Hi everyone!
Here’s a talk proposal. It would be our first time at the hack meeting, but we would love to come.
INTRODUCING FIREFUND
We are activists, mainly from Copenhagen but also Greece, USA and Sweden, from many different fields of political action. A couple of years ago, we started working together on a new organization aimed at building infrastructure for the international left to be better organised, stronger and more succesfull. We see ourselves as ‘meta-activists’ working on tools for other activists to use.
Last summer, we beta-launched our first project: FIREFUND.net <
http://firefund.net/>
We had our first encounter with international crowdfunding of solidarity, when the Kobanê Reconstruction Board used our platform for a crowdfunding campaign during the holidays. $ 50.000 pledged - but not realised, since the goal was $ 130.000 in 30 days.
Those experiences taught us a lot, and we changed gears. Now we are weeks away from launching FIREFUND 2.0 - a scalable, fully functional crowdfunding platform designed to convert symbolic solidarity and internet-based ties between the international left, into brute force and direct action via crowdfunding.
Facilitating money-accumulation for solidarity and direct action is not a straight-forward task. One thing is the basic technical infrastructure, which we would love to include in the presentation for review and critique. Another thing is the ‘soft-side’ of organizing a succesful crowdfunding platform for the international left - how do we actually make campaign succeed as a international community, without removing the direct relationsship between activists and donors, without censurship and eurocentrism, without letting fascists use the platform, without getting shut down or worse; endangering our users freedom.
We’ve been working on the 2.0 launch for more than a month now. If we succeed on our current launch plan, we should be able to do an actual soft-launch at the hack meeting.
We’ve been talking about launching a version of the full site on our staging-server, and then starting a crowdfunding campaign 'on stage' to collect donation for the hack meeting next year - only collecting donations from people at the meeting. That way, we will be able to do a full functional test with the whole hack meeting. Everyone there would try it out, and be able to provide new issues, bugs, hacks and weak-points - and it would be a perfect opportunity to use those collective experiences to do workshops on actually fixing the issues, finishing the last tasks and be ready for a full launch before the summer vacation.
We haven’t written the presentation yet, only drafts. It is hard to do, because we won’t know what we have to show, before the meeting starts. But yeah, this should give you an idea of what we’re thinking about.
Please let us know if it fits the hack meeting’s objective and if you have more notes on what would be interesting to talk about on stage, if we are welcome,
With solidarity (on behalf of the firefund collective),
Karl Kristiansen
Contact:
firefund@??? <
mailto:firefund@riseup.net>
Attach public key if you want to talk in private.
