud evolution last night but the system spat me out and I lost it all. Where does Thud site fit into MMO?

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If the profitability thing is not majorly urgent then just generating and contributing to a good site with interesting ideas sounds like a fun thing to do.

Fixed price where the admins tweak the prices tend to get irate players: whenever the admins make a change, you get people who are angry. If the system makes a change, then you get people who are disappointed, and who suspect that the admins have some behind-the-scenes "nerf knob" that they turned, but it's less of an issue. It's also, as you pointed out, more work. So the economy should be automated and transparent.

Any system where the price changes, will be gouged. Any system where it remains constant, will become meaningless.

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For people to advertise or sell through us, I'd say anything even vaguely Discworld related, 'specially if it's made by fans, for fans, is OK. A product that's not made by fans, and isn't targeted at fans, would be something I'd strongly consider excluding (a mass-produced chess board). Common sense, with rules later to cover the most common sillinesses.

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I'd feel guilty, to be honest. If people are giving me money, I'd want them to be paying for something. Maybe space for a web-based profile? Maybe more resources to use ingame for creating stuff? I don't know, but I feel that I should give something... but the counterpoint to that is that in order to give something, I need to restrict access to something in the first place.

Tricky.

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Oh that sucks

http://game.thudgame.com/getgame/ used to do that but appears to have broken. I've added fixing it to my to-do list

In a cellar. Dunno if you've read the books, but the demo is a very rough view of a cellar. With some work, some boards, some more work, some pieces, some more work, a halfdecent gui, and some more work, you should be able to play Thud in there, and watch other people play it. Don't hold your breath though, there's a lot of work between where I am now, and there.

They will then be able to play eachother and also to play people in the thud applet, and any other client, who will be represented just as people sitting at tables. If they challenge eachother they'll walk over to eachother's table, and play against eachother there, where other people can watch them. I will need an option to make games "hidden" too, so that people can have private games, of course.

This will mean giving the poor applet some love and attention too, which it needs. That should make people happy.

I do love the approach of see what people do, what they want and accept and how boundary testing reveals the subsequent guidelines to keep things on track. You truly seem like an honourably motivated being.

Guilt is such an interesting emotional unconscious choice.

I get the impression that your to do list grows daily with each creative potential that gets by the initial consumer acceptability filter. To withhold service in order to justify later payment for its subsequent inclusion does sound unpleasant but when time is included as a consideration in more than a sense of the buddhist only Now matters style of kidney there is much time, effort, skill and experience invested in this site already (a lot of yours I assume). To only accept a donation of appreciation for what you did just now, or now or now or now, (sorry I can never keep up with the moments, they're always so fresh before they become history.) or tomorrow doesn't consider that which has alrerady been consumed to yield the sustenance of pleasure in the past, stored precious as the memory of pleasure experienced for so many who share and participate in your creation daily.

Guilt at acccepting money/ ? when perceptually flipped to represent the position of consumers of the outgrowth of your creativity becomes "I feel guilty enjoying this site and all it has to offer for I have contributed so little to it." If all members felt that way there would be no Thudding community.

I stopped charging for similar reasons as you stated above and actually had clients feel like an unpayable debt hung over them. I charge by donation now so people know that they principally owe nothing on the scales of conscience at a tarriff level appropriate to their own integrity requirements and wallet capacity. Just a thought, I am sure you know your own mind and I know I am but a newbie in this realm but there is a limit to what anyone can do to service so many appreciators without losing oneself in the process or letting the creativity suffer through lack of delegation or acceptance of goodwill.

I am glad you do what you do and I don't even know the half of it.

Is it honour, or laziness and lack of imagination? I'm excited to see what people will do with this creation, and I know that whatever I imagine, people will come up with something ten times cooler. It'd be [some word: churlish, shortsighed, foolish?] to try to shoehorn them into my own vision of what they should do. It's enough that I'm saying "make it Discworldy" - that's more of a framework than SecondLife has, and should make the community and world more coherent, without being oppressive.

Yup. I have many to-do lists, all of which are terrifyingly long. I try to prioritise, but I've started to re-rank by happiness rather than by urgency, nowadays. "Which of these things will make me happiest to have done?" This was after I looked at all the lists one day and asked myself "how many of these involve *doing something I actually want to do*?

The MMO is something that I want to do. Not for any financial motivation: it's my Everest. I'm doing it because it's there, because I can, and because even working on it gives immense satisfaction.

A lot more of Lee's, I feel: most of the web-stuff is him, I'm just the "boring" backend database, server and programming guy.

True, I hadn't thought of it like that. But our community, though on paper is several thousand members, is mostly made of of less than 200 core members. Donations might help, but I think, without growing the community, they won't help much.

How's that working out? A number of webcomics artists do rather well out of it ( www.missmab.com/ and www.goblinscomic.com spring to mind), others, not so much. Seems to me I'd need a significant number of fans before I could make a living, and asking for donations before then, well, that'd just show me how few people really love me

With ThudGame (the java applet) I had thought that charging for "pretties" might be a workable business model. But too few people play it.

It's the delegation that's the killer here. Getting the Druids involved in the site was the Best Thing Ever for the site: they've done, I think, more than Lee and I combined, and are just... I can't express how cool it is to have people help! But I'm having a hard time finding stuff for people to do with the MMO, at the moment, other than testing stuff, and sharing ideas.

The code's open source, so people could give suggestions on the tiny amount I've released. The theme of the world is basically known, so people could create models and textures. But at the moment there is very little impetus for people to do that.

"Soon" (ie in probably quite a while given my current work rate) there'll be the ability to change stuff in the world. I think (hope) this will be the "tipping point", the point where suddenly there is a vast ocean of creative stuff people can do, and hopefully everyone can find a way to contribute, whether it's music, art, modelling, plot writing, area design, or in-character participation in the world and its developing society and economy.

[quote}-" This was after I looked at all the lists one day and asked myself "how many of these involve *doing something I actually want to do*?

The MMO is something that I want to do. Not for any financial motivation: it's my Everest. I'm doing it because it's there, because I can, and because even working on it gives immense satisfaction.

This to me hits upon the key to human satisfaction. I am sure my name sake would have something to say about this but every second of your life for as long as it continues is your only real finite resource in this place and reality. The sorcerors of ancient mexico describe "impeccable" behaviour as simply not wasting energy and resources. minimal input max output efficient and direct recognition of right action each moment sort of thing. They are also very clear (as is alluded to in many other cross cutural attempts to understand the nature of things and non things ) that nothing is any more important than anything else and no more important than the importance you choose to assign to it. You choose unconsciously (whatever that means) what is important but can reclainm enough awareness to make that choice conscious and therefore really a choice. Once this occurs a dilemma follows it. What do I want to be important and thereforer act absolutely as if it is important even though I know I am only choosing at this moment to do so. Carlos Castanedas version of this idea reckons that his teacher said that if the path chosen turns out not to be a path with heart (for you), then immediately cease it and choose somethingelse to be important and act accordingly.

The how of this outside of its theory is arguably, in our cultural context, easiest to access utilising self hypnosis and NLP technologies related to beliefs and values and how they are represented in the awareness and how they are neurologically decoded at the interface between thought, representation and behaviour. very useful stuff. Kind of like accessing subroutines in the psyche that function silently in the background, interrupting the running programs to access and adjust them.

A few basic refs-
(NLP designed by Richard Bandler from a linguistic computer programmers perspective).
If interested "Beliefs" by Robert Dilts, "Monsters and Magical Sticks" by Steven Heller and Terry Steele, "Using Your Brain For A Change" and "Frogs into Princes" (amongst numerous others) by Richard Bandler and the Values work of Tad james most accessible through "Timeline Therapy and the Basis of Pesonality" Book.

The point of this blurb is that when you really think about motivation and why we choose to spend our precious moments on what we do with them, then doing what gives you that Everest feeling makes more sense than the accumulation of little green pieces of paper or making sure every one else is satisfied. Conveniently enough, if the former is progressively enhanced by the latter ones then it makes sense that all needs can be satisfied. The activities to climb the mountain are technically as important as climbing the mountain because they are suppotive of it and therefore are it.

It seems throughout the different threads of this site that whatever a subject starts at, it quickly goes off into something else. If I have done this to the bounties issue, i apologise. It has for me been very inspiring of thought and interest to chat with you. This is my first ever internet conversation. I have been reading to learn conventions and abrevaiations commonly used in such formats and am still albit long winded. Thanks for your patience.

How to make money could really be seen as how to exchange value, worth and utility via a standardised system. The utility is really using your precious time in the best way for you which you seems to be the joy of doing it, the rest is just gravy. Admirable application of true self rationality.

How's that working out?

I have less in the bank than charging heaps, more clients than charging nothing and am much clearer about why I do what I do. I would not say it is the path to financial abundance but it balances financial need, honouring the need for clients to feel unencumbered by debt and means that people can feel freer to take time to chat and explore interesting thoughts over a cuppa without watching the clock with their wallets. I feel it reflects my motivations of curiousity, sharing and exploration of the unknown for mutual benefit.

I feel that with your situation, charge is less appropriate than to offer the chance to supportyou in your expedition. That is common practice for big climbs, yacht races, humanitarian endeavours etc (even politics) the trick is to accept graciously ensuring no strings are attached. You don't sell yourself or offer preferential influence for the cash, people pay because of the rightness of doing so. Sponsors often want publicity but some people just want to see how much the human achievement envelope can be expanded.