Much has happened since Goteo opened its doors at the beginning of November 2011. Mostly positive things, some unexpected things, others to learn from and make improvements – we've travelled a long way along with many people and projects, and it's a journey that's worth looking back at here as we enter this new year 2013.
We had this in mind when Franc Camps-Ferrer, data visualisation specialist and artist living between Brooklyn and Barcelona appeared and proposed converting various questions and numbers into dynamic graphics.
While we continue to work on the best way in which the platform, besides housing projects based on the commons, can make open data freely available so that anyone can use and analyse it (thereby providing needed collective knowledge about this new area which is crowdfunding), Franc Camps has taken some of the detailed statistics of campaigns, users and contributions and has captured the the first year of Goteo in this fabulous series of infogaphics and conclusions.
In Franc's work on Goteo it is possible to clearly visualise other important questions, such as, for example how different successful campaigns with a similar pattern of a good start in the first few days of the campaign and the key factor of regular updates of information developed, or the recurrence and average of contributions, which are higher in general than project campaigns on other platforms which do not offer a collective return (something that we had already confirmed during the research carried out by Platoniq before the development of Goteo).
This video which accompanies the infographics is an example of the detail and understanding that this type of visualisation permits, where in this case it is possible to appreciate the geographical behaviour of the cofunders between November 2011 and November 2012.
Developments in 2012
Time flies and we are continuing to grow so we thought we'd take advantage of the new year to comment on some of the milestones in the still short history of Goteo.
2012 has been the year in which Goteo Euskadi opened as the first autonomous node of the platform (more nodes will follow shortly, such as Andalusia, strengthening the decentralised model we believe in). Throughout the year we've given lots of presentations and talks (like this one at TEDxMadrid), and facilitated more than 15 workshops on collective and open financing n cities worldwide - Madrid, Bilbao, Zaragoza, Tenerife, Cáceres, Berlin, Rome, Dublin, Nantes, Caracas, Maracaibo etc.
Thanks to the invaluable help of some fantastic volunteers, the platform has been translated into Catalan, English, Basque and French (and a great book has also been created in French). The first version of the source code has been released on Github under an AGPL license (and has been used by at least a pair of other platforms that we are aware of). We've developed an API with which it's possible to process tax-deduction certificates for donations, for those cofunders who renounce a reward in return for their contribution, which is available from the user control panel. It's also been the year in which we have received the Premio Focus de Conocimiento Libre prize for a successful organisation and been chosen as number one among crowdfunding platforms for social change on the P2P Foundation blog.
In the year that has ended we have also started collaborating with Pau Llop on the Colaboratorio de eldiario.es blog, writing about the collaborative economy. As well as being pretty active on our own Goteo blog, , we have written for the Berliner Gazette and the Mosaic magazine of the UOC, as well as being interviewed by Felix Stalder for Shareable and been featured in various media & events. We've also published a summer and recent winter catalogue (with campaigns that we invite you to support).
More data!
Complementing the numbers and visualisations featured in this post, the platform now has 17,761 registered users (8, 917 active cofunders, of whom more than 1,000 have cofunded more than one campaign) and about 10,400 daily visits, totalling 2,500,000 visits during 2012, and we have 10,000 followers in different social networks. Around 150 open projects have been published to date, collecting, in total, more than 430,000 Euros, with an average of almost 40 Euros per cofunder and a campaign success rate of over 60%. To that must be added 765 offers of different types of collaboration. With regard to collective returns, the most-used license by projects has been the Creative Commons ) Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.
All this (and much more for which there isn't room in this post) wouldn't have been possible without all of those people who have contributed their financial help, time, knowledge and other resources to the projects campaigning on the platform. In name of the project promoters and the Goteo team we just want to give a big
T H A N K Y O U
and our hope that 2013 will be a great year for everybody wherever the commons prevail.