IndieGoGo, based in Berkeley, CA, and launched in January, 2008, is an online business that matches film projects with contributors who can put up any amount of money they choose for stories and filmmakers they believe in. It was co-founded by Danae Ringelmann, Slava Rubin and Eric Schell, who are seeking to, in their words “democratize film creation.”

The business model has two components. There are targeted ads on the site placed via Google AdSense and a 9% processing charge, which includes the PayPal fee, when the filmmaker receives the funding from the community.

Participation in an IndieGoGo project is highly improvisational, with a) rules that are easily understood; b) precise definition of roles; c) clear objectives; and d) a game that’s win-win.

Easy Rules: IndieGoGo describes itself as “an online social marketplace connecting filmmakers and fans to make independent film happen. The platform provides filmmakers the tools for project funding, recruiting, and promotion, while enabling the audience to discover and connect directly with filmmakers and the causes they support.” From this forthright initiation, the rules of the game–from communications protocols to the mechanics and safeguards of making contributions–get explained in equally plain language. This is a welcome contrast to the rules of the Hollywood game which are quite mysterious, often get-rewritten mid- or even post-game, and involve a lot of winking, sleight-of-hand, and under-the-table-action.

Clear Roles: Players play the game as either ‘Artists’ or ‘Fans’. Artists’ roles call for them to ‘Post, Promote and Produce.’ Fans’ roles call for them to ‘Discover, Support and Get VIP Perks.’

Objectives: Get the film made! Nothing else matters. If the film gets made, a new set of objectives can kick in. The objective of the IndieGoGo game, however, is to ‘get product in the can.’

Win-Win: Contributors to IndieGoGo films are not in it to make money, the paybacks are not financial, and that’s about as honest a statement as an indie filmmaker can make to a backer. Indie films have always been a labor of love. The ten ‘doctors and dentists’ who financed the Coen Bros.’ first film, Blood Simple, got the satisfaction of launching the careers of a couple of great filmmakers. Chances are they have not shared in the Bros.’ subsequent boxoffice booty and you did not see them onstage when the boys collected their Oscars. The win-win offered by IndieGoGo involves participation and accountability. By programming transparency into its game, IndieGoGo, enables ‘Artists’ to reward ‘Fans’ with ‘VIP Perks’ that can include things like creative input during production, invitations to screenings, and characters named after them. To be sure, there are far more films on IndieGoGo that get no traction (e.g. “Money Raised: $0 of $2,168,000″) than those who list ‘Successes,’ but that has always been the bootstrapping nature of the marketplace for art. Remember that Van Gogh sometimes had to trade paintings for meals.

Two filmmakers whose project has found wings thanks to the angels of IndieGoGo are director Michealene Risley and producer Anand Chandrasekaran.

In 2006, Risley began shooting a documentary about a horrible myth promoted by tribal healers in Zimbabwe that men with AIDS can cure themselves by raping a virgin, and a woman named Betty Makoni who fights the myth and tends to its young (sometimes as young as one year old!) female victims. After shooting 22 hours of footage in Zimbabwe, Risley and her crew were arrested, jailed, their film seized by Zimbabwean police. Risley and crew made it out of the country with the 22 hours, and at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival she met Chandrasekaran, a tech entrepreneur from Silicon Valley, looking for a film project to support.

The two filmmakers formed a partnership. They soon began promoting Risley’s film, Tapestries of Hope, on IndieGoGo, where they have raised two rounds of contributions totaling over $50,000.

Tapestries of Hope has become one of IndieGoGo’s biggest success stories. A community of supporters centered in Northern California and extending around the world, has joined its game and, with the film’s completion now assured, the objectives have begun to evolve toward the goals of putting an end to the horrible myth and healing its victims. Tapestries, Chandrasekaran told me this week, has been invited to stage its world premiere later this year at the United Nations.

In the expanded awareness made possible by the Networked World, we experience burdens we have not had to bear before. But our power to connect — patron to artist, money to cause, healing to suffering, vision to reality — has expanded too. The payback to backers of Tapestries of Hope cannot be tallied in the boxoffice grosses. There’s no EBITDA on heroism. The payback comes with shining a light on an ugly and inhuman atrocity, and supporting the cause of Betty Makoni, a beautiful human being whose bravery and sense of purpose is the measure of us all.