The post Frustrated with “Business as Usual”? Try Common Wealth appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Just like you, there are others frustrated by “business-as-usual”. They are frustrated by the “lip service” provided to stakeholders. Like when a company says “employees are our greatest asset” but means the opposite.
By contrast, there are organisations where stakeholders have an actual stake. These include:
- Companies using equity crowdfunding
- Co-operatives, where members are owners and
- Community Co-ownership structures
The best way for these people to meet, share ideas, expertise and discuss issues / challenges is via this first-of-a-kind event: Common Wealth.
Where and When?
Date and time
Thu 27th Feb 2020, 9:00 am – Fri 28th Feb 2020, 5:00 pm
Show more dates for this event
Location
Online: Via Zoom Webinar. In Person: UTS Business School, Dr Chau Chak Wing Building
14-28 Ultimo Rd, Ultimo NSW 2007, Australia
Is This For You?
Stakeholders with an actual stake (shared ownership) impacts day-to-day operations, competitive advantage, governance, local economic development and more. The people dealing with these issues will be at Common Wealth.
Aligned investments in “stakeholders with an actual stake” brings down risks and localises returns. But, it also raises new issues at each stage of the business cycle i.e initial capital raising, growth funding and exit. The people raising funds and innovating in this space will be at Common Wealth.
Common Wealth is the place to explore these dynamics with pioneering like-minded people.
Is this the type of crowd that you want to spend time with? If the answer is “yes”, then join in the conversation.
Day 1: Conversations Worth Sharing: Live To Webinar
Day 1 of Common Wealth is an in-person gathering of the Speakers at UTS Centre for Business and Social Innovation.
Speakers present live to each other (with some imbedded media). Their presentation is made via Zoom Webinar, so you can tune in from across the world and participate too.
PLEASE NOTE: The Zoom Webinar Details will be emailed to you separately after ticket purchase. This may take up to 24-48 hours.
PLEASE NOTE: If you want to watch a specific speaker you must choose the right session time.
- Session Pass = 2-hour session = $20 = 4 Speakers
- Whole Day Pass = 8 hours = $60 = 16 Speakers
Who Is Talking on Thursday – 27/2/20
Turning Ideas Into Action: Day 2 – 28/2/2020
A series of strictly limited Round Tables is on Day 2 (28/2/2020) of Common Wealth.
> Equity Crowd Funding: 9:30am – 11:30am (<5 Tickets left)
Hosted by the CFIA (Crowd Funding Institute of Australia) this industry-centric, equity crowdfunding round table will dissect what has worked and what needs to change with the current regime. Most, if not all, the current licensed platforms and regulators will attend.
> Co-operation Between Co-operatives: 12:30pm – 2:30pm (<5 Tickets left)
Hosted by The BCCM (Business Council of Co-ops and Mutuals) this industry discussion will focus on how to Co-operate between the emerging and existing sector for everyone’s benefit.> Sydney Commons Lab: 3:00 – 5:00pm (SOLD OUT)
Hosted by Tirrania Suhood and Dr Jose Ramos this roundtable will centre on the creation of Sydney Commons Lab in 2020. This proposed “civic institution” would promote commons-development, support with policy recommendations and provide a network for commons-oriented initiatives.
Socialising may occur post-event.
Reposted from the original event page. Get tickets here.
Lead image: lighthouse by barnyz
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]]>The post Jerry Michalski ponders ‘abundance’ in the face of artificial scarcity appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>The ExO Foundation’s MTP (Massive Transformational Purpose) is Migrating Society to Abundance. Michalski explores exactly what abundance means in that context.
Jerry Michalski is the former managing editor of Release 1.0, a technology newsletter. He is the founder of Sociate.com and ReX (Relationship Economy eXpedition).
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]]>The post Jerry Michalski on Design from Trust appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>What If We Trusted You — this Patreon project — is a quest into this territory, with an optimistic point of view: When we design systems from trust, we get better results that cost less and have terrific side effects, like rebuilding community and releasing our inherent genius.
Thousands of organizations worldwide already act this way: we let strangers rent our homes and sit our pets; we share designs for cars and code; we govern Commons and cooperatives. Patreon is a great example of trust at work. You can learn more at WIWTY.com.
As those of you who know me may be thinking already, I was born for this quest, which began 20 years ago, when I was a tech-industry analyst. In the middle of hearing some 4,000 startup pitches, I realized I didn’t like the word “consumer.” Over time, paying attention to that itch blossomed into a world-change thesis I call the Relationship Economy. WIWTY is a laser slice through that thesis.
Along the way, I’ll curate everything worth remembering into my online Brain, which will be our shared memory. My Brain is a side story all its own.
At the beginning, this project will look like a podcast or vlog rolling out on my YouTube account and elsewhere. But WIWTY is also:
- A book.
- A collection of novel business ideas designed from trust.
- Advice on what to do with your one wild and precious life.
- A media experiment in collective intelligence, blending videos with Prezi, TheBrain, GitHub and more.
- A way for me to “walk the talk,” to work openly, to use modern tools that connect us to one another and to improve our many Commons.
As we hit Goals here on Patreon and level up, we’ll be able to take more action together. I’ll convene meetings, virtual, real and augmented. We’ll help other initiatives and may have funds to seed our own. Along the way, we’ll give people a narrative for how (and why) they might act now to build a productive way forward.
Sound good? If so, please click here and let’s get busy.
Jerry Michalski
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]]>The post Crowdfund: Support BEK, an autonomous space for free sociocultural activities appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>BEK video from BEK kolektiv on Vimeo
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]]>The post The Lucas Plan: a Documentary appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>40 years ago a group of skilled engineers at Lucas Aerospace UK, when threatened with redundancy, responded with an ambitious plan to make better use of their talents – designing what they called socially useful and environmentally sustainable alternatives to the military products their company made.
THE PLAN asks why we’re not more aware of their remarkable story, which flew in the face of recession and the free market philosophy rising up at that time. It shows how the Lucas workers developed their plan – including wind turbines, a hybrid car, heat pumps and energy efficient housing – and reveals its broader social, environmental and political implications.
It’s a story that fills the void of 40 years lost to the idea of society being subordinate to so-called free markets. A story in need of knowing and celebrating, that still offers much to our time.
Back the crowdfund here:
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]]>The post Fire Appeal: Donate to Stir to Action! appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Donate!
On July 7th, an accidental fire in a neighbouring studio wiped out Stir to Action’s office – we lost everything. We estimate we’ve lost around £15,000 in magazine stock and archive, new office furniture, office computer, and paperwork. And, of course, the office!
This loss has disrupted our whole organisation and recovering from the fire will delay selling our latest issue, which fortunately arrived a few days after the office went up in smoke, announcing our planned New Economy Programme to train a 1000 people, and other current projects.
To see us through the next six months we’re asking for support – we’re not expecting to recover everything, but here are the basics that will help us get back on our feet!
What do we need help with?
– Office computer (with creative design suite)
– Office Furniture: desks for our team, and equipment for workshops, evening classes, and other community events we plan to host over the next six months. We’ve already been offered free office space by a local organisation!
– Magazine restock: we are looking to reprint 1,000 copies of the last four issues only, so we can sell them at events, conferences, and through our online shop.
– Printing next issue: The most immediate challenge for our organisation is to fund and produce our next issue. Staying on our print schedule is important for our cash flow, but it’s also a symbol of our recovery and our supportive community. Our October issue be themed on the communities and co-operation that arise during and after disaster and crisis.
– Magazine archive recall: We’re looking to rebuild our print archive from our first issue, Spring 2013, to our 15th issue, Autumn 2016 (the remaining archive would be replenished by our restock print run). We are limiting our collection to 10 copies each for storage reasons. Please send a message on this page if you don’t mind giving up a few of your back issues!
– Time and patience as we rebuild and organise our upcoming New Economy Programme and other projects 
Thanks for your support and solidarity!
The Stir to Action team
Donate!
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]]>The post Better Work Together – The Book! appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>The book will be reflective of quite a few people’s thinking – a real community effort, coordinated by a strong core team.
It will be mixture of short essays, personal reflections, collective thinking and really practical guides. It’s being written to be relevant for both entrepreneurs, founders and freelancers as well leaders and cultural influencers in larger organisations.
We’re aiming for this project to share our learnings, inspire action and help grow the global movement of people putting purpose at the heart of their work – so we hope has a wide appeal.
We would love your support.
Our crowdfunding campaign is live and you can be part of the special first edition release of the book here.
You can support our campaign here and pre-order your copy of the book here – and we would love all the help we could get to share the word as well!
Thanks so much!
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]]>The post The Making of the Cooperative Cloud appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>A cooperative cloud would also provide a clear stepping stone towards the open source, collaborative working environment we have described as PLANET and could help form the basis of an entire open source suite of apps for the cooperative economy.
This Internet of Ownership ‘Clouds directory‘ explores and documents efforts to form free, open source alternatives to corporate cloud infrastructures, especially through cooperative business models and is a very useful resource for anyone thinking about building something similar.
As ever, at The Open Co-op we are keen to encourage as much cooperation and collaboration in this area as possible because it seems crazy for new initiatives to re-invent the wheel and greater gains, and network effects, will be easier to achieve if more effort is focused on one larger collaborative effort than many disparate initiatives.
The post below is the latest update from the CommonsCloud project from the Free Knowledge Institute which helpfully details a lot of their technical decisions and subsequent setup.
Members of the CommonsCloud project will be speaking at OPEN 2018 in London in July – come along and say “Hi” if you are interested in collaborating on a common solution.
How did we get here and where are we heading
CommonsCloud is an online collaborative platform, an alternative to proprietary software platforms like Google Drive, but respectful with privacy and it doesn’t commercialise your data. The ambition of the CommonsCloud project is to offer an alternative to proprietary cloud platforms, under the control of its users, replicable as free software and well documented. This is collaborative web applications to edit, store and share documents, agendas, manage projects and facilitate debate and decision-making. The way we do this is through an alliance of collectives committed to free software and digital sovereignty, building on the best web applications that are already out there and bring them together in a user-friendly environment where people help each other, enhance their awareness regarding the power of self-governance and sovereignty.
Collectives and individual users have a say in the decision-making of the CommonsCloud, through the cooperative femProcomuns. Users become co-owners of the CommonsCloud as cooperativists, paying a monthly contribution for the services needed. Users that want to try the service or contribute in other users projects, can access a free account with the basic services. Everyone can choose their contribution according to capacity and needs.
We’ve recently started a crowdfunding campaign at the Goteo platform, many people are asking how did we start to develop this project. Let’s take a dive into where we come from, which free software building blocks we have chosen so far and how they come together. Then we share some ideas for the near future.
Brief history and inspirations
We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, or our ambition would have little chances to become real. We can say that all collectives participating in the CommonsCloud Alliance have their own experiences self-hosting their free software web applications, from wikimedia instances to taiga, RedMine or WeKan boards for kanban/agile self-management of projects. From ownclouds to NextClouds and from Asterisk (VoIP) to Etherpad or RocketChat servers. The thing with all these webapps is that if we manage them individually, our users typically need to register many different accounts and collaboration between collectives is rather limited. And there are so many web applications that keeping up to date on all of them is a job on its own, not something that one can do alone. So there’s a need to build this together, especially as the tools and networks of the corporate masters are very powerful and it isn’t easy to seduce people away from them.
There are some platforms that make the management of free software web applications very straightforward and with reduced maintenance effort. Let’s take a loot at the ones we have worked with.
Since September 2016 we have been running a self-hosted server with Sandstorm. The Free Knowledge Institute still runs the instance and we have tried it with a few dozen people and projects. It allows one-click deployment of over 40 apps and encrypts the data of the users in a personally controlled “grain” as they call it. After some time we found however that it isn’t especially easy to find back your information inside the dfferent apps, in particular if you are involved in different projects. Also the users need to get used to so many different user interfaces, one for each app – even though these are embedded into one persistent interface of the Sandstorm platform. A very interesting project, but it wasn’t exactly what we wanted.
Then we studied Cloudron and set up a few instances, spoke with the founders, ran a dozen of the applications. On this platform there’s again a one-click installation procedure, that in this case installs each app in a docker container, that requires very little maintenance effort. The offer of the Cloudron founders is a 8€/month subscription fee to get maintenance updates for self-hosted instances, very decent really. Maybe this was getting nearer to what we wanted, but we felt we lacked control over the applications. Maybe this solution is designed for collectives without sysadmins…
Then a very inspiring case is the Framasoft project in France, which has put up different webservices for many of the usual applications which its users can access with one account. From spreadsheets, to videoconferencing, to notepads, to framadate (alternative to Doodle), from calendars to mindmaps, etc. One interesting feature is that their sustainability model is based primarily on donations (some 300.000 euro/year), an alliance of collectives that contribute to the development, maintenance and usage and a team of 7 people with a salary to maintain the core operation, plus 35 members and some 300.000 users. Some differences with the CommonsCloud though. After several co-creation workshops we have decided to reduce the number of userinterfaces. Instead of several dozens we are starting with three core platforms that we intent to integrate where possible, but that each one of them provides a wide range of features. One other is that we set this in motion as a platform cooperative, where the users become the owners. We love Framasoft’s “De-googlify-Internet” campaign!
So how did we start the CommonsCloud? The first meeting we had was in January 2017: we got together with 10 people from different collectives in Barcelona to lay the foundations. We have put in common the experiences as briefly reviewed above. Other interesting cloud applications that we should mention include Cloudy that our friends at Guifi.net and the UPC are developing as a GNU/Linux based cloud infrastructure and Cozy as a personal cloud solution. FKI Board member Marco Fioretti has been working over the last five years on an architecture proposal for a personal cloud or “PERcloud” that each user can have individually on his/her own machine. This vision has influenced the design decisions of the CommonsCloud architecture, even though our current architecture is focused on collective cloud solutions that are co-owned by the users. After a co-creation session at the Mobile Social Congress in Barcelona in 2017 we set up an international working group, on the FKI wiki and the CommonsCloud mailing list. From there, the work has continued on- and offline, in parallel with the set up of the femProcomuns cooperative, until now, when both are ready to take the next step: enter the production phase.
The core software architecture
Keep it simple and hide the complexity.
One account for single sign-on
The first thing all mentioned platforms have in common is one account server that allows users to login at all different services (single sign-on). LDAP – the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol – is the open standard to organise directories of user accounts, and most webapps have existing plugins to facilitate user accounts managed through an LDAP server.
We designed the LDAP Directory Information Tree in such a way to accomodate for other collectives to join the alliance and share the LDAP account server (we consider it a mutualised account server). Each user can be part of multiple groups (Organisational Units, OU) and each OU can have multiple services and ACL groups. We all know how important user onboarding is. Given the increasing challenge to keep spam under control, we bring human validation of accounts back into the game. Remember your wiki getting full of SPAM and closing automatic user registrations? We have seen it in different contexts. Instead we designed an onboarding process that goes as follows:
- people register and indicate a primary collective, and validate their email address
- the admins of the primary collective validate the user and activate the account
- the user sets her/his password and s/he is up and running on the services that are available for everyone (public services) plus the ones from the primary collective.
From here on, the user can manage his/her profile and request or be invited to become part of other collectives and access the corresponding services. Our man Chris has been developing the webinterface that facilitates this process. Still much UI work is to be done to make the experience better.
Phabricator – as the community PROJECTS self-management platform
Based on user demand we prioritised three main areas of applications with a “winner” in each area that we considered as the most solid and strategic choice for that area.
Phabricator is a platform to manage projects, that allows open/closed, volunteer/professional teams and communities to organise their work with agile methodologies and Kanban workboards (like Trello, Wekan, Kanboard) with a few dozens of complementary applications that one can integrate easily within a group if so desired. It also ofers a locker to store passwords and other secrets, a hierarchical wiki and a documentation engine, a survey tool, notepad, badges, blogs, etc Members of the Barcelona: Free Software association (part of the alliance) shared the experience of the global KDE community who uses Phabricator to manage software development with its code repository toolset; the Wikipedia community also runs its own Phabricator instance. As you can appreciate, Phabricator is not just for code development (like github) but provides an extensive toolset for non-technical teams to self-manage their community production work.
NextCloud as the core online OFFICE platform
NextCloud is the community fork of ownCloud and many consider it the best of online cloud platforms, where one can store and share files, calendars, and contacts. With the appropriate plugins, online editing of office documents can be integrated. This we consider the killerapp that our users need to migrate from Google’s Drive. There are several options here to edit online documents. At this moment we have integrated the CollaboraOffice online LibreOffice server for that purpose. There are also other options, such as Only Office, that can do that job. We are collectively exploring what’s the best solution on this front. We know for sure that many of our users need to collaboratively edit online office documents, or Google Drive will remain their “friend”.
NextCloud has recently incorporated the so called “Circles”, which allow users to define and self-manage usergroups whith whom they can quickly share documents. At the same time we are exploring the Groups option that we manage through the LDAP directory, where users of a certain collective can automatically have access to the collective’s file share, calendar and group contacts.
While it is true that NextCloud has lots of other apps that can be added through plugins, right now we haven’t activated them. We first want to have the pioneering userbase to get used to the three core platforms and then sit together to see which features and apps we think are best to have and in what ways.
One of the most wonderful things of NextCloud is its synchronisation of files, calendars and contacts between the server and one’s mobile, tablet, laptop and desktop. When editing a document online, one may decide to continue through one’s local LibreOffice installation, synch the files automatically and continue on any of the synched devices, automatically the whole team has access to the latest version of any shared document, without additional human intervention.
Discourse as the AGORA, the platform for online debate and collective decisionmaking
Online discussion needs a good platform to convince people with so many different experiences. Some are fans of online forums, others of mailing lists. Discourse combines them both into a flexible and userfriendly environment. We found it a very decent complement to the other core platforms.
Some aspects of the User Experience
The first thing we already mentioned was the decision to limit the number of user interfaces, of different platforms. Right now we have three: Phabricator, NextCloud and Discourse, plus the web interface for the onboarding process to register and manage users in the LDAP directory server. We will try to choose new applications within these existing platforms, but there will for sure be some more platforms that we will add in the near future. For example the OdooCoop economic self-management platform for the social and solidarity economy that we are developing with another alliance around the femProcomuns coop. And possibly other, depending on the demand of the users and the proposals of the developers.
A second aspect is the onboarding process itself. Based on previous experience, the fully automatic user validation isn’t our preferred route, due to the risks for SPAM. On the other hand a fully centralised human validation process could slow down the onboarding of new people. Instead we choose a path in between, where new users choose a “primary collective” where they belong to, and the admins of this collective get then notified and can validate the new user accounts.
A third aspect is the combination with public CommonsCloud services, such as the three mentioned services explained here, and private instances for collectives participating in the CommonsCloud. A user can have access to the public NextCloud instance but also to the private one of his collective. The user interface will need to combine these options neatly into a humanly understandable and easy to user interface.
Modes of production
The way we produce the services as explained here is as much as possible building on the motivation of the shared mission. We can distinguish three levels of engagement:
- Driving team, of developers, sysadmins, designers, communicators etc: they take the initiative to make it happen, and are the first ones to get paid when income is generated; income is distributed depending on real work done;
- Alliance members: they share knowledge on the R&D level, participate in the strategic decisions and want this initiative to exist;
- End users: they are aware of the need to build the alternatives to corporate clouds collectively as a commons and contribute according their needs and capacities to make this happen. End users can be either individuals and collectives who want a dedicated instance of some or all of the services offered. In a next post we will share the governance model that we are developing to guide and organise our work.
Many details need still to be defined, but we are working along these lines to take the leap. Join us and contribute to the CommonsCloud.
Originally published on open.coop
Photo by neXtplanaut 
The post The Making of the Cooperative Cloud appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>The post Matchfunding Social Entrepreneurship and the Commons Collaborative Economy in Barcelona appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>The Goteo Foundation (www.goteo.org), in collaboration with the Barcelona City Council and Barcelona Activa, launches the call “Conjuntament” A matchfunding pool of 96.000€ are available to multiply citizens donations made to the 24 social initiatives. Every € donated by the citizens will be duplicated by the Goteo Foundation.
The 24 social initiatives want to change Barcelona and its neighborhoods through a lot of projects which are economically sustainable and related to sectors as agro-ecology, feminism, technological sovereignty, cooperative housing, labor inclusion, documentary production, the commons, the economy of cares and the sharing & social economy.
Matchfunding is a new way to manage institutional budgets which provides:
- Legitimacy: Public institutions legitimize their budgets while allowing citizens to decide and prioritize how public money is used. Creating a space for participation where citizenship promotes and supports initiatives coming from below.
- Participation: Citizens decide to launch projects and to choose which projects to support.
- Sustainability: Projects come from neighborhoods and organized citizenship, in opposition to top-down policies. Communities are behind these projects and they want to make them alive.
- Transparency: Citizens audit the whole process, as they can check and visualize instantly how the money is used.
- Success: The success rate rises until more than 90%, when a public institution multiplicate the donations made to the crowdfunding campaigns.
- Learning lab: While they are in campaign, projects learn as they work collectively, making the project stronger and growing their network.
Key points
- The call for projects was open from October 23th to December 4th 2017.
- 24 projects have been selected and ranked according to the criteria gathered into the Terms (http://ca.goteo.org/call/conjuntament) and according to two categories: 1. social entrepreneurship and 2. Common and collaborative economies.
- Past 8th of February a communication workshop for the 24 selected projects was held.
- Advising has been carried out with the promoters in order to help them to prepare their crowdfunding campaigns. This will continue during the campaign and post-campaign.
What is the impact of the matchfunding call Conjuntament?
67 projects have been submitted, where 24 of these were selected.
These projects need a total of € 192,543 as a minimum budget of crowdfunding and € 321,419 as a optimal.
The Goteo Foundation, in collaboration with the Barcelona City Council and Barcelona Activa, created a matchfunding pool of € 94,000 available for the projects (€ 4,000 per project) to meet their budgets.
About Goteo
Goteo is a civic crowdfunding platform for initiatives with a high social impact on cultural, technological and educational projects. Through this social and commons approach, Goteo designes tools, such as matchfunding, which allows public and private institutions supporting and promoting social projects by multiplying the amount of donations they receive from citizens.
Goteo is also a community of communities made up of more than 120,000 people, with a success rate of more than 75%.
However, it is much more than that. Behind the platform there is a non-profit foundation (with the consequent fiscal advantages for donors in Spain) and a multidisciplinary team developing tools and services for co-creation and collective financing.
With a common mission always linked to the principles of transparency, progress and improvement of society. Its philosophy of open source and free licenses resulted in copies and alliances in several countries, as well as is has been recognized and awarded internationally since 2011.
For further information and/or collaborations, please contact at [email protected]
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]]>The post Goteo – crowdsourcing for open communities appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>Goteo is a complex entity, how would you describe yourselves?
Smart Citizen kit – campaign run on Goteo. Image (c) Goteo
Goteo is a collective that tries to promote participation and collaboration between institutions and citizens. With the Goteo platform, we help create stories through tools, merge them together and grow them; on the other hand, we also generate communities around initiatives. We work on bringing together individuals and public institutions to “collaborate forward,” for example, by opening up the institutional processes of participation or distributing funding evenly and in a more participatory way. We also track different organisational and development systems, including new funding models. More precisely, Goteo is a platform for crowdfunding campaigns, but it is not limited to funding: it also involves crowdsourcing. We do not only help our partners in acquiring the funds to carry a project on, but also in collecting non-economic contributions that a community can help with, and in sharing open-sourced collective benefits for the community, allowing projects to be replicated, reused, disseminated, or even improved or copied for further uses.
What makes the platform specific?
What is unique about Goteo is that we push for open source resources, collective initiatives, and we promote sharing collective benefits after a project passes through our crowdfunding campaign. We ask campaign promoters to publish their digital resources in an open source way once the campaign is over. It means sharing open source licenses, whether it’s a code or a design, a manual or any kind of file that shows the project. It is important for us to think of how this process contributes to the city and to the urban movement of gathering collective resources: we believe that it is an interesting way of putting clusters in movement.
Why so much emphasis on open-source?
We think that when you ask for support from a community, you should give something back. If you are an artist asking for funding for a CD, you should publish your CD with a creative common license or other free licenses afterwards, and give it back to the community. By doing so, we are also helping expand knowledge and provide access to free knowledge at a time when many forces are trying to enclose knowledge. The pressure on knowledge is similar to the pressure on social centres that are trying to resist enclosure.
Isn’t open source a constraint for the projects that run campaigns on your platform?
We really trust that the more open your project becomes, the more it attracts, the more it creates and the bigger it grows. That’s why we always push for the open licensing of the products and projects we support, and their outcomes – and that’s also why our platform itself is open source. You can download and copy the code of our platform, and have your own crowdfunding platform, use it, share it, improve it. We call this crowdfunding with crowd impact and crowd benefits. Goteo in Spanish means “leak”, and that’s how a campaign grows successful, drop by drop. Like the way you irrigate a garden: we understand that a way of funding collectively means that every drop adds to whatever you need to complete the watering of your garden.
How do the events you organise connect to the crowdfunding activities?
We believe that open knowledge creates more open knowledge, this is why we conduct workshops and bring together communities to cross-feed each other. Over 2000 people have come to our workshops, from many different countries and contexts: some apply the new ideas they gathered to urbanism, some to culture management, others to technology as well as many other fields. When you add layers to a project or invite different ideas to engage in dialogue with their counterparts, you can grow together and create more successful projects.
We always ask if crowdfunding is compatible with crowd benefits. People who prepare crowdfunding campaigns, ask us, “Do you think this is viable, do you think this feasible, do you think I can go through with it or is it something that is not going to be successful?” When we assess the project, we look for two ways of rewarding, not only the individuals who support the project, but also the community.
We divide rewards into two different groups: one consists of individual rewards, referring to when a person supports the project with 20 euros, and receives a postcard, a copy of your disk or participation in your workshop. The other refers to collective incentives that are more important for us, to push the community to support a project and add social importance to it. When something feels important and adds value to society, it is likely that more people will support and engage with it.
How do you define crowd benefits?
When we consider a project, we always ask promoters about their own experience, details, facts and issues of their projects that can help them conduct their projects in a better way. We ask about their needs. Of course, all projects in the fields of culture, urbanism and architecture need money. If there are no financial resources available, we look for alternative ways to support the project. We also ask about the tasks to be carried out, the infrastructures that they own, can count on or need and an outline of the materials needed for the project. Based on these, we assess what rewards one is able to give back to the community. Collective benefits can be digital archives, manual guides, codes, apps, websites or designs that can be downloaded, copied and adapted to the needs.
How can you help projects?
When gathering a group of people around a project, some might donate money while others might have important contributions that are not of a monetary nature. We promote our partners to also share their non-monetary needs in their communities. Projects often need a van to move things, or a translation. We have a feature on our platform to exchange these possible means of cooperation. We feel that when people get together and get to know each other and their projects, it is also easier to engage them and create community through social networks.
On average, around 200 people support each project, with contributions that range from 20 euros to 1500 or with their skills. 70% of our crowdfunding campaigns are successful, and one of every three donors does not want anything in return, they are donating because they value the project. We believe it is possible to talk about the culture of generosity in a world where we are constantly told that we have to be individuals, and we have to make it ourselves, be self-made men. We believe instead that the culture of generosity is really at our core, in our heart.
How do you define how much money is obtainable with a crowdfunding campaign?
Spain in Flames – campaign run on Goteo. Image (c) Goteo
We always establish two different budget goals for campaigns: there is a minimum which we consider the project needs just to kickstart, and then there is an optimum budget that could take the project further. We do respect the numbers identified by the promoters themselves, because they know more than anyone else about their needs and the costs in their local contexts, but we keep an eye on budget requests to make sure that what they ask for is clear and the plan is coherent. We suggest to keep the projected budgets at the right scale and advise initiators to make their budgets transparent and modular: if a project needs 10.000 euros, what budget categories does it include? Once initiators understand their own budget better, they often realise that some their needs can be covered with existing infrastructure or non-monetary contributions. Another criteria for projecting budget is an initiative’s capacity of social outreach: if an organisation has never disseminated anything in social media, or the initiator is an individual with limited online engagement, it might be better to keep the projected budget low. To this, we add another specific layer of knowledge about what different people from random places can do in areas that are not necessarily on our minds, for instance, in rural areas. We are generally very much focused on cities, but there are interesting initiatives in rural areas that contribute to the commons.
What is your experience about campaigns that addressed development or construction projects?
We had several campaigns in the fields of urbanism and architecture: they give us insights on how to facilitate different behaviours in urban and rural areas and how to share knowledge among communities that were previously not in touch. For instance, La Fabrika de Toda la Vida is an initiative using a former cement factory in Extremadura, not far from the Portuguese border: they financed their start-up phase, the rebuilding of a part of an enormous factory, with a successful crowdfunding campaign through Goteo, they raised 133% of their minimum budget. Their offer to give back to society was the building itself: they turned it into an open space that anyone can use and suggest activities for.
Another example is the Instituto Do It Yourself: it is a knowledge hub, an infrastructure that helps people exchange knowledge in a peripheral neighbourhood of Madrid. The Institute was started in 2013; it is a nice example of a free knowledge resource, established with the help of a campaign we launched together. There are also journalism projects we supported that are closely linked with urbanism. For instance, Goteo supported a campaign for a research on land use in Galicia, Northern Spain, where wildfires are closely connected to speculation: the devastation caused by wildfires usually opens the way for changing land use and building more profitable buildings on formerly agricultural land. Another project is the Smart Citizen Kit, built with open-source Arduino hardware to be installed in your home. The kit monitors air quality and sends data to a centralised device that collects data from different parts of a city.
The Social Coin – campaign run on Goteo. Image (c) Goteo
How do your campaigns contribute to the creation of a more collaborative tissue of community initiatives?
Processes through our platform turn out to be barometers of what a more collaborative and ethical society could become through implementing more open source collaborative processes and programs. For instance, some projects deal with cooperation in a larger sense. One of the initiatives produced a set of coins, kind of tokens, for collectives, companies of big groups to measure their collaborations: a way to visualise a chain of favours, to highlight how non-monetary contributions and collaborations function within a team or among several teams.
What are the overall results of the platform?
In six years, we collected over 5,7 million euros altogether, with an average contribution of 50 euros, and with over 496,000 euros in match funding. At stats.goteo.org, the platform has open data about our campaigns: it shows tendencies, categories, money collected for each project, and the time it takes a project to collect the necessary funding. We also developed an app with which people can freely use the data. Tracking accountability is very important for us: the more we know about a project we support, the more vigilant we can be in what they do, and also receive better outcomes from them.
Do public institutions play any role in your campaigns?
It is an important issue. Some people would say, “All right, crowdfunding is nice, and so are the collective benefits, but we are exploiting our families, our friends, communities and ourselves just to extract more money from them for our projects. Isn’t it a bit contradictory, doesn’t it promote the notion of ‘Big Society’ advocated by conservative ideologues?” We’re aware of this and work on attracting private and public money, to balance contributions to the projects we support: we work on many of our funding processes with private companies as well as with different local and regional public administrations and universities.
From crowdfunding to crowdadvocacy guidebook. Image (c) Goteo
In the past years, we have been working with various public administrations, and they would agree to add some budget to specific calls, match funding a set of campaigns selected by an open panel including public officials and our team with 10,000 or 96,000 euros. These are projects that go through crowdfunding campaigns, but public institutions double the amount given by citizens; so for each euro made through crowdfunding, the administration offers another euro. It is a way to open the process of decision-making: there are initiatives that institutions would not fund without collective support.
La Fabrika de Toda la Vida for instance, was also supported by the regional government’s match funding. At the time, the conservative government of the Estremadura region would probably have not understood what it meant to restore a former factory in a village; but with the support shown to the project by other institutions, the citizens and us, they realised that it was intelligent to invest in a project like this.
Our cooperation with public institutions is not exclusively monetary. Lately we have been working with public institutions, for instance with different municipalities in Barcelona and elsewhere, on how they are developing their participatory processes, their policy-making, and on how they can engage their citizens and promote more open and meaningful decision-making processes. This is a horizon that we have: we are looking for growing alliances between public and private actors to raise funding for citizen projects, soon at a much larger scale than today.
This text in an excerpt from the book Funding the Cooperative City: Community finance and the economy of civic spaces. Figures have been updated in February 2018 to reflect Goteo’s progress.
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