This is sitting in my ideas book - the model I had in my mind was a subscription service rather like a trades union, except it was your personal shared interests it represented rather than the interests you shared through work. You'd put your policy preferences in a form, and then your money would go to those campaigns only. Like a plug and play thing. I'm unsure exactly how this is that different from existing campaigning groups.

Political conflict and its filtration into policy has many causal pathways, only a small dimension of which is captured by your scenario: a small minority significantly effected by policy X, and a large majority moderately effected by policy X, such that the minority has cause to exert a influence on policy X disproportionate to its membership. How would a crowd-sourced platform limit itself only to these cases? What would prevent it from becoming a forum for the pitting of distinct values or material interests against one another? Yet if you do pre-select campaigns in some way, what would distinguish the platform from existing mass-membership political campaign groups?

How is this kick-starter type idea different from orgaisations that try and get donations from specific or general campaigns on the back of swift opportunistic petitions online like Avaaz? Is it the audience and the quality of the work that would improve? Or is it literally that we're talking about technical-legal rather than political-mass lobbying?

I don't understand how this addresses the main problems:

1) Most people are rationally irrational about politics. They have no reason to become informed about the pollution. 2) What's to stop free-riding? Do you insist 100% sign-up from the 990? If so, none will ever get funded. If not, people can free-ride.

Also I am sceptical about the ethics of making it easier to engage in negative-sum games. I expect these would largely be to more efficiently fund the culture war.