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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“Giving everyone an active stake in a project makes a more sustainable funding model”

What was the need that brought Spacehive to existence and how did it situate itself to existing crowdfunding platforms?

Aaron O’Dowling-Keane: The organisation came about in 2012 because the founder and CEO Chris Gourley, a journalist at the time covering planning and architecture within London, saw a real need in the market for something that facilitated a bottom-up transformation, civic participation in urban planning. With this in mind, he set up Spacehive. The very first Spacehive project was the Glyncoch centre in Wales which raised £700,000 out of a £730,000 target. They had six weeks to hit the remainder of their target or they would have lost all the money they raised so far. They thought they had exhausted all their options and were incredibly stressed. At this point Spacehive intervened, offered them help in crowdfunding and introduced them to a couple of big grants to get the community participation going. Glyncoch had the highest unemployment in the UK. People could not afford to pay for this community centre themselves otherwise they would have done it already. Of course it is not about contributions of large amounts of money but about lot of people showing that they are interested by voting with their wallets. They set up the campaign, got everyone involved in the project team to go around door to door, explain the project, get a couple of pounds or whatever people could give and put it in the bucket. With that they were able to go to local businesses and say:”look, a couple of hundred people have all given to something they are really passionate about; if you, as a local business, can also show that you support this, and help fill the needs of the community, they would be very grateful and you will get an amazing return on this of investment.” Once they got the local businesses involved, the next step was to talk to the chains and corporates. They told them “there is a really active community, with businesses and citizens involved, show that you too are also part of this community!” Within six weeks they managed to raise the extra £30,000 mainly from individuals and a number of organisations that came together to make it happen. That was the very first Spacehive project: it showed how people coming together can positively change their space and the community is able control how their resources are being used.

How much did this experience condition the modalities of further work? How did it establish the way the organisation started working?

The most important part was the proof of concept: for a long time we did not know how to get these different fractions working together. A large part of what we do is working with councils as well as corporates as otherwise they tend to work in isolation. So they would put all their energy resources into making one project and then they would move on. Whereas if they were able to combine their resources, giving everyone an active stake in making the project happen, it would become a more sustainable funding model. This way people feel they have more ownership over what is happening in their communities. So in Glyncoch the most important thing was that all these fractions came together and actually made this project happen.

How did you define civic crowdfunding at the time? How did you establish the boundaries of where Spacehive would work?

The truth is we are constantly refining our definition of civic crowdfunding. It means different things to different people, most often the financing of community or shared spaces. There is a real need for it because crowdfunding had already started working in terms of a kick starter in the consumer space, technology and there was a need to use that technology to change the way people were using money and facilitating change within the public arena.

How do you select the projects that you support? What are the selection criteria?

We have eligibility guidelines. The most important thing is that the proposed project has to be available for the community to use, it has to be in a public space or have public access. It is any shared space, it can be managed privately or publicly but it has to be open to everybody.

Do you check if the applicants’ claims are true?

One of the unique features of Spacehive is that we have a verification process from a third party service called Locality. Anyone who uploads a project to our site and wants to pitch at the fundraising stage has to go through this process. It checks whether what the applicants say is true, if they have the appropriate permissions, whether the people or the contractors are already on board.

Many of the projects that go for funding on your site are about very expensive processes. How can you help initiatives with match funding or other kinds of support?

There are two things there. Buildings are just one part of the projects, we also support live events and any temporary or permanent structures that would transform space. What crowdfunding is often used for is not to pay for the entire renovation of a building but to show proof of interest. It works by building up the money for match funding and show grant makers that there is active interest in the community to make the project happen.

Whether it’s a playground or a small part of a greater project, they would crowdfund for that part. Where we come in the project is that we have a whole bunch of partners, grant makers of all shapes and sizes, who are actively looking for projects in their specific areas of interest and so we match them intelligently. So if you came along with a project about creating green spaces and you uploaded it to our website we would then encourage you to pitch that to all the different grant funders who are interested in funding green space.

Who are the grant makers and institutions you work with?

We work a number of corporate partners, councils and grant funders, for instance, the Esme Fairbarn Foundation, one of the UK’s biggest grant funding bodies but we also work with businesses such as Barclays and their Lifeskills programme. They specifically fund programmes with young creators, ages 16 to 25 and they actively promote the skills you build from actually crowdfunding a project.

We also work with the Hyde Group, a property developer looking to build up community cohesion. By using Spacehive they are able to give their residents a platform where they can share their ideas, engage their community and build up a cohesion and neighbourly spirit which is often lacking in big cities like London. All these different organisations use Spacehive in different ways but ultimately their power is that by building up these ecosystems of different partners the projects get funded much faster with a much wider group of stakeholders.

When it comes to municipalities, there are building regulations, planning codes, long term development strategies: how do you make sure that the project you support comply with these frameworks?

All projects have to upload their planning permissions in advance. The great thing about working with the different councils is that if there is a project that is interested in a certain space and they are looking to engage the council, this is a great way of building up their relationship by putting a project in the site as an idea, building up support and use that as an activist route to get the council involved at an early stage.

What are the rewards you offer to the people who donate to the campaigns?

With civic crowdfunding the reward is the project itself. You can say most of the funders are quite ‘selfish’ in that they put money in the projects because they want to enjoy it or they want others to enjoy it. The projects might also offer additional rewards, but generally it is not what motivates people to get involved. Community cafés might offer food or drinks, they might invite you to a party to celebrate successes, or in other projects they might write your name on a part of the pledging wall but ultimately people pledge because they want to be part of something. We do not promote equity-based crowdfunding. In terms of rewards it is on a project by project basis but generally the project itself is the reward.

There was a debate a few years ago around Brickstarter. Some people said “we are already paying tax, why should we also contribute our own money towards the public good?” How do you see your role in relation with the public sector?

I think it is a complimentary role.The joy of the crowdfunding model is that if people see something and they want to pay, they can, and if they don’t want to pay they don’t have to. What the crowdfunding aspect does is that it allows people to vote with their wallets for what they want to see in their area so it is not replacing what the council services and what the government taxes are paying for. Demand is increasing and budgets are decreasing in the government sector so this is a way to actively say how they want to prioritise government spending and get a whole bunch of other partners involved.

Where do you see the field of civic crowdfunding evolving in five or ten years? What are the limitations of civic crowdfunding in shaping the city?

The boundaries are unlimited, you can do anything with civic crowdfunding. It is growing in terms of the public’s recognition of how different people in different places engage. But crowdfunding is not going to replace planning. You will still need investors, but crowdfunding plays a part by getting people to have a say and creating that bottom-up democratisation of choosing what is important and how you want your city to grow. Actually we were listed with the GLA (Greater London Authority) as one of the top ten world innovations in government earlier this year and it is really interesting to see the other projects, to see what other countries are focusing on in terms of how government is engaging with a community. That is so powerful, getting citizens, getting councils and businesses into the same platform and talking about what they want to see happen.

How do you think the civic crowdfunding models can compete with very large speculative investment that is dominating cities especially London? Do you see this creating more spatial justice in terms of property development or at least the development of public spaces?

What people really like about the model is transparency: that they can see all the different partners. It means there is some kind of ownership and responsibility during the project delivery. On the other side, it puts the onus of responsibility on the project developer and project delivery manager to answer back to all the people who funded it. It is very empowering and that is what we are looking to do. To empower citizens to take control and play an active part in the areas where they live and civic crowdfunding allows them to do that.

Interview with Aaron O’Dowling-Keane on 26 July 2016

All images from Spacehive.com

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Click here to download the book

• Funding the Cooperative City: Community Finance and the Economy of Civic Spaces – Preview
• Edited by Daniela Patti & Levente Polyák
• Cooperative City Books
• Eutropian Research & Action, Vienna, 2017
• ISBN 978-3-9504409-0-4
  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Photo by barnyz

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This is an excerpt from the upcoming book Funding the Cooperative City: Community finance and the economy of civic spaces.

In the past decade, with the economic crisis and the transformation of welfare societies, NGOs, community organisations and civic developers – City Makers – established some of the most important services and spaces in formerly vacant buildings, underused areas and neglected neighbourhoods. Consolidating their presence in the regenerated spaces, these initiatives are increasingly looking into the power of the local community, the dispersed crowd and new financial actors to invest in their activities.

Two years ago, the cultural centre La Casa Invisible collected over 20.000 euros for the partial renovation of the building including the installation of fire doors and electric equipments to assure the safety of their revitalized 19th century building in the centre of Málaga. A few months later, East London’s Shuffle Festival, operating in a cemetery park at Mile End, collected 60.000 pounds for the renovation and community use of The Lodge, an abandoned building at the corner of the cemetery. In order to implement their campaigns, both initiatives used the online platforms Goteo and Spacehive that specialise in the financing of specific community projects. The fact that many of the hundreds of projects supported by civic crowdfunding platforms are community spaces, underlines two phenomena: the void left behind by a state that gradually withdrew from certain community services, and the urban impact of community capital created through the aggregation of individual resources.

The question if community capital can really cure the voids left behind by the welfare state has generated fierce debates in the past years. This discussion was partly launched by Brickstarter, the beta platform specialised in architectural crowdfunding, when it introduced to the public the idea of crowdfunded urban infrastructures. Those who opposed Brickstarter, did in fact protest against the Conservative agenda of the “Big Society”, the downsizing of welfare society and the “double taxation” of citizens: “Why should we spend on public services when our taxes should pay for them?”

Nevertheless, in the course of the economic crisis, many European cities witnessed the emergence of a parallel welfare infrastructure: the volunteer-run hospitals and social kitchens in Athens, the occupied schools, gyms and theatres of Rome or the community-run public squares of Madrid are only a few examples of this phenomenon. European municipalities responded to this challenge in a variety of ways. Some cities like Athens began to examine how to adjust their regulations to enable the functioning of community organisations, others created new legal frameworks to share public duties with community organisations in contractual ways, like Bologna with the Regulation of the Commons. In several other cities, administrations began experimenting with crowdfunding public infrastructures, like in Ghent or Rotterdam, where municipalities offer match-funding to support successful campaigns, or with participatory budgeting, like in Paris, Lisbon or Tartu. Yet other public administrations in the UK, the Netherlands or Austria invited the private sphere to invest in social services in the form of Social Impact Bonds, where the work of NGOs or social enterprises is pre-financed by private actors who are paid back with a return on their investment in case the evaluation of the delivered service is positive.

Largo Residencias, Lisbon. Photo (cc) Eutropian

Alternatively, some cities chose to support local economy and create more resilient neighbourhoods with self-sustaining social services through grant systems. The City of Lisbon, for instance, after identifying a number of “priority neighbourhoods” that need specific investments to help social inclusion and ameliorate local employment opportunities, launched the BIP/ZIP program that grants selected civic initiatives with up to 40.000 euros. The granted projects, chosen through an open call, have to prove their economic sustainability and have to spend the full amount in one year. The BIP/ZIP project, operating since 2010, gave birth to a number of self-sustaining civic initiatives, including social kitchens that offer affordable food and employment for locals or cooperative hotels that use their income from tourism to support social and cultural projects. In 2015 the experience of the BIP/ZIP matured in a Community-Led Local Development Network, as identified by the European Union’s Cohesion Policy 2014-2020, which will grant the network access to part of the Structural Funds of the City of Lisbon. The CLLD is a unique framework for the democratic distribution of public funds: it foresees the management of the funding to be shared between administration, private and civic partners, with none of them having the majority of shares and votes.

While, as the previous cases demonstrate, the public sector plays an important role in strengthening civil society in some European cities, many others witnessed the emergence of new welfare services provided by the civic economy completely outside or without any help by the public sector. In some occasions, community contribution appears in the form of philanthropist donation to support the construction, renovation or acquisition of playgrounds, parks, stores, pubs or community spaces. In others, community members act as creditors or investors in an initiative that needs capital, in exchange for interest, shares or the community ownership of local assets, for instance, shops in economically challenged neighbourhoods. Crowdfunding platforms also help coordinating these processes: the French Bulb in Town platform, specialized in community investment, gathered over 1 million euros for the construction of a small hydroelectric plant in Ariège that brings investors a return of 7% per year.

ExRotaprint, Berlin. Photo (cc) Eutropian

Besides aggregating resources from individuals to support particular cases, community infrastructure projects are also helped by ethical investors. When two artists mobilised their fellow tenants to save the listed 10.000 m2 Rotaprint in the Berlin district of Wedding, they invited several organisations working on moving properties off the speculation market and eliminating the debts attached to land, to help them buy the buildings. While the complex was bought and is renovated with the help of an affordable loan by the CoOpera pension fund, the land was bought by the Edith Maryon and Trias Foundations and is rented (with a long-term lease, a “heritable building right”) to ExRotaprint, a non-profit company, making it impossible to resell the shared property. With its sustainable cooperative ownership model, ExRotaprint provides affordable working space for manufacturers as well as social and cultural initiatives whose rents cover the loans and the land’s rental fee.

Creating community ownership over local assets and keeping profits benefit local residents and services is a crucial component of resilient neighbourhoods. Challenging the concept of value and money, many local communities began to experiment with complementary currencies like the Brixton or Bristol Pounds. Specific organisational forms like Community Land Trusts or cooperatives have been instrumental in helping residents create inclusive economic ecosystems and sustainable development models.

Homebaked, Liverpool. Photo (cc) Eutropian

In Liverpool’s Anfield neighbourhood, a community bakery is the symbol of economic empowerment: renovated and run by the Homebaked Community Land Trust established in April 2012, the bakery – initially backed by the Liverpool Biennale – offers employment opportunities for locals, and it is the catalyst of local commerce and the centre of an affordable housing project that is developed in the adjacent parcels. Similarly, a few kilometres east, local residents established another CLT to save the Toxteth neighborhood from demolition. The Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust, with the help of social investors and a young collective of architects (winning the prestigious Turner prize), organised a scheme that includes affordable housing, community-run public facilities and shops.

The economic self-determination of a community has been explored at the scale of an entire neighbourhood by the Afrikaanderwijk Cooperative in Southern Rotterdam. The cooperative is an umbrella organisation that connects workspaces with shopkeepers, local makers, social foundations, and the local food market: they have developed an energy collective in cooperation with an energy supplier that realises substantial savings for businesses in the neighbourhood; a cleaning service that ensures that cleaning work is commissioned locally; and a food delivery service for elderly people in the neighbourhood.

With community organisations and City Makers acquiring significant skills to manage welfare services, urban infrastructures and inclusive urban development processes, it is time for their recognition by established actors in the public and private sectors. The EU’s Urban Agenda, developing guidelines for a more sustainable and inclusive development of European cities, can be a catalyst of this recognition: it can prompt the creation of new instruments and policies to enable such community-led initiatives. While the Cohesion Policy 2014-2020 has developed the CLLD framework, not many Member States chose to use this instrument. The Urban Agenda could therefore envision the adoption of more methods to be experimented by City Administrations, to allow for a more sustainable and inclusive allocation of resources. Whether through matchfunding, grant systems, or simply removing the legal barriers of cooperatives, land trusts and community investment, municipalities could join the civil society in developing a more resilient civic economy with accessible jobs, affordable housing, clean energy, and social integration.

Lead image from homebaked.org, Liverpool UK. All other images from Eutropian.

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