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 (https://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]

Photo by raindog

The post Matchfunding Social Entrepreneurship and the Commons Collaborative Economy in Barcelona 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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By Jan Mazur

This article is an excerpt from the book Funding the Cooperative City: Community Finance and the Economy of Civic Spaces

Crowdfunding has emerged as a relatively innovative, Internet-enabled way of financing projects, startups and small and medium enterprises (SMEs), especially in their early-stages. In the EU, where most of the financing for companies comes primarily from banks and not capital markets, it has been burdensome and limiting to seek bank financing for startups and SMEs. Most startups and many SMEs lack relevant operating history and track record, cash flow or collateral to secure bank loans. Angel investors and venture capital funds are an option, but they usually cover specific segments of the startup and SME market. Nevertheless, any finance provider may strongly benefit from the risk reduction based on crowd validation, as the product or service information becomes distributed to large amounts of people who may “crowd validate” them by backing their crowdfunding campaigns. Contrary to their inability to raise required capital, the economic significance and impact of SMEs is greater than their size; they are one of the main vehicles for the creation and dissemination of innovation, and their potential to exploit synergies is usually very strong.

Breakdown of the European alternative finance market by model, 2014. Image (c) EC

Crowdfunding, defined as “a collective effort of many individuals who network and pool their resources to support efforts initiated by other people or organisations”, belongs to the domain of finance-providing activities. Its specific mutations can be unregulated, regulated, or exempted from the regulation, depending on multiple criteria and elements of these activities. Crowdfunding is typically performed on online crowdfunding platforms, which offers intermediate support for projects or companies by individuals (crowd) who wish to support them. On a more general level, we typically recognise (i) donation-based, (ii) reward-based, and (iii) investment-based (including equity-based and lending-based) crowdfunding platforms, whereas the level of regulatory attention naturally increases with the increase of risks and the amount of money provided individually and sought cumulatively. However, the regulation tailor-made for crowdfunding does not exist on the EU level, though some EU legislation may apply to financial relations within equity-based and lending-based crowdfunding. National legislations of certain countries specifically regulating crowdfunding do exist, yet the industry significantly lacks the authority that would provide EU-wide standards and fortify the public trust towards the platforms, which would allow especially investment-based crowdfunding to go mainstream.

When it comes to donation-based crowdfunding, from the legal point of view, we typically understand the relations between projects/companies seeking finance and their backers who provide finance for certain non-monetary rewards as a donor contract without any material reward (other than “a good feeling”). Donor-based crowdfunding platforms nowadays enable fundraising for non-profit and charity contributions and projects, but also for education and scientific research. Reward-based crowdfunding is more complex, though the applicable regulation is also quite unrestrictive. Under the reward-based crowdfunding scheme, financial contribution is exchanged for current or future (conditional) goods or services on a platform, which supports and enables the exchange. The business model of these platforms is based on charging a fee in the amount of a few percentage points of the crowdfunded amount. Reward-based crowdfunding normally does not fall within specific financial regulations as the relationships established by the crowdfunding system are usually considered to be basic civil and business-to-consumer relationships. The regulatory requirements are typically low for these platforms and no special approvals are required, except for the regular trade/business licensing.

Typologies of crowdfunding. Image (cc) Eutropian

There are two main models of investment-based crowdfunding: (i) equity-based, and (ii) lending-based crowdfunding, whereas there are also hybrid forms of crowdfunding models based on revenue sharing, profit-sharing or subordinated loans, just as there are hybrid forms of finance. To generalise the regulatory patterns of these crowdfunding models is not an easy task, as the models vary significantly from country to country where national legislations apply. Moreover, these models are also strongly dependent on the corporate structure and the underlying security or instrument that is being traded or issued against the financial investment. However, certain broad generalisations may be drawn; equity-based crowdfunding may fall within the scope of several EU directives. Each of the investment-based models involve monetary motivation, be it an interest, share of profit/revenue, or exit value, but can also involve other motivations, especially in more locally-oriented and social entrepreneurship-oriented crowdfunding platforms. In equity-based crowdfunding, investors invest money into projects or companies in return for a part of their existing or newly issued equity, which may take different forms, such as stocks (securities), or shares, depending on the corporate form of the target company. It is also permissible to issue various classes of stocks, so the stocks may not always possess typical shareholder’s rights, such as voting rights, but only a share on profits.

Crowdfunding companies are typically startups and small and medium sized companies, which tend to choose private capital company forms or even partnerships. Private limited companies are usually cheaper to run, offer flexibility and shield shareholders with limited liability, which makes them a top choice for starting companies. However, these company forms may not be permitted to raise funds from a large amount of investors and are in general not suited to do so. Transferability of shares may also be limiting and limited in the case of private companies, so it disincentives potential investors.

Bulb in Town crowdfunding platform. Image (c) Bulb in Town

Investment-based crowdfunding campaigns are regulated by national regulations and the Prospectus Directive that requires that Member States shall not allow any offer of securities to be made to the public without prior publication of the prospectus. The obligation for companies to publish a prospectus is related to offers of securities with the total amount of investments of at least 5 million EUR (over a period of 12 months), with specific exemptions depending on the number and qualifications of investors and the size of securities.

Crowdfunding campaigns are typically not aimed at qualified investors only. On the contrary, crowdfunding targets large amounts of mostly unqualified investors for individually smaller considerations, often in thousands of euros per investor, yet the typical campaigns run from hundreds of thousands to several millions of euros in total. Empirical evidence suggests that most of these exceptions would not exempt the company from publishing a prospectus based on the Prospectus Directive. Yet, some Member States choose a specific form of regulation of this obligation, as the publishing of a full prospectus may be quite burdensome for startups and small (medium) enterprises: in France small-scale transactions only require a light-prospectus, in Germany, all authorised crowdfunding offerings with a maximum of 10.000 EUR individual investor contribution and a maximum 1 million EUR total investment are exempt from prospectus publishing. On the other hand, in Slovakia the same regime applies for offers between 100.000 EUR to 5 million EUR as for the large offers of 5 million EUR and above. It is advisable to create a specific, crowdfunding- and SMEs-friendly legal regime for middle-range offers, if not directly harmonised on the EU level, than at least on the national level.

Goteo crowdfunding platform. Image (c) Goteo

Some of the services of crowdfunding platforms (the sale and purchase of the financial instruments on behalf of investors) could be regulated by the Markets in financial instruments directive (MiFID), which harmonises the provision of investment services to professional and non-professional clients by investment firms. In the meanwhile, some of the instruments issued by the crowdfunding companies (such as shares in privately held companies) may not be considered financial instruments under MiFID, i.e. transferable securities, and thereby should not be affected by the directive. From the perspective of the platform, it may be beneficial to be a regulated investment services provider, as the MiFID-authorised platform can benefit from the EU passport rule, which allows them to offer services in other Member States. However, this may be very much dependent on the various national company law regimes, which classify the shares of these companies as transferable securities or not. Once authorised, the platform may not be able to conduct any other business than the authorised and regulated. This may lead to unserviced segments of the market with companies issuing different classes of shares, which is hardly desirable. Moreover, being a MiFID-authorised platform poses a relatively large regulatory burden with subsequent costs, which may be impossible to bear by platforms with campaign traffic below a certain threshold.

Lending-based crowdfunding tends to have a looser regulation than the equity-based one, even though it is more relevant in terms of the market size. In certain jurisdictions, authorisation to provide the platform services may be required. The regulation involves information obligations to investors, clear risk representation, but also minimum capital requirements of platforms and resolution plans. Lending-based crowdfunding represents basically two major groups of unsecured loans: (i) peer-to-peer, where consumers offer each other consumer loans, and (ii) peer-to-business, where businesses borrow from multiple lenders. Interestingly, new forms of secured loans start to develop, such as real estate mortgages and developments.

Civic Crowdfunding guidebook published by Spacehive. Image (c) Spacehive

From the viewpoint of community-led urban development projects, the most important sector of crowdfunding is civic crowdfunding. Typical legal structures of civic initiatives tend to be either non-formal or loosely associated around non-profit civic associations (associating persons) and foundations (associating funds), or mixed for- and non-profit legal forms of social enterprises or cooperatives. All types of crowdfunding can be used to some extent by civic initiatives. Non-profit associations and foundations have historically drawn from wide amounts of donors through charity campaigns or collections, which have fared well in the Internet-enabled environment of donation-based crowdfunding. Interestingly, some platforms, such as Spacehive, have been able to cooperate with municipalities, which matching funds to successful crowdfunding campaigns. Yet investment-based crowdfunding requires a revenue-generating activity, which is to be crowdfunded for and which either pays back the loan with interest or generates profit for investors. Moreover, equity-based crowdfunding requires a legal form, which is allowed to issue subscribable shares; therefore non-profit associations or foundations would not be a well-functioning legal form for typical equity-based crowdfunding. Various legal forms have different features and governance structures, for instance cooperatives may favour a more democratic approach to decision-making and profit distribution. On the other hand certain forms put the amount of capital contributions of shareholders first when it comes to decision-making. Nevertheless, traditional company forms can usually be adjusted to fit the needs of civic-oriented crowdfunding, i.e. “civic-adjusted company.”

Investment-based crowdfunding may be a good form of finance for social enterprises and cooperatives, as, in the absence of social banking, regular banking may pose barriers too high in accessing finance. However, banks may perceive crowdfunded companies positively, as they increase their equity, as is also evidenced by the Bulb In Town case. From a business perspective, local crowdfunding campaigns may also draw substantial benefits from the fact that shareholders are potentially significant stakeholders (and vice versa) and consumers of goods and services of the crowdfunded project; the interests of shareholders and stakeholders are aligned.

In conclusion, any regulation must take into consideration elementary risks that investors or lenders face. They need to have access to clear and accurate information on the borrowers or invested companies. Regulators advise crowdfunding platforms to maintain strong engagement of investors and allow them to exchange opinions and discuss the projects openly on the platform. The investors must be well-informed on the project or company they consider investing in and the risks they face: risk of capital loss, risk of dilution, limited possibilities of liquidating an investment and limited information and track record to base the decision on. The platforms may be prone to conflicts of interest due to their business model, which is based mostly on charging fees for successful campaigns. Investors may also over-estimate the due diligence carried out by the platform. It is in the long-term interest of the platforms to make sure and review whether their investors understand the risks of the crowdfunding investments and restrain their investments into a well-built portfolio.

Even though the crowdfunding is a very promising source of alternative finance, the regulation currently available is clearly not suited for it yet. Crowdfunding regulation, currently at the EU and many Member States level as a by-product of existing legislation, should acknowledge that crowdfunding is not defined by a specific form of company shares (securities), but rather by its specific nature. The overall amount of crowdfunding campaigns usually does not exceed a few million euros. Investors are usually dozens of individual and mostly non-professional investors investing thousands or tens of thousands of euros. As crowdfunding in general does not pose a systemic risk, it poses a consumer finance risk, especially the risks of frauds, deceptive campaigns, or embezzlement of finance from the company etc. These risks must be addressed in order to set a level playing field for the platforms and set professional standards. Thorough due diligence of campaigning companies serves the investors, companies, platforms and the market and society equally, as it safeguards against frauds and unsound business plans. It is advisable that countries adopt rules for crowdfunding platforms in order to better manage the expectations of all the parties.

Some proposals could include a lighter regime of prospectus obligations for companies publicly offering stocks worth 100.000 to 5 million euros, specifically if individual investments do not exceed larger amounts; requirements on transparency of the platforms regarding individual campaigns (including investors’ discussions on these campaigns), platform rules, legal terms and conditions of individual campaigns, conflicts of interest; requirements on information obligations of the platforms regarding the risks of the investments in general and advisory to mitigate them (including obligation to limit individual investments into a single company and investor’s portfolio rules), risks of individual campaigns, minimal due diligence requirements for platforms; specific EU-wide rules to allow platforms offer shares of companies to non-professional investors for limited investments regardless of the legal form of companies; guidance on solving conflicts of interest of platforms.

Photo by Medialab Prado

The post Regulating crowdfunding – international resources for local communities? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Get your ticket for the conference!

Time flies: it seems that while we weren’t looking Growfunding has already turned five! In the past five years, we have joined hands with thousands of people to build up Brussels from the bottom up. That means it’s high time for a celebration, but also to see if we’re doing things right. On Friday the 19th January we’re organising an international conference

Together with Brussels residents, city makers, academics, policy makers and six ‘partners in crime’ (La Ruche from Montreal, Patronicity from Detroit, Spacehive from London, Co-city from Paris, Goteo from Spain, Ideaginger from Bologna and Voor Je buurt from the Netherlands), we will be sharing our knowledge and experiences an all-day debate on ‘The Civic Crowdfunding City’.

What kind of city do we want to live in? And what role can civic crowdfunding play in building this city?

What kind of a city and society can we create through civic crowdfunding? And just how democratic will this be?

We’ll compare good practices from 8 world cities within four different themes:
>          The inclusive city: how can civic crowdfunding be used to include people that are otherwise excluded from urban life?

>          The pup-up city: which kind of urban spaces are created through civic crowdfunding and what are the characteristics?

>          The Arrival city: which social and cultural infrastructure is created for refugees, migrants and newcomers through civic crowdfunding?
>          The circular city: How can civic crowdfunding contribute to the creation of a circular economy?

Click here for the entire programme e-and the names of the speakers.

PRIX LIBRE / VRIJE BIJDRAGE / FREE DONATION

Tickets for the conference on Friday 19/01 will be available through this growfunding-campaign. Contact [email protected] if you need an invoice.

It’s entirely up to you how much you (or your employer) want to pay to participate in the full-day ‘The Civic Crowdfunding City’ conference. The higher your contribution, the more tickets we will be able to make available free of charge to people unable to afford them. These tickets will be distributed through our partner organisations, such as Globe Aroma, Cinemaximiliaan, Article 27, samusocial and klein kasteeltje.

There is no admission fee for students, contact [email protected] to reserve you place.

Everyone who has provided support for this event will be sent our digital publication on the Civic Crowdfunding City (estimated publication date: May 2018).

Oh, and by the way, we’re also looking for around twenty volunteers to help us ensure that the event runs smoothly. If you’re interested in participating, don’t hesitate to register as a volunteer via our brand-new Volunteer button;-)

PARTY ALONG?

You can find all info and the programme on www.growfunding.be/bazaar. Prepare for a fantastic line-up of Brussels artists: an ‘empty shop’, a fashion show by Tony Bland, a dance performance by The Slayers, concerts by Nawaris, Arumbo and Fanfakids, great beats from the 54Sound, and more. You can find a detailed programme: friday and saturday. Tickets for the concerts and performances can be purchased through the Beursschouwburg theatre. All income generated by this event will go to current growfunding projects.

(This text was translated by Ubiqus Belgium, Growfunding’s language service provider)

https://www.facebook.com/events/161683631093820/

Photo by Medialab Prado

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Hacktivism + crowdfunding + wide social collaboration

= the building of new commons

Each of these activities has always existed separately, of course, but it was the vision of Goteo to integrate them into a single open network that is helping commoners build a new Commons Sector in society. With more than 50,000 users and more than 2 million euros raised since 2012, Goteo has helped launch more than 400 projects that support the commons, open code and free knowledge. The projects span a rich variety of fields – education, the environment, technology, culture, entrepreneurial startups, journalism and more.¹ Among them:

The Smart Citizen kit, an open source environmental monitoring platform and hardware for citizens to open and share their own environmental data;²

Quién Manda, a collaborative mapping project that depicts political and economic power relations in Spain;³

Open source gasifier, a renewable electricity generator using residual biomass gasification in the Republic of Chad;⁴

Nodo Móvil, a replicable, travelling wifi connection unit for communities, social movements and public spaces;⁵

Spain in Flames, an open data website to allow the visualization of forest fires, their causes and solutions, enhanced with data from investigative reporting;⁶

Foldarapa, a compact, foldable 3D printer made by a community using a P2P distributed production model that helps its users expand production while sharing the profit with others;⁷ and

The Social Market, a cooperative project by the Spanish Alternative and Solidarity Network linking more than 230 companies and others committed to solidarity economy values.⁸

Goteo is more than a platform for crowdfunding. It serves as a focal point for distributed collaboration among strangers, each of whom may have something special – physical resources, expertise, infrastructure tools, personal time – to contribute to a particular project. Goteo doesn’t just engage individuals; it has become a network of local, independent communities throughout Spain. These range from one in the Spanish region of the Basque country, supported by the Basque government, to others in Andalusia and Barcelona.

The people who belong to the Goteo network tend to play different roles at various times. They may introduce a new project that needs support, contribute funds to help launch a project, or collaborate on it so that it can grow.

Goteo had its origins in the Platoniq collective⁹ – a Barcelona-based group that was a pioneer in the production and distribution of copyleft culture.¹⁰  The hackers of Platoniq (including me) were passionate about designing tools for citizen empowerment and social innovation. We mostly used open source, peer-to-peer technologies that can be easily adapted and reproduced.

Some of Platoniq’s projects became quite famous. Burn Station (2004) was a mobile, self-service system for searching, listening to and copying music and audio files with no charge – all of it legally under a Creative Commons license.¹¹This “taking the Internet to the streets” initiative gained worldwide attention. Another project, The Bank of Common Knowledge, was a series of gatherings in different cities that provided open workshops and manuals.¹² Thanks to hundreds of volunteers, people could learn how to install and use a wiki, how to repair domestic technologies, how to set up a free wifi network, how to set up a local consumer group.¹³

In these and other hackathon-like events Platoniq also served a “process medium” or “masters of ceremonies” for technology-based projects. It helped developers and entrepreneurs recruit new collaborators, clarify the problems to be solved, choose the superior body of source code for projects, and develop alliances in moving them forward.

Despite the success of Platoniq’s work, it became painfully clear after several years that there was a serious lack of resources to incubate innovative and experimental projects. This need was especially acute for projects based on open source and commons-based principles. Neither public nor private institutions are generally eager to support such projects, and certainly conventional market players see little gain in helping produce innovations that are designed to be copied and shared.

The rise of crowdfunding in 2009 as a new model of digital collaboration began to open up a new field of possibilities, however. It became evident from such early platforms like Kickstarter that distributed funding from hundreds and even thousands of people could be a feasible base of support. The standard crowdfunding process at the time consisted of a specific fundraising goal, a deadline for pledges, an “all or nothing” scheme (sufficient pledges to meet the goal or no funding), and a system of individual rewards or perks for backers.

Some of the participants in Platoniq, especially Susana Noguero and Olivier Schulbaum, decided to investigate the possibilities. They found that backers of open source projects were on average more generous than backers of other projects, and that they also contributed more regularly. Platoniq also explored the subtleties of other distributed systems for raising money online – the microcredits approach used by Kiva and platforms for lending money to entrepreneurs – as well as alliances with local organizations in smaller countries. In the end, we decided that it was time to invent a new platform for funding innovations that contribute to open knowledge and the commons.

Since we couldn’t identify any single project or tool designed to support the logic of sharing, collaborating and social impact, we decided to invent one – Goteo. From the start it was a collaborative endeavor. Before programming a single line of code, we entered into a lengthy period of codesign in which we consulted with communities of practice, cultural agitators, open source practitioners, designers, academics and others. We asked the potential users to help visualize the new crowdfunding platform and suggest features that could better meet their own needs and experiences.

Goteo was launched at the end of 2011 as the first crowdfunding platform expressly for open and commons-oriented projects. Its design embodied the following values, in order of importance:

Collective return: Aside from individual rewards for backers, the final outputs of any initiative using Goteo must contribute to the commons. For example, projects must use licenses that allow copying, sharing, modification and free use of part or the whole of each created work.

Trustworthy management model: The legal organization that manages Goteo is a nonprofit foundation, Fundación Fuentes Abiertas, which is officially recognized as a public-interest organization. This management model offers tax-deductible benefits for both cofinancers and promoters.

Fostering transparency: Each project must give specific details about where the money collected will go. Coupled with a two-round scheme of fundraising, this requirement means that even very successful campaigns disclose the actual use of money obtained, including extra money beyond the stated goal. Furthermore, Goteo and project promoters both sign a legal agreement that guarantees that the work described in the crowdfunding campaigns – products, services, activities, archives, etc. – are actually produced.

Distributed collaboration: Beyond monetary contributions to projects via Goteo, people are invited to collaborate in the development of projects by offering services, material resources and infrastructure. They can also participate in specific microtasks.

Training: Goteo has advised and trained more than 2,000 people from many domains through dozens of workshops – a commitment that both disseminates our knowledge while building Goteo’s social following and economic stability.

Community of local nodes: Goteo is not a centralized hub, but more of a community of communities – a network of local, independent nodes that serve to localize projects and give them context. The first one started in the Spanish region of the Basque country, supported by Basque government, and a second later began in Andalusia. New ones will soon be launched in Barcelona and in Nantes, France.

Public/private match-funding: Goteo is a pioneer in recruiting public/private capital investors to help develop open culture projects through a bottom-up process in a “cloudfunding capital” process: each euro a project receives from a person is matched by another euro from institutions belonging to a social investment fund.

Open source: The core software code of the Goteo website is freely available under a General Public License 3.0 via GitHub, which ensures that it can be used and improved via open source principles.

Goteo’s organizational design principles and values mean that its crowdfunding processes are more rule-based than others. It takes more work to ensure that proposed projects comply with basic criteria of openness and commons principles; that projects are actually produced as promised; and that the collective rewards are delivered and made accessible.

But with tens of thousands of users and a 70 percent rate of success for all proposed projects (the majority of crowdfunding platforms rarely reach a 40 percent), we are convinced that Goteo is headed in the right direction. Its success has validated new standards of openness in crowdfunding, and it has attracted some of the most compelling innovators in the field. Although it is difficult to measure, Goteo has also contributed significantly to projects in free culture, open source code and the commons that might otherwise never materialize.

Goteo aspires to somehow “close the circle” with its previous experiences with Platoniq by developing new forms of peer-to-peer creation, crowd incubation and development for projects in the stages before and after crowdfunding. That will have to wait for a while as we concentrate on Goteo’s first priority, to finance and consolidate the Commons Sector.

Enric Senabre Hidalgo (Spain) is currently a member of Dimmons Research Group (Internet Interdisciplinary Institute – UOC), and a visiting Fellow at the CECAN research centre (University of Surrey). He’s a researcher working on co-design methodologies and Agile frameworks for research processes and the development of digital Commons. Previously, he was member of the Platoniq collective, co-founder and project manager of the platform Goteo.org for civic crowdfunding. He is also vice president of the Observatory for CyberSociety and teaches Software Studies and the History of Digital Culture at the Open University of Catalonia, where he holds a Master’s Degree in the Information and Knowledge Society.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

Photo by Medialab Prado

Photo by Ars Electronica

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ZEMOS98 will bring feminist-orientated care and warmth, Remix for Bien común (Remix for the Commons), Commons spirit and Love to the North. In particular they will share their Audiovisual Source Code (Código Fuente Audiovisual) format and approach. We are hopeful we can all benefit from a ‘Finnish Summer of CopyLove’ gathering peer-support and attention to contribute to their and our dreams come true.

During Zemos98’s visit to Helsinki we will organize several events in the framework of the Pixelache Festival. We will be disseminating open practices and open formats for audiovisual creation that we firmly believe contribute to co-create ways of performing multi-cultural understanding, increase the connections between South-North, and allow us all to contribute to much needed empathy and care in the world.

Main features

During Zemos98 visit to Pixalache festival in Helsinki we will organize:

• 2-3 public presentation events in Helsinki on the topic of CopyLove and Interfaces for Empathy. The events will take place during the Pixelache festival days 22-25.9.2016. They will be live-streamed, and the documentation archived online with commons-orientated licenses. One of the events will be in Spanish, and the other one or two in English. All the events will be simultaneously translated to another language (either English or Finnish).
• 1 CopyLove workshop (registration-based) on the topic of Caring for Each Other and Interdependence. In the workshop we will crowdsource ideas and approaches towards promoting care-economics and caring commons and we will co-design and co-produce an open manual. This manual will be shared post-event with text content variably in English, Spanish and Finnish.
  Related events according to reward scheme to peer-supporters (See rewards).

Why this is important

CopyLove and Empathy are themes that speak to the current environment of tension, division and isolation that communities feel are encroaching their everyday lives. Instead, Pixelache festival creates a different narrative of collaboration and empathy that we think will greatly benefit from the input of our colleagues from Zemos98.

To bring Zemos98 to Pixelache we want to reach out to:

1. Citizens worried about increasing intolerance in Finnish society and want to support concrete actions that create new narratives.

2: Alternative Economy Cultures -oriented initiatives, including crowdfunding & feminist/care economics that want to cross-pollinate their thinking across Europe.

3. To the Spanish-speaking community in the Finnish metropolitan (Helsinki)-region.

4. The Open/AvoinGLAM and AV practitioners, activists and researchers who want to learn more about the Audiovisual Source-code method and event-format, and Remix for the Commons approach.

Goals of the crowdfunding campaign

– Develop, disseminate and encourage the Audiovisual Source-code format as a way to talk and generate empathy and CopyLove.

– Make migrant and local connections between North-South.

– Promote Goteo and commons-orientated crowd-funding in Northern Europe.

Team and experience

We are sister festivals that only recently met after all our time apart. We care.

Pixelache people have been making their festival since 2002 in Helsinki, Finland. Zemos98 people have been making their festival since 1998 in Sevilla, Finland. Both have grown up to absorb trans-disciplinary subjects and to promote Caring for the Commons around the same time (2014-2015). ZEMOS98 took the theme CopyLove as it’s festival theme in years 2012-2013 and made a successful related Goteo campaign. ZEMOS98 no longer produces a festival but focuses on other projects and has consolidated a good network around these topics in the South of Europe. Pixelache Festival in Helsinki is partly supported by the Finnish Ministry of Culture and Education and City of Helsinki, this year the full-time and part-time staff employed by the association are also co-directors of the festival (Petri Ruikka and Mari Keski-Korsu respectively). Pixelache has strong presence in the Northern European cultural scene, and benefits from a broad international network.

We Care.. We are not only colleagues, but best of friends, and we want to bridge across South-North.

The people specifically, focusing on the Finland-based branch of the CopyLove Helsinki campaign will be:

Andrew Gryf Paterson from Pixelache has been an artist-organiser for over 12 years in Helsinki and internationally with a strong profile, focused on open-source culture and Commons-oriented strategies. In 2009 he organised the Alternative Economy Cultures symposium in that year’s festival, whereby the 2 keynote speaker’s (Michel Bauwens and Michael Albert)’s travel costs from Madrid and Massachusetts USA were fully crowdfunded. Previously part-time staff role for 4 years, he is again on the association’s board with responsibility for International Networks and Archival-tendencies.

Andrea Botero is a Colombian designer and researcher based in Helsinki for over 10 years, with a keen interest in caring for the commons and participatory methods. She is co-editor of the Peer-Production in Public Services: Cases from Finland ebook (together with Paterson and Joanna Suud-Salonen), and has been lead-researcher on co-p2p.mlog.taik.fi platform at Aalto University.

Mariana Salgado is an Argentinean design researcher that has worked 10 years in the cultural sector in Finland, and has actively contributed to the Finnish chapter of OpenGLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums). She was invited last year to the Hackathon Caring for the Commons at 17th ZEMOS98 Festival, and got inspired by the CopyLove sessions and Zemos98 activities. She published in Spanish the book: Diseñando un Museo Abierto (Designing an Open Museum, 2010). Mariana is an activist in her neighbourhood, and within the Spanish speaking community in Finland.

Support the Campaign here.

The post Bringing CopyLove’s Audiovisual Source Code to Helsinki and Beyond appeared first on P2P Foundation.

We’ve been thinking about using the Peer Production License (PPL) since we came up with the idea for the Think Global/Print Local campaign over two years ago. We didn’t end up doing it because it just seemed simpler to use the same license originally used for Think Like a Commoner, the book we are translating and using as a prototype for this campaign. We’ve heard criticism since the start of the process – which, to me, was spot on – about the use of the imaginary of “free licenses” in a campaign using a Creative Commons Non-Commercial license. We took that criticism quite seriously. So, in dialogue with the book’s author, David Bollier, and a group of legal advisors, we’ve decided to license the translation under a Peer Production License and open the campaign to other publishers and collectives in accord with its established criteria.

In this article we’ll talk about the license, its particularities, the criticisms against it and how, for us, its use shifts the focus away from the book we’re going to translate and more toward the commons-based publishing network we want to build.

The campaign incorporates one of the ideas we promote at the P2P Foundation: interweaving the use of free/open digital knowledge commons with a manufacturing system grounded in the locations where the designs drawn from these commons will finally be materialised.

The ultimate goal is to enable mechanisms so commoners can support themselves and ensure their own social reproduction without resorting to capitalism.

This ideal, Open Cooperativism, has an essential element – commons oriented reciprocity licensing – to protect economic circulation within the commons and defend it against predatory or hostile interests. These licenses, grouped under the concept of CopyFair, present a host of complexities. Resolving these will require rigorous research and development. But the good news is that we already have a first example of a valid and functional CopyFair license: the Peer Production License.

This license is essentially identical to the ubiquitous Creative Commons non-commercial license (BY-NC), except for the following clauses extracted from the ‘Telekommunist Manifesto’ (which contains the full Peer Production License text):

1. You may exercise the rights granted in Section 3 for commercial purposes only if:

i. You are a worker-owned business or worker-owned collective; and

ii. all financial gain, surplus, profits and benefits produced by the business or collective are distributed among the worker-owners

1.  Any use by a business that is privately owned and managed, and that seeks to generate profit from the labor of employees paid by salary or other wages, is not permitted under this license.

What does this mean?

This fork on the original text of the Creative Commons non-commercial variant makes the PPL an explicitly anti-capitalist version of the CC-NC. It only allows commercial exploitation by collectives in which the ownership of the means of production is in the hands of the value creators, and where any surplus is distributed equally among them (and not only into the hands of owners, shareholders or absentee speculators). According to Dmytri Kleiner, co-author of the license with the barrister John Magyar, it’s not a copyleft license, but instead copyFARleft. Kleiner explains the need to open the commercial restrictions defining CC-NC as follows:

What we mean here is that the creative “commons” is privatized because the copyright is retained by the author, and only (in most cases) offered to the community under non-commercial terms. The original author has special rights while commons users have limited rights, specifically limited in such a way as to eliminate any possibility for them to make a living by employing this work. Thus these are not commons works, but rather private works. Only the original author has the right to employ the work commercially.

All previous conceptions of an intellectual or cultural commons, including anti-copyright and pre-copyright culture as well as the principles of free software movement were predicated on the concept of not allowing special rights for an original author, but rather insisting on the right for all to use and reuse in common. The non-commercial licenses represent a privatization of the idea of the commons and a reintroduction of the concept of a uniquely original artist with special private rights.

Further, as I consider all expressions to be extensions of previous perceptions, the “original” ideas that rights are being claimed on in this way are not original, but rather appropriated by the rights-claimed made by creative-commons licensers. More than just privatizing the concept and composition of the modern cultural commons, by asserting a unique author, the creative commons colonizes our common culture by asserting unique authorship over a growing body of works, actually expanding the scope of private culture rather than commons culture.

It is important to note that the PPL is primarily designed to liberate cultural or consumer goods or products, and to offer more choices to content creators or artists presently using Creative Commons non-commercial options. But Kleiner does not recommend the PPL for productive or capital assets. The latter should be licensed with copyleft (GPL, AGPL, etc.), allowing large corporations and capitalist consortia to exploit these commons to their benefit. What is this all about?

To understand the distinction, it is important to grasp the concept of “exvestment” (wordplay on “investment”). Kleiner explains it as follows:

[Exvestment occurs…] when a company spends money to improve Linux because that company makes money running a social networking site, that company benefits from such expenditure, however it is exvestment not investment, because the capitalist class as a whole does not benefit since this reduces the market for commercial software by improving free alternatives and makes such means of production available to non-capitalist producers as well.

This is why I think we need to be careful when we apply the PPL (or similar) to software, because I think to maximize transvestment [the transfer of value from one mode of production to another] in the direction of commons-based production we need to keep Department I goods (Capital Goods or Producers’ Goods) free for capitalists so they can exvest in them, while keeping Department II (Consumer goods or commodities) goods non-free for them.

We think of the Peer Production License as a viable alternative for artists, musicians and content creators. Here’s one well-known example: Yahoo, the company which owns Flickr, decided to sell images that its users licensed under Creative Commons, which allows commercial exploitation (CC-BY). This large corporation is enriched by the works of content creators who get nothing in return. In fact, the creators cannot do anything: they have licensed their work with a free license which does not distinguish who the benefactor is, whether it’s Yahoo or a small cooperative that manufactures handmade books. Copyleft licenses do not discriminate or make distinctions between the economic bases of those who exploit these works. PPL, however, does; in fact, it is their raison d’etre.

Is it the perfect license? Of course not; in fact, I think there has never been and never will be a “perfect license”, although in the future licenses may be developed with more complexity or dynamic adaptability. The PPL is not without criticism or suggestions for improvement, but, probably due to that same complexity, no other viable alternative exists as of now – although there are some in early stages of development.

The license in the context of the Think Like a Commoner campaign

As noted in the beginning of this article, we are very pleased to have been able to change the license the book will be published under only days before the first round of the crowdfunding campaign ended. Here are some of the reasons.

Visibility. A lot has been written on the PPL, but almost no one has implemented it. By using the PPL, we give more visibility to the license and open conversations about it. We hope that other artistic groups or content producers can learn about the PPL and put it into use. The campaign is no longer only about the book, network or other models of publishing production and distribution, but now also includes a practical experience in copyfarleft licenses. Being totally honest now, clearly we also hope this will give more visibility to our crowdfund.

Adaptability in the face of criticism. It hasn’t been easy to implement this change in the middle of a crowdfunding campaign, but we always wanted this to be a dynamic project capable of establishing a dialogue with its followers. For this, we’re very grateful to all who have offered criticism regarding our use of the CC-NC.

Breaking out, and adoption by other publishers. The PPL opens the campaign beyond its initial parameters, freeing it from our control. If you’ll allow me an exaggeration in terms of scale, we saw this kind of mercurial reinvention in 15-M and Occupy, and we love it. By using this type of licensing, the publishing network can be extended and strengthened through self-allocation instead of having to wait for prior approval from the existing publishing consortium. We would be delighted if other publishers and collectives would contribute to the campaign by spreading the word or offering material contributions. They, in turn, can benefit through the production and physical distribution of the book. Ultimately, we’d love to see examples of indirect reciprocity and communal shareholding, not just with this project but with future uses of Copyfair licensing.

Commons publishing networks in other languages. Moreover, with the P2P Foundation and Telekommunisten (the political/art collective Kleiner belongs to), we are planning to launch Think Global, Print Local in English-speaking countries by working directly with the PPL, broadening the scope of the initial campaign.

Help us finish the second round of financing

As of today, May 10th, we have just one week before the campaign ends on May 18^th and we’re still more than 1500€ short of our optimum target. We know that there are enough people who want to read this book in Spanish, to have a hard copy and/or to get any of the other rewards offered in the campaign. More importantly, there are people who care deeply about the issues discussed here and in our crowdfunding campaign text, and want to support this first attempt to create a distributed, transnational, commons-based publishing network that uses licenses such as the PPL. The question is reaching these people in time to achieve – or even surpass – our optimal funding goal. One thing that sets Goteo campaigns apart is this second round “for the optimum”. It can be difficult to distinguish between absolute necessities and those things which make a project really come to life, and this second round helps us fulfill our best aspirations. Can you help us? We’d greatly appreciate it if you would share this article and the link to the campaign – and of course, if you want to contribute to the crowdfund directly, we’d be eternally grateful.

Keep Calm and Keep Commoning!

Stacco Troncoso. Co-founder, Guerrilla Translation. Strategic Direction, P2P Foundation.

• Images by OpenSource.com, 2, Código Abierto, Sursiendo and Guerrilla Translation y Commons Transition
• Translated by Ann Marie Utratel and Stacco Troncoso from the Spanish version, originally published in Guerrilla Translation.

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The plan is to translate my book into Spanish and then use small-scale printing and distribution to publish the book in Spain and throughout Latin America. — initially Peru, Argentina and Mexico, to be followed later in other locations.  The Spanish edition of my book will be entitled Pensar desde los comunes: una breve introducción.

It is difficult for a project this innovative to obtain financing, so the organizers have launched a crowdfunding campaign this week through the Spain-based Goteo website.  I’m thrilled to have my book be the focus of this pathbreaking translation/publishing experiment.  I’m also excited about having my short introduction to the commons accessible to the Spanish-speaking world!

The “claymation” video by Espacio Abierto of Peru, explaining the project, is particularly wonderful, especially the animated clay rendition of me!  If you go to the Goteo website for the campaign, you can watch the video, learn more about the project and contribute to it.  It’s off to a strong start, but it needs to minimally raise 8.042 euros — 10,602 euros is optimum.

The organizers of the project are Guerrilla Translation and Traficantes de Sueños in Madrid, Spain; Sursiendo in Chiapas, México; La Libre de Barranco in Lima, Peru; Tinta Limón in Buenos Aires, Argentina – with support from Goteo in Madrid. A special thanks to Stacco Troncoso and Ann Marie Utratel for their hard work in making this project happen.

The team explains its plans in this way:

We want to pioneer a new mode of artisanal, decentralized text translation and international book distribution and publishing. This model makes the best use of the digital knowledge commons by freely offering the translated text online while printing and distributing hard-copy books at the local level through nodes in various locations. In this way we avoid centralized production and environmentally unsustainable international shipping….[The project] will help build bridges across languages and cultures, and enable concrete, material commoning practices. For this reason, we urge our English-speaking and indeed all multi-lingual friends to join us in supporting this groundbreaking effort.

Let’s help this new effort in international commoning and publishing.  It would be great to bypass the costs, inefficiencies and commercial limitations of conventional publishing (something I discuss at greater length here).  Let’s think global, print local!

The post Think Global, Print Local: A New Commons-Based Publishing Model appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Have you ever wanted to share an inspiring book that you thought could help people and communities elsewhere, but in another language?

Have you thought about combining decentralized online and offline ways of sharing information?

Have you imagined more complex, layered projects crossing cultures and oceans, while also saving resources and building the commons?

For years, these ideas have been stars on the horizon for us at Guerrilla Translation. And, now, we’ve created a project that does all that — with your help — and we’re ready to share our crowdfunding campaign on Goteo. (Surely you know our friends who crowdfund the commons!) We took an idea the P2P Foundation’s Michel Bauwens often talks about — “What’s light is global, what’s heavy is local.” — and turned it into a multi-team, transnational publishing project.

Guerrilla Translation translates (English to Spanish, and the reverse) and shares articles on our web magazines about the kinds of change we want to see, and be, in the world. But we love books, too, and want to share our favorites with our Spanish-speaking friends.

Books pose many challenges to translate, produce, and distribute, though. For a Spanish translation, a book should be available in both Europe and Latin America — but transatlantic shipping costs a lot in resources, and a small publisher likely won’t have offices in multiple countries. Even within a continent, transnational shipping can be long distance. And what about the translation cost for a small publisher?

We believe a good book needs careful, skillful translation by humans, not software. Small-scale publishing and printing require time and resources. And, for these skills, we can’t simply ask everyone to volunteer their time; that’s also unsustainable. We want people to get paid fairly for their work.

We’ve come up with a new way to translate and share good books — a new kind of transnational publishing network that is commons-oriented and ecologically minded: Think global — print local.

With the help of this crowdfund, our teams will pioneer a new mode of artisanal, decentralized text translation, international book publishing, and distribution.

Our model starts by getting crowdfunding support for the translation plus basic design and formatting costs, then freely offering the translated text online as an ebook. But we also break out of digital space by producing a hard copy book through small-scale printing and distribution in several locations — in this case, Argentina, Mexico, Peru, and Spain.

This way, we avoid centralized production and environmentally unsustainable international shipping; we provide the ability for local producers to print and sell the hard copy book; and we add to the knowledge commons with the free digital version.

We have chosen a special book as a prototype: David Bollier’s Think Like a Commoner. (See what Mr. Bollier has to say about this project in this video and here in his blog.) This book explores the rich history and promising future of the commons — a self-organizing social system for the stewardship and enrichment of our collective wealth.

There are more than 400 million native speakers of Spanish worldwide; with this project, Spanish speakers can read and share a fantastic introduction to the commons in book form. We particularly want to add to the conversation around the commons in Latin America, where a long-standing tradition of the commons is getting new energy and attention.

We urge our English-speaking — and, indeed, all multi-lingual friends — to join us in supporting this groundbreaking effort. This campaign is not only for the Spanish-speaking world — we feel this is an important campaign for commoners worldwide. You’ll notice that one of our crowdfund donation rewards is the option to sponsor a number of “library” copies for another community. Of course we also intend to publish books in English, if this project is successful. Together with you, we want to bolster commoning as a challenge to the standard narrative of market economics, defend our shared wealth from enclosure, and create new relations and structures of production.

A successful campaign will allow us to “learn by doing” and repeat the experience with new books and texts in the future. Eventually, we’d like to crowdfund more books and offer more local nodes the option to print and sell books locally in various languages, so everyone’s costs are covered and good books can land in the hands of eager readers — without the expensive and wasteful practices that result from centralized, old-school publishing and distribution models.

We can’t think of a better way to put our skills to work helping build the modern digital commons, while also enabling material commoning practices, so please join us with your support.

Production and labor costs will be covered by the campaign. Work will be performed globally and locally by the following P2P/commons-oriented translators and copyleft publishers: Guerrilla Translation (Spain, Portugal, and Argentina), Traficantes de Sueños (Spain), Tinta Limón (Argentina), La Libre de Barranco (Peru), Sursiendo (Mexico).

Check out our campaign here. There are many ways to help. Have a look and please spread the word!

The post Think Global, Print Local: A crowdfund for a new publishing and distribution network appeared first on P2P Foundation.