WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:10.160 So where can everyone, we about to start our next session, but I come to the first funding 00:10.160 --> 00:15.160 death room again, I will move to the camera as well. 00:15.160 --> 00:20.160 We have our next speaker up, who is Neil, and he will talk about building sustainable 00:20.160 --> 00:25.400 sustainability, a case study of funding diversification for a decision, stages you as 00:25.400 --> 00:26.400 Neil. 00:26.400 --> 00:27.400 Thank you. 00:27.400 --> 00:37.120 Well, thank you very much, I'm very excited to be presenting here in Fosen. 00:37.120 --> 00:44.680 It's my first time, so thank you for to the organizers of this debroom to select our proposal. 00:44.680 --> 00:52.160 And well, today I'm going to structure my talk as it's presented here. 00:52.160 --> 01:01.440 I'm going to explain a successful story on how we survived an existential crisis, I would 01:01.440 --> 01:06.080 say, for our project. 01:06.080 --> 01:11.240 I'm not telling you that the end of the story, it's successful, so we finally survive 01:11.240 --> 01:18.120 the crisis, but you will see that we suffer a lot during some moments. 01:18.120 --> 01:23.120 So why we'll introduce a little bit of a CDM, then talk about the original setplaces, 01:23.120 --> 01:26.280 then how we develop a sustainability plan. 01:26.280 --> 01:33.800 I will outline some of the key aspects of this plan, then reveal how is it going and show 01:33.800 --> 01:38.360 you some of the learnings and challenges that we learn. 01:38.360 --> 01:44.960 So first of all, I don't know who in this room knows what is a CDM, can you raise your 01:44.960 --> 01:45.960 hand? 01:45.960 --> 01:53.200 Okay, okay, so I'm going to explain a little bit, I don't want to focus a lot on this, 01:53.200 --> 01:58.840 but for those of you who don't know what the CDM is, the CDM is an open source project 01:58.840 --> 02:05.080 and it's a platform for community governance and cities and participation. 02:05.080 --> 02:09.080 So it can be used by any type of organizations. 02:09.080 --> 02:16.200 We are mainly used by public organizations, mainly our local cities of governments, but 02:16.200 --> 02:22.080 also we have some open source projects who are using our technology to organize their 02:22.080 --> 02:23.080 community governance. 02:23.080 --> 02:30.280 So if somebody in the room has first project and have a community and needs an open source 02:30.280 --> 02:37.720 tool to organize the government of their community, you can reach to us and talk a little 02:37.800 --> 02:43.240 bit because you may have been interested in using the CDM, and in fact here in the room 02:43.240 --> 02:52.840 we have Ruth from motik, she has been implementing the CDM for their community in motik. 02:52.840 --> 03:03.560 So well right now the CDM is being used around the world by more than for 15 organizations 03:03.640 --> 03:10.040 and we are in more than 30 countries, as I said we are mainly used by local governments, 03:10.040 --> 03:15.960 like St. Bartonacity Council, the New York City, but also we have some like national and 03:15.960 --> 03:20.920 subrenational actors, like the Brazilian Federal Government is now using the CDM 03:20.920 --> 03:27.080 at a national level, also we have the European Commission using it and also we have different 03:28.040 --> 03:35.240 organizations or cooperatives, like some energy, it's like an energy competitive from Barcelona 03:35.240 --> 03:43.160 who also using the CDM for their community governance. So well that's the state of the 03:43.160 --> 03:53.560 art and let's take a look on the origin of that crisis. So the project was created fifth as a public 03:53.560 --> 03:58.680 policy as a project inside of the Barcelona City Council because they needed a participatory platform 03:58.680 --> 04:07.080 so they decided to develop a participatory platform and they decided to read in an open source project. 04:09.240 --> 04:16.680 Then three years after the release of the first version of the CDM, the community decides 04:16.680 --> 04:23.880 to create a new legal entity that is the CDM association and this association will become the 04:23.880 --> 04:32.120 central actor of the project and will be the actor responsible of the maintenance of the code 04:32.120 --> 04:42.280 and of taking care of the community. So at 2019 we created the association at that time there was 04:42.280 --> 04:49.000 an any funding for the association but then a few years later we started receiving two public 04:49.000 --> 04:54.920 grants, one from Barcelona City Council and another from the Catalan government, La Generalitat de Catalunya 04:54.920 --> 05:06.680 and then at 2022 we had two contacted workers paid and this two public grants and at that time 05:06.760 --> 05:15.160 everything was going great. We were growing and we were happy but suddenly Barcelona City Council 05:16.760 --> 05:24.920 does not pay they did not pay to us a grant so this lift was in a critical situation in a critical 05:24.920 --> 05:34.280 financial situation with a negative balance of 50K euros. So this is a meme of of that time 05:35.240 --> 05:43.880 showing how the Barcelona City Council lives as like with the house in flames but that will 05:43.880 --> 05:51.720 to be fell and to be honest also this project is what it is thanks to the Barcelona City Council 05:51.720 --> 06:01.480 so also to be clear on that this may be not that far with them but what happened is that we realized 06:01.560 --> 06:09.400 that we should finally start to define newer strategies to diversify our income resources and not 06:09.400 --> 06:19.640 be so dependent on one or two public organizations. So then we started to develop in this 06:20.280 --> 06:27.960 sustainability plan to do that. We hire a consultant, a consultant company called La Solamesa 06:28.920 --> 06:36.280 these people are based in Mexico and the US and they are very focused on the civic tech 06:37.880 --> 06:45.800 field and they know very well how to how to move and how to do a sustainability plan. So they 06:45.800 --> 06:53.000 helped us to write and develop this sustainability plan. So the main goals of these projects are 06:53.080 --> 07:00.280 well to explore new sustainability strategies that make us more resilient to changes and less 07:00.280 --> 07:09.320 dependent also define an acclera action plan for the next five years and then also prepare and think 07:09.320 --> 07:18.760 on which kind of projects how we can transform our core activities into fundable projects that 07:18.760 --> 07:25.560 has been something really hard at the beginning to do but one of the kill learnings of all this 07:25.560 --> 07:35.480 process and also the last main goal was to get to gain knowledge on how all these fundraising 07:35.480 --> 07:42.840 world works because for us was something that we didn't know a lot of of it. So we made five 07:42.920 --> 07:51.240 workshops with these girls. We started making an internal diagnosis and we were 07:52.840 --> 08:02.040 like seeing which we were the main key points or the main value that the CDM could have 08:03.000 --> 08:09.400 for possible founders. Then in the second workshop we made an external analysis. We take a look 08:09.400 --> 08:18.120 to all our competitors or similar projects and we started to look at which organizations are 08:18.120 --> 08:24.120 funding them and started to listing all the possible funders. So we made an exercise called 08:24.760 --> 08:29.560 funders intelligence or something like that. So we have a database with all the possible 08:29.560 --> 08:38.040 funders and their programs. Then the last workshops we started to develop an action plan defining 08:38.120 --> 08:45.400 well these different scenarios at three years or four years and defining concrete activities to 08:45.400 --> 08:54.440 achieve those goals. So yeah that's what we've been doing with La Soura Mesa and then I can show 08:54.440 --> 09:00.760 you a little bit the sustainability plan more in concrete. So regarding the needs we define that 09:01.000 --> 09:10.520 those needs to as I said reduce those dependencies and achieve an stable income for the 09:10.520 --> 09:16.920 long term and also because the main goal of all these was to have like an stable team because at 09:16.920 --> 09:25.000 that moment we were only two people and we know that we needed more workers on board to maintain 09:25.080 --> 09:35.080 the decision project in a sustainable way. Also there are also needs like improving the external 09:35.080 --> 09:43.000 community, education, encouraging the participation of the community and so on. But well here is 09:43.000 --> 09:49.080 this is stated the main goal of the sustainability plan as I said strengthing the 09:49.080 --> 09:56.120 operational capacity of the association to fulfill all our responsibilities and then show the 09:56.120 --> 10:03.240 sustainability of the city. So in that sustainability plan we'll find it for income alternatives. 10:03.240 --> 10:10.360 The first one is public funding the one that we were already receiving then we find it private funds 10:10.360 --> 10:19.000 and here we include philanthropy research like EU projects and so on or other types of private funding. 10:19.640 --> 10:26.920 Then we started to refine services also as a possible income alternative and the donations from 10:26.920 --> 10:34.760 members and partners that I will talk a little bit more on that on the nexus slides. So we find that 10:34.760 --> 10:45.640 this chart by as the ideal distribution of our incomes. Having a perfect balance between public 10:45.640 --> 10:53.560 funding, private funds, partners and services because at that time the public funding was representing 10:53.560 --> 11:02.920 the 80% of our income. So the idea is to achieve this distribution we will see how is it going 11:03.480 --> 11:09.240 before. Also what we have done in that plan is to find different coastal scenarios with 11:10.200 --> 11:18.200 an idealistic scenario and optimistic one the red one and a more realistic scenario of growing 11:19.160 --> 11:27.880 and we will see also how that has been and to see these two scenarios the realistic one 11:27.880 --> 11:38.920 aims to reach a budget around $400,000 by 2026 and having a team of six people pay by the association. 11:39.000 --> 11:48.040 And the idealistic scenario will $700,000 and 10 people hired by the association. 11:49.160 --> 11:57.400 So let's see how it is going. So in the actual plan we find it in different specific actions 11:57.400 --> 12:03.400 when was the partnership policy that I will talk about now also the donations of the of 12:03.400 --> 12:11.080 the members and other people also start doing like a fundraising activity and to build new alliances 12:11.080 --> 12:20.280 with public organizations. So we define it a partnership policy because we the decision association 12:20.280 --> 12:25.800 we are the ones maintaining the source code of the system and taking care of the community but 12:25.800 --> 12:30.840 we are not providing services to all those governments who are using our technology. We have 12:31.800 --> 12:37.000 a creative and ecosystem of service providers around the world who has been providing 12:37.000 --> 12:44.200 the CDM services. When a government reach out to us and say hey I want to implement the CDM 12:44.200 --> 12:54.440 we always say the same to them. You should look for a local IT company on your context and 12:54.440 --> 13:01.160 told them what you want to do and see if they want to start building a business model on the top 13:01.160 --> 13:09.400 of the CDM or not and that has been I would say a key aspect on the successful story of the CDM 13:09.400 --> 13:15.560 because right now we have more than 20 companies around the world that provide the CDM services 13:15.560 --> 13:23.000 and those companies are have present in in more than 10 countries I would say. So that's a key aspect 13:23.320 --> 13:30.760 of that project and a quite the unique aspect maybe of in the open source community. 13:32.200 --> 13:38.520 So when so we have all of these and and we at some point realize okay those companies are 13:38.520 --> 13:44.360 making a lot of money and it's okay for us but we should create a path and easy path for them to 13:44.360 --> 13:50.280 contribute back to the comments to contribute back to the association who is the actor taking care 13:50.280 --> 13:58.040 of the digital comment that is the CDM. So we created a fee of the 3% of the year income generated 13:58.040 --> 14:06.120 by the CDM activities but this partnership policy is based on trust so we cannot enforce those 14:06.120 --> 14:11.400 companies to pay us. We cannot in fact some of us companies that are making money with the CDM they 14:11.400 --> 14:18.840 are not paying back to us but some of them are so we are building this race in trust because we 14:18.840 --> 14:24.360 don't want to change our license or anything like that and we cannot enforce those those payments. 14:26.040 --> 14:32.360 Here is a lot on how this works exactly so the CDM association is augmentating the code 14:32.360 --> 14:38.200 and then the service providers most of the times are the ones who are implementing and customizing 14:38.200 --> 14:43.400 for the final client the NGOs cities or governments but sometimes also happens that the 14:43.400 --> 14:50.040 governments are the ones that are implementing or using their in-house capabilities to 14:50.040 --> 14:57.320 install and deploy the CDM. So with the partnership policy we just create this path to contribute 14:57.320 --> 15:05.720 back to the association who is maintaining and taking care of the CDM code base and I think that 15:05.720 --> 15:11.880 this is quite red code because we have made a clear decision that we don't want to compete with 15:11.880 --> 15:21.000 the service providers we are not providing any kind of services. Well so these are right now the 15:22.200 --> 15:30.920 official partners of the CDM we have here 12 companies you can see we have some some as a 15:30.920 --> 15:37.080 pocket code from from Barcelona we have all three for example from Switzerland and then we have 15:37.160 --> 15:45.000 code and omega from Mexico or open source politics from France code for Japan also people from Switzerland 15:45.000 --> 15:53.800 from Sweden and so on so you can see that there's a huge variety of actors here and here you can 15:53.800 --> 16:00.440 see how is it going in fact and our top financial contributions this is an screenshot of our 16:00.520 --> 16:08.840 open collective page I will talk about this later but yeah here you can see the the money that we 16:08.840 --> 16:14.920 that we have been raising during this last year from those companies so as you can see open source 16:14.920 --> 16:21.000 politics is a main with huge different the main contribution to the contributor to the CDM 16:21.000 --> 16:33.080 because for they the CDM is I think the 90% of their business model almost so open collective 16:33.080 --> 16:39.400 so how are we managing all this contribution all these donations and so on we have our open collective 16:39.400 --> 16:48.920 page and we have defined it these three tiers one tier for members for members who want for people who 16:48.920 --> 16:54.280 wants to be a member of the association it's for the years per year and then here the partners can 16:54.280 --> 17:03.560 also add their donation there three percent donation and and also if you want to donate to a CDM 17:03.560 --> 17:10.840 you can go there to the open collective page and and make us a donation and also we are using 17:10.920 --> 17:18.360 open collective as as a transparency portal where we reflect all the number of the economic 17:18.360 --> 17:23.720 numbers of the association on where how and where we are spending the money and how many 17:25.320 --> 17:30.040 grants are we receiving and from who and so on so everything is easier 17:32.840 --> 17:38.840 well let's say also an important aspect of all this process that has been all the fundraising 17:39.400 --> 17:46.520 work but we've been doing so well it's it's hard to start doing fundraising work 17:46.520 --> 17:52.040 because you need to start thinking okay which projects should be interesting for the funders which 17:52.040 --> 17:57.640 now then well it's something that you learn by doing I would say but well during these two years 17:57.640 --> 18:04.760 we have submitted 15 projects nine well reviews and six accepted not that bad I would say our rate 18:04.760 --> 18:13.240 is not not that bad and the most recent accepted projects are those one well the first one is 18:13.240 --> 18:21.160 from people power it it's like an NGO, an network NGO based in the US and they are very 18:21.160 --> 18:29.800 focused on all the cities and participation field and also in digital technologies also we receive 18:29.800 --> 18:37.320 a fund from the Metagop project this is a US more research based project and they pay 18:37.320 --> 18:45.400 test to make some improvements on the interoperability aspects of the CDM then we have been 18:45.400 --> 18:51.480 this year collaborative rating with the Barcelona Super Computing Center on a European project 18:51.480 --> 18:59.640 that they they have been they received and mainly they are paying us to improve the API capabilities 18:59.960 --> 19:07.000 of the CDM and also we have been selected in a EU project we are starting in this world of the 19:07.000 --> 19:14.920 horizon projects it's something that we are still figuring out if we are happy with that or not 19:15.480 --> 19:20.600 I will come in a few years and tell you if if it's a good set here or not to to a start 19:21.400 --> 19:28.040 participating in those projects but it's a lot of money I would say to be honest and and it's an interesting 19:28.120 --> 19:34.520 project on how we can improve political participation in multilingual communities or spaces 19:35.080 --> 19:41.800 and finally the one that you all may be aware of the NGI 0 comments fan we have received an 19:41.800 --> 19:49.240 small grant to to make some improvements in some core aspects of the platform 19:50.200 --> 19:57.880 so while coming back to the ideal distribution let's see how this is going 20:00.040 --> 20:11.800 so this was 2023 and as you can see public funding were still almost the 70% then the 20:11.800 --> 20:21.240 money received from from partners was almost 20 and services 12 so we started using a little bit 20:21.240 --> 20:29.400 the dependence on public funding but not that much and then in 2024 we opened door to all these private 20:29.400 --> 20:36.840 funds that I were mentioning so public funding is decreasing a little bit the the the the piece of the 20:37.720 --> 20:47.640 buy so we are right now around this 56% of public funding and also well the the partners 20:48.760 --> 20:55.160 I don't know if the the total money of partners or nations having increased but I think it's 20:55.160 --> 21:03.240 pretty the same between 2023 and 2023 and 2024 the thing is that well we are achieving our 21:03.240 --> 21:11.640 main goals so we are reducing the dependence on public funding so well yeah just to start closing 21:11.640 --> 21:20.920 and have a bit of time for questions some challenges and learnings well one of our main challenges 21:20.920 --> 21:27.080 right now is that as I said we were born as a very local based project in Barcelona and so on 21:27.080 --> 21:35.000 and now the community is growing faster and we have like a little bit of growth crisis line 21:35.000 --> 21:44.200 right now and yeah and like how to transitate from a local based one international project is one 21:44.200 --> 21:52.200 of our challenge also another key challenge for us is how to receive public grants because I mean 21:52.200 --> 21:59.560 we really believe that the theme is a digital public infrastructure and should be mainly publicly funded 21:59.560 --> 22:06.280 and we want more public organizations involve in the maintenance of the CDM but this is very hard 22:06.280 --> 22:13.000 for example the Brazilian federal government we have like 100% alignment in political terms with them 22:13.000 --> 22:20.760 they they know what it means to to use an open source software and they want to contribute but they 22:20.840 --> 22:29.960 cannot because if the Brazilian government makes a donation to a to a Catalan based association this 22:31.800 --> 22:38.360 this payment should be approved by the National Congress of Brazil so it's impossible so that's 22:38.360 --> 22:43.560 that's one of the key questions that we are asking ourselves how we can involve how we can receive 22:43.640 --> 22:52.200 money from public organizations outside of Spain and also one key question that's around 22:52.200 --> 22:59.000 of this problem is how we finance a maintenance work because we see that it is easy to raise money 22:59.000 --> 23:07.560 for AI blockchain or whatever is the best word of the year and of the shiny new things and all that 23:07.560 --> 23:15.720 stuff but it's hard to to get funded for maintain and work to fix bags and so on so that's 23:15.720 --> 23:25.480 one of the key challenges and learnings I would say that we should grow in a sustainable way so 23:26.200 --> 23:31.640 rather than like receiving a lot of money and and don't know how to do with that it's better to start 23:31.640 --> 23:39.640 going little by little step by step and and and chose like the ideal size of your team to 23:39.640 --> 23:47.640 not grow in for the sake of growing only also one other killer thing is how to submit projects 23:47.640 --> 23:54.440 that are pitchable are a fundable are interesting from the funders but that do not 23:54.600 --> 24:02.680 divide you from your core mission because maybe you can see yourself like presenting some proposals 24:02.680 --> 24:08.600 that divide you from your from your core mission and and also one of the learnings is that we 24:08.600 --> 24:13.800 need to internationalize our legal and financial structure we are figuring out how to do that 24:13.800 --> 24:20.360 maybe opening different headquarters in in other countries that would allow us to receive money 24:20.360 --> 24:27.960 from from those countries and the last learning I think that we all share is that we for sure 24:27.960 --> 24:33.800 we need a public agency at a European level at a country level I don't care following the example 24:33.800 --> 24:43.160 of the this German agency take fan I was thinking on the old name I don't know the the new name 24:43.720 --> 24:51.160 but but I think that we we all should push forward for this we are in fact trying to do 24:51.160 --> 24:58.040 to do at a Spanish level and at a Catalan level so yeah this is a culture action for a lot 24:58.040 --> 25:05.000 of us in the room to push for and to advocate for public funding for open source projects and that's 25:05.400 --> 25:07.000 all thank you very much 25:13.400 --> 25:17.000 okay I see three questions go ahead 25:17.000 --> 25:21.320 so in the earlier slide you said you had about six people working in your team 25:22.920 --> 25:27.000 so you can correct me if that was done the right interpretation I just have a curious 25:27.000 --> 25:33.400 how much time was spent fundraising so for the planning project we're going to 25:33.400 --> 25:38.280 planning and trying to get people to fund your organization and this kind of curious 25:38.280 --> 25:43.560 how much time of dedicated that without an individual person was that working on this and how much 25:43.560 --> 25:48.760 time of what they spending doing this versus a working on the project so okay so the question he's 25:48.760 --> 25:55.720 how much time we are spending on yes I'm doing that so the question is how 25:57.000 --> 26:04.840 how much time we spend in fundraising work I don't know I don't have a clear answer on that 26:04.840 --> 26:11.720 I'm being mainly the responsible of that and working a lot on this but I have also 26:11.720 --> 26:18.600 other responsibilities like I'm also part of the product team of the project I'm not leading it but 26:18.680 --> 26:25.640 but I would say that depending on the time of the year but 20 to 30 percent of my time is 26:25.640 --> 26:31.400 a little bit too fundraising and also a key aspect here is that we have like a we call it 26:31.400 --> 26:36.680 coordination committee is the board of the civil association and it's made of volunteers and some 26:36.680 --> 26:44.120 of these volunteers has been helping us a lot on doing these fundraising work and for example we 26:44.120 --> 26:50.120 which has been receive a grant from the foundation for a foundation of friends and this has been 26:50.120 --> 26:57.640 thanks to colleague of the committee who is French so so that's the question next question 26:59.640 --> 27:04.760 depending on this you spend the significant amount of resources fundraising and so the grant 27:04.760 --> 27:11.400 proposals and things like that what is the key reason why you didn't choose the service provider 27:11.720 --> 27:18.120 because that would be been a regular stream of income from government and companies to fund 27:18.120 --> 27:23.800 development like canonical does that for example okay so your question is how is 27:26.200 --> 27:37.000 why we are not providing services okay I mean because at the beginning we were not interested on that 27:37.080 --> 27:43.080 and because the project was born inside of of a public administration and then we create 27:43.080 --> 27:49.560 this association and we become more autonomous and for the moment we we have an agreement with all 27:49.560 --> 27:58.120 the actors of the community that we are not going to be competing with these other service providers 27:58.120 --> 28:04.360 because we really think and this is like quite unique I would say in the case of the scene that 28:04.440 --> 28:11.000 that we can be mainly publicly funded a four-month payment work so if this hypothesis 28:12.440 --> 28:17.560 I mean if we can maintain this hypothesis during the years we would never need to start 28:17.560 --> 28:26.280 doing implement an installation and providing those services so so we we stay as a neutral actor on 28:26.280 --> 28:32.120 all this because you know if we start to doing some services maybe our vision could change 28:32.520 --> 28:39.720 maybe we were like giving more attention to the needs of our clients rather than having like a 28:39.720 --> 28:44.920 high-level vision about the product that's the key aspect of it we are taking care of having 28:44.920 --> 28:51.800 this global or high-level vision shared by all the needs of the community because most of the time 28:51.800 --> 28:57.400 the clients are asking for customization and new features and things that most of the time we say okay 28:57.400 --> 29:01.400 this is a model that you should develop on your own and that you should maintain this is not going 29:01.480 --> 29:08.840 to the core so that's part of these balance I think that there were yes there first 29:23.240 --> 29:24.760 yeah 29:24.760 --> 29:36.040 ah I can issue the question yeah how we decided to to hire the consultants or you want to 29:36.040 --> 29:43.400 tell me well the consultant agency and how one we spend on it that the name is La Solemeza 29:43.400 --> 29:49.640 they're basically Mexico and in fact we chose them because one of the colleagues of the 29:49.720 --> 29:57.400 coordination committee knows the boss of this agency and and is somebody who is really connected 29:57.400 --> 30:06.200 to the civic tech community and field so so here I she really knows to which funders we should 30:06.200 --> 30:13.080 talk and so on so she also has like a really real good contact agenda so she can connect us to some 30:13.640 --> 30:21.160 people and that's that's why we we chose them and I don't remember how much we spent on them 30:23.400 --> 30:30.040 nine thousand something like that yeah something like that and at that time the thing was that 30:30.040 --> 30:36.520 Barcelona City Council is one year okay and it was one year we didn't give us the grant but the 30:36.520 --> 30:45.000 next year they give us the the double amount of money so two compensators so with that money 30:45.000 --> 30:52.680 we use that to start doing this and I think that we need to close yeah well so thank you very much