I support a lot of role-playing games fund-raising campaigns. It is an easy low-level tier reward to let people give feedback on pre-production drafts of the game. I've seen it happen half a dozen times, this process:
- I get a link to some proprietary storage locker with an expiring link, or a password that I am not supposed to share with any non-backers (or sometimes, only within my play group).
- I am given an address to mail feedback to.
- One day later, too much feedback, we are all awesome for being passionate, but now we have a form-based feedback system to use. And by form-based, they mean Google Docs.
- Goto 1 for another draft, then back to the feedback forms.
This system could be improved, really easily and immediately. But it would trade up scarcity of the material, which is the perceived value of copyrighted works. If I ran a fund-raising campaign to finish a work, my process would be:
- Links to the drafts of the works, in open standard document formats, and most likely a wiki or other web-based versioning system, where feedback can be given and discussed openly.
- Profit.
A lot of the systems that I refuse to deal with, such as Google Docs, are primarily used to enforce workflows that are based on scarcity of culture, and run counter to easier methods of expression. RPGs are literally about people sitting around a table making up stories. We would be smart to emulate that workflow.