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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Proyecto Avizor provides a database to facilitate checking on parliamentary activities in development against poverty

In this article, we’d like to explain Goteo’s follow-up tracking process for successfully crowdfunded projects and their collective returns: how it’s performed, what results we obtain, and what conclusions the process allows us to draw. We do this together with  Vicky Anderica and Raúl Magallón, our “tracker” collaborators in charge of following and analyzing the results of Goteo’s successfully financed campaigns.

We’d also like to take this opportunity to explain why we place so much importance on collective returns as an added value, and the ideology behind it. With collective returns at the very heart of our design, we’re focusing our efforts on spreading information to make the concept more comprehensible, creating ways to improve what we can learn, and following those returns closely to gauge the extent of their reach.

Tracking Returns

One of the distinctive characteristics of Goteo is its defense of the digital commons (as well as the commons in general), that content on the web which remains available for free use through the implementation of open/free licensing. This is what we’re referring to here as “collective returns”.

One thing we’ve always been concerned about is what happens with a project after a successful campaign. Right from the beginning, we’ve been committed to offering a special kind of guarantee for completed projects, one that ensures the fulfillment of the rewards and collective returns promised in the contract between project creators and Fundacion Goteo, once the project achieves its minimum financing goal.

However, beyond the legal obligation, we’re much more interested in learning first hand how far these projects have gone, what they’ve created, what difficulties they’ve encountered during their production process and most of all, what digital returns they’ve made available.

That’s why we’ve been collaborating with Vicky Anderica (lawyer, project coordinator in Access Info Europe) and Raúl Magallón (journalist and professor at Universidad Carlos III)) to work out the details of this tracking process. So far, they’ve covered 191 completed projects whose campaigns were successfully financed after one year (the contract-specified period for the fulfillment of promised returns), checking their websites and social media and getting in touch with the project promoters one-on-one.

Key Findings

One of the clearest conclusions reached is that we need to strongly emphasize the meaning of collective returns to the promoters and users, so that everyone involved is aware of their importance (from our point of view, collective returns have an even greater importance than individual rewards).

Of course, since seeing is believing, here are three examples. The first is from the health sector, a project called Child Poisonings (from the call Crowdsasuna) published a practical guide with the most effective preventative measures; the second from the field of open government, Project Sentry (proyecto Avizor), provided a database to facilitate checking on parliamentary activities in development against poverty; a third from the Collective Architectures platform, crowdfunded in the first UNIA matchfunding call, which opened its source code, its hosted content and resources as well as the tool itself to facilitate communication among entities on this network.

This post is meant as a step in the same direction, to be followed with more details about our new proposals to enhance our services: to reinforce the information first shared with project promoters; to improve the accessibility of public returns; to share a recap of the main contractual commitments (but in friendlier terms) before the campaign; to create a basic calendar of “deliverables” for the entire process (pre-, during and post-campaign); and performing more outreach activities.

Since the analysis of the returns is being done for blocks of project, we’re presenting here the results of the second round, covering 131 projects:

• 92 out of the 131 projects reviewed completed their returns properly. The remaining projects had had some pending questions, but were in progress and had a launch date.

• 22 were late with their collective returns, but had made a public announcement about the reason (production complexities, problems with outside agents or distribution channels running behind with deadlines, or other unexpected delays, etc.)

• 3 had made changes to the promised collective returns, as circumstances had changed and the original commitment no longer made sense.

• 14 did not reply and apparently had not published any announcement.

While we continue to seek ways of ensuring the fulfillment of pending returns, which is the commitment we’ve made with the Goteo community and the projects, to us this figure seems to represent a strong indicator of the courage and commitment which can be created in the present context of crowdfunding, where, in general, there are still very few methods of tracking or guarantees, despite the proliferation of many types of platforms.

Regarding collective returns by category:

Why do we open knowledge (and not just acknowledge donations): returns vs. rewards

According to Vicky Anderica, promotion and monitoring of collective returns is in the Goteo “DNA”: returns are necessary because nourish the commons. And ensure that there is part of the responsibility that we wanted to take as a platform, to facilitate further financing tool.

In that regard, Goteo covers the entire process of generating the return, supporting project creators from the very beginning phases of their campaigns with our advice, workshops, and specialized articles like this one, right through tracking and promoting those returns once published. However, in her opinion, we should strengthen the task of educating, try to get a better understanding and a greater awareness of the political significance and social responsibility that comes with open knowledge.

As an example, a good case of the widespread impact focused on direct democracy is Escaño110, an Andalusian project within the UNIA matchfunding call on innovation in education and open knowledge (UNIA is an entity that supports co-financed projects, publishing and disseminating the results). Escaño110 offers not just a practical guide to developing a popular legislative initiative, but also offers the code itself for its web platform that promotes the ILPs and collects signatures. This makes it possible to replicate the process in other territories.

But we also find examples from culture that broaden the area of citizen knowledge management, such as Fundación Robo, whose collective creations are fully copyable and shareable, or Demodrama Faces, a stage project that shares its manuals, content and the software code used for their audiovisual creations made with sensors, enabling other artists to integrate these technical advances in their own works.

Collective returns form one of the greatest added values we can provide to projects, as the expression and realization of our conviction: that privatizing our knowledge is not a source of development. Instead, sharing, opening and adding our knowledge is what builds possibilities and a better society.

Therefore, documenting processes (like that of GoDrone, the research and practice of a Catalan secondary school student who has already achieved crowdfunding for a second project, GoHand), capturing our experiences and digitizing this material (such as the education platform Reevo, whose content, resources, database and source code are open for free access and use) helps us extend the value of each project, taking advantage of the freedom and expanding possibilities offered by the Internet.

The tracking being done by Vicky and Raúl shows that, in many cases, greater importance is given to sending rewards than to the publication of returns. In their opinion, Goteo should provide more education and better dissemination around the commons and the creation of participatory communities, among other things, to promote the creation of synergies between projects which include open DNA,”peer-to-peer”, and other projects beyond the technological environment.

In this respect, #AperitiusCrowd in Barcelona or the #LimonaData meetings in Palma (informal meetings to debate and share resources with campaign promotors) are becoming feedback channels among disparate projects, where in a first-hand, face-to-face way, they can collectively discuss and debate their issues and share positive experiences that have helped to produce and reproduce these open processes. We also help with publicizing the returns from projects funded through Goteo which we consider exemplary, for instance Nodo Móvil from the last #AperitiuCrowd, whose manuals, video tutorials and firmware code you can see here, here and here. Even if you don’t quite know what to do with the firmware, it could be interesting to browse the manual and encourage someone to help build a Nodo Móvil guifi.net for an event!

Education through use

From the point of view of most “co-sponsor” users in Goteo, we appreciate that having direct access or use of the collective return usually isn’t their main motivation for contributing to a project. However, it is often closely related to the core values of the projects they’ve decided to support. “I’m not going to use it, but it’s good that it exists”, says Vicky Anderica regarding the source code shared through the platform tuderechoasaber.es, or the film Cerca de tu casa (Near your house). “The important thing is that it exists, that people see this film, to the extent that film can help transform values”.

That is, the fact that a project shares something openly, even if that return might not be of direct use to the donor, is often a motivation in itself and “a boon to the project by its mere existence”, following the Goteo motto ‘CrowdFunding for CrowdBenefits’. Wherever the uses of these returns is promoted (providing consulting, manuals, installation instructions, promoting replication of online platforms, festivals, open-content publications, disseminating educational or creative content, creating events, etc.), infinite possibilities are also opened.

That teaching that the analysis of Vicky and Raul demands of us will undoubtedly improve the visibility of good practices and create new uses for these collective returns. Can a project promoter who needs to launch a Goteo funding campaign enrich his own project with returns that other similar projects have shared? Can someone feel encouraged to replicate a project in another area or professional field, and create a network? Of course they can! It improves their production, advances the processes others had followed, opens up possibilities for joining related communities, and expands the chances for the success of their campaign.

It’s also imperative that we improve our explanation of the process of publishing collective returns. To that end, we have created an FAQ specifically to help, which will be updated with references to other hosting platforms with open, horizontal, independent and neutral content. However, in order to further improve traceability, it will be important that projects specify in their Goteo dashboard what content they share. This way, they are shown to be compliant with the system, and help Goteo to be, more and more, a valuable index of free content for everyone.

Measuring Impact

Apart from tracking and in bringing more efficiency in the publication of returns and the quality of their content, we would like to be able to define good indicators of the real impact those returns are having. According to Vicky and Raul, a unique feature of Goteo is the fact that the return allows us to measure the impact or results of the project, that is, “to see the traceability of the result from the point of view of their contribution to the community”. For that reason, they suggest that we add a question in our communications with project promoters about what they believe the expected impact of their returns could be.

The valuable follow-up work and that particular suggestion raises a parallel question: to what extent could this process of analyzing the generated impact be decentralized?

In reality, the challenge is in exporting the dynamics of free software communities, where ongoing community participation is a fundamental part of each project, and where the distribution of responsibilities, such as spreading the benefits of the project, improvement, and measuring impact is more often guaranteed. ‘It has to do with the project’s ability to maintain this active community,’ they say.

In any case, the management of these communities and the information they can provide is in itself a great challenge for any team leader, one that can be facilitated by hosting discussion forums (like the one we’ve linked to the Facil community, promoters of the Clé Facil project), publishing articles for discussion and information (like the GNUPG project blog), organizing events like the one MediaLab Prado organized to collectively co-define what to do with the open data from the Madrid city council, etc. In this sense, in 2015 we have begun, as a sign of our collaboration with UNIA, a study dedicated to the definition and improvement of the impact indicators used for Goteo projects, which we will soon tell you more about.

We can already talk about how Goteo is making connections between related projects and how we’re refining our commitment to promoting and spreading common and free digital space, but we must still go a step further in facilitating and creating synergies among the different communities that cross on the platform. This presents a new opportunity to strengthen the positive experiences of Goteo users, be they project creators or donors, in line with some of the improvements made this spring, such as publishing the Goteo API to enable the use of data generated on our platform, and improving the efficacy of campaign management to optimize chances of success.

Our journey continues…

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The spring season, so prone to civic revolutions, has also re-awakened our own ethical, open and collaborative instincts. So this year, building on the support of the growing community of Goteo users, we have launched new features and an enhanced set of core values which we would like to share here.

First of all, we at the Goteo Foundation want to thank everyone who has launched projects and co-financed the hundreds of campaigns since we started. All of this support means that today we can announce a reduction in the platform’s campaign commission, from 8% to 4%. It makes us especially happy to announce this step, going beyond crowdfunding and contributing to advancing the standards of the social, collaborative and ethical economies.

Because we can adapt to the environment and use distributed and local collaboration, we can generate more margins in the collective benefits of openness. Further, as a non-profit, we pledge to continue developing new strategies for fundraising and match-funding by “cloudfunding”, so we can continue working towards a progressive commission decrease – thanks to the addition of more individuals, communities and institutions.

But that’s not all! This spring brings more – and equally important – Goteo news…

Lowering the commission, raising our values

After three intense years, Goteo aspires to be a barometer of the needs of a more collaborative and transparent society, a generator of shared positive impact on communities, and a digital tool for social innovation. It’s not us saying these things, by the way, but voices like The Guardian and the Stanford Social Innovation review And all because it’s clearer to us every day, confirming our commitment to transparency and collective benefits for society: each new crowdfunding campaign has more meaning and achieves more when those values are enhanced.

So far, we have been collecting the open results of projects funded via Goteo and promoting examples and testimonies of good practices; we’ve also watched our source code being replicated around the world, in all kinds of new platforms (such as this fantastic Japanese version).

The next step we’re taking in this direction is to share the data for all activity generated in Goteo through an open API with its associated documentation, which will allow other people to create all sorts of interactive visualizations with our statistics. Soon, we will share the first dataviz by Outliers Collective, along with some plans we have for researchers and developers hungry for data!

This is another important thing we’ve devoted a great deal of effort in developing and documenting. Now, users – while initiating and supporting projects, and enjoying collective returns – can also learn about Goteo’s detailed impact results (and even share and cross them), and help tell stories which, drop by drop, contribute to improving the world.

More mechanisms to support projects

More proximity: Now it’s easier to track us and find (or keep an eye on) our activities, because we just published our open agenda. There you’ll find new workshops (after holding more than 80, where we’ve trained more than 3,000 people already); meetings with national and European institutions (so you can learn how we try to influence policies); or, when a new call for match-funding is launched (by the way, after seven of them, we have channeled 100,000 euros from different institutions, which were doubled by civil society).

More synergies: Instead of receiving your donation back for a campaign that did not reach its goal, now your money gets another chance to make an impact. You can choose to put your contribution into a virtual wallet, and your drop can flow into a different stream, helping a similar project at any time. So, after betting on an initiative that hasn’t achieved its crowdfunding goal, the contribution can go to another project on demand. Not a drop wasted!

More commitment: For those of you who increasingly donate to Goteo campaigns on a regular basis, or, for that 40% of users who turn down their individual rewards when donating (promoting distributed generosity and a culture of commitment), we have enabled a new channel to support our mission, with direct donations to the Goteo Foundation and our daily work developing civic technologies.

Oh – in case there’s any doubt, we don’t just promote transparent accounting, we also apply it (here goes an example of how we invest resources in Goteo):

More alliances: But all this (and other ways we’re expanding social impact through our collaborative, ethical standard for crowdfunding – unique in the world) would not be possible without the thousands of people who support us every day. And let’s not forget our friends, organizations with whom we are pleased to move forward and share alliances. These include (among more to come): European Cultural Foundation, International University of Andalusia, Zaragoza City Council, Europeana Foundation, Fab Lab Barcelona, Fabra i Coats, Ideograma, Barcelona City Council, OuiShare, Universidad Carlos III, Yokohama Community Design Lab, FUNDECYT, Toshiba…

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