Goteo

An open source platform for crowdfunding and distributed collaboration

Goteo is an open source social network for crowdfunding as well as distributed collaboration based in Spain. The explicit mission of Goteo.org is to help finance and support the independent development of creative and innovative initiatives that contribute to the common good, free knowledge, and open code. Building on this, the platform aims to facilitate the collective investment in open projects with social, cultural, scientific, educational, technological or ecological objectives that generate new opportunities for the improvement of society and the enrichment of community goods and resources.

Goteo has been developed by the Goteo team led by Platoniq and subsequently transferred to the Fundación Goteo. It is built in JavaScript and PHP and it is published under a GNU Affero General Public License, version 3.

Goteo has the following basic characteristics:

  • Open projects with social impact: All the projects supported by Goteo share knowledge under free/open licenses.
  • Collective return: Goteo seeks the social return of investments and for this reason apart from individual returns, the system is based on collective returns for the development of the commons.
  • Possibility of non-monetary contributions: Besides donating money, people can support projects in other ways, such as helping in translation, diffusion, etc.
  • Driven by a non-profit organization: Goteo is managed by a non-profit foundation that is part of the social economy.
  • 100% legal donations and tax deductibility: All economic transactions in Goteo are considered as donations.
  • Attraction of venture capital: A continuous fundraising work is conducted in order to add entities that multiply individuals’ donations.
  • Workshops and training: Courses for campaign optimization through real cases in group work.
  • Two crowdfunding rounds of 40+40 days: If the first round is successful, a second one runs in order to reach the optimal costs.
  • Cost transparency: Goteo promotes transparency in the items being hedged as a way to build trust and promote accountability.
  • Signed contract with the responsible for each project: Legal support of the project, the rewards and the compliance with the conditions of Goteo.
  • Monitoring and Dissemination of results and good practices: Goteo gives great importance to the development process of post-campaign projects, confirming and reporting the results.
  • Open Data and API: Goteo shows statistics in a clear and visual form and indicators of all activities, promoting open source tools on crowdfunding knowldedge.
  • Open Source platform: Goteo is an open source platform so its source code can be reused, modified and adapted to create other platforms.

The CloudFunding consists of a Platform for Social Good that will support Thessaloniki’s local communities to collect money for social and charitable purposes. The platform will give Thessaloniki’s citizens and organisations the ability to co-finance three types of projects:

1. Projects for the improvement of the environment of the city (i.e. creation of parks and playgrounds, restoration of monuments, expansion of bike lanes, etc.). These projects could combine private and public funding.

2. Projects for social entrepreneurship (i.e. creation of non-profit enterprises to promote objectives that improve the city life or strengthen its social capital. The Municipality will act as a mediator of the initial effort.

3. Projects for knowledge-intensive and technology based youth entrepreneurship.

This platform has been developped as a pilot implementation for the project STORM Clouds.