Snowdrift is certainly an interesting approach and agree, similar things are needed. In an abstract sense, as i see it, we need to find a way to direct funding

Snowdrift is certainly an interesting approach and agree, similar things are needed. In an abstract sense, as i see it, we need to find a way to direct funding, in an accessible way, towards people just wanting to work on generally useful stuff, without being entirely reliant on capitalism and market economies. I do fear that most schemes for selecting what to fund, grants, or capitalistic markets tend to promote the wrong things for the wrong reasons. Once serious money gets involved it gets ugly quickly and all sorts of gaming and failures take over. I guess one failure mode of Snowdrift would be that high visibility projects, with a direct user facing component, will get loads of funds. But infrastructure kind of things, will be forgotten and be underfunded. Perhaps not a real problem though, the funds going the user facing project might ripple down, so to speak, into the infrastructure. In any case, the problem of selecting who should get money is hard, and you probably just have to accept that its a gamble with low odds of success. Maybe most of the things not worth doing, is worth doing precisely to find out how not worth doing they are!