What if crowdfunding could be embedded, in an agile way, into co-creation processes, hackathons and other development meetings alike? What if this sort of solution were not only open source, but could also generate new communities, collaboration and Common goods? If you're moved by these questions too, please keep reading (below),and find out how you can help us..

The challenge

Tired of how many hackathon or co-creation results vanish after people meet together? At Goteo.org we have been developing an open source crowdfunding tool and an open standard model for funding, with more than 1.5 million € for projects and hundreds of collaborations so far. We've also been recognised as one of the top 10 digital social innovations to watch.

But we're still not satisfied! We care about methods and facilitating co-creation processes with "open DNA", where people with diverse skills and goals, working together for a day or more, can produce powerful, copyleft results and prototypes (here's our latest post about this).

Now, we want to smoothly connect co-creation with crowdfunding, and to create social impact with a couple of hacks to our tools and methods. That kind of challenge!

Solution

The idea is composed of specific improvements in the Goteo platform (and any of its derivative works, of course, once back to GitHub) which will allow improvement to its adaptation as a natural follow-up of co-creation processes, adopting crowdfunding when energy and creativity are still high and teams can still have great impact in disseminating the work they've been doing:

  • Simplified form for new projects and ideas, so the concept comes first.
  • Inclusion of feeder capital from sponsors, in order to make "cloudfunding" rock.
  • Freedom to chose time for an initial round, followed by a 2nd one for reaching optimal costs.
  • Responsive design, for agile admin validation and publishing on the go.
  • Social media embed in campaigns for more noise.
  • Donations via mobile, twitter, telegram (2nd phase).

Many teams interested in making co-created ideas real could benefit from this. We're tired of seeing how, after cool and intense hackathons or workshops, many powerful ideas and solutions lose energy. At the end of such processes, at that special moment and speed, one powerful thing to do is to embrace agility, and estimate the costs and goals for "minimum viable versions" of half-cooked software, beautiful diagrams of processes, solid prototypes, where sponsors can also jump in as multipliers. So any group of motivated developers, social "provocateurs", open data activists or cultural hackers - specially if they're mixed :) - could use this to get more support for their idea. Our target groups are fresh teams with fresh ideas looking for resources to help them build, and then deliver social impact.

We need you!

So, if this sounds useful and interesting to you, too, you can support us by leaving a comment or rating the idea here, where we explain the same. This is a call where we can start to look for support for this development, with the aim of creating as much impact as possible and then putting ourselves to work!