So where can everyone, we about to start our next session, but I come to the first funding
death room again, I will move to the camera as well.
We have our next speaker up, who is Neil, and he will talk about building sustainable
sustainability, a case study of funding diversification for a decision, stages you as
Neil.
Thank you.
Well, thank you very much, I'm very excited to be presenting here in Fosen.
It's my first time, so thank you for to the organizers of this debroom to select our proposal.
And well, today I'm going to structure my talk as it's presented here.
I'm going to explain a successful story on how we survived an existential crisis, I would
say, for our project.
I'm not telling you that the end of the story, it's successful, so we finally survive
the crisis, but you will see that we suffer a lot during some moments.
So why we'll introduce a little bit of a CDM, then talk about the original setplaces,
then how we develop a sustainability plan.
I will outline some of the key aspects of this plan, then reveal how is it going and show
you some of the learnings and challenges that we learn.
So first of all, I don't know who in this room knows what is a CDM, can you raise your
hand?
Okay, okay, so I'm going to explain a little bit, I don't want to focus a lot on this,
but for those of you who don't know what the CDM is, the CDM is an open source project
and it's a platform for community governance and cities and participation.
So it can be used by any type of organizations.
We are mainly used by public organizations, mainly our local cities of governments, but
also we have some open source projects who are using our technology to organize their
community governance.
So if somebody in the room has first project and have a community and needs an open source
tool to organize the government of their community, you can reach to us and talk a little
bit because you may have been interested in using the CDM, and in fact here in the room
we have Ruth from motik, she has been implementing the CDM for their community in motik.
So well right now the CDM is being used around the world by more than for 15 organizations
and we are in more than 30 countries, as I said we are mainly used by local governments,
like St. Bartonacity Council, the New York City, but also we have some like national and
subrenational actors, like the Brazilian Federal Government is now using the CDM
at a national level, also we have the European Commission using it and also we have different
organizations or cooperatives, like some energy, it's like an energy competitive from Barcelona
who also using the CDM for their community governance. So well that's the state of the
art and let's take a look on the origin of that crisis. So the project was created fifth as a public
policy as a project inside of the Barcelona City Council because they needed a participatory platform
so they decided to develop a participatory platform and they decided to read in an open source project.
Then three years after the release of the first version of the CDM, the community decides
to create a new legal entity that is the CDM association and this association will become the
central actor of the project and will be the actor responsible of the maintenance of the code
and of taking care of the community. So at 2019 we created the association at that time there was
an any funding for the association but then a few years later we started receiving two public
grants, one from Barcelona City Council and another from the Catalan government, La Generalitat de Catalunya
and then at 2022 we had two contacted workers paid and this two public grants and at that time
everything was going great. We were growing and we were happy but suddenly Barcelona City Council
does not pay they did not pay to us a grant so this lift was in a critical situation in a critical
financial situation with a negative balance of 50K euros. So this is a meme of of that time
showing how the Barcelona City Council lives as like with the house in flames but that will
to be fell and to be honest also this project is what it is thanks to the Barcelona City Council
so also to be clear on that this may be not that far with them but what happened is that we realized
that we should finally start to define newer strategies to diversify our income resources and not
be so dependent on one or two public organizations. So then we started to develop in this
sustainability plan to do that. We hire a consultant, a consultant company called La Solamesa
these people are based in Mexico and the US and they are very focused on the civic tech
field and they know very well how to how to move and how to do a sustainability plan. So they
helped us to write and develop this sustainability plan. So the main goals of these projects are
well to explore new sustainability strategies that make us more resilient to changes and less
dependent also define an acclera action plan for the next five years and then also prepare and think
on which kind of projects how we can transform our core activities into fundable projects that
has been something really hard at the beginning to do but one of the kill learnings of all this
process and also the last main goal was to get to gain knowledge on how all these fundraising
world works because for us was something that we didn't know a lot of of it. So we made five
workshops with these girls. We started making an internal diagnosis and we were
like seeing which we were the main key points or the main value that the CDM could have
for possible founders. Then in the second workshop we made an external analysis. We take a look
to all our competitors or similar projects and we started to look at which organizations are
funding them and started to listing all the possible funders. So we made an exercise called
funders intelligence or something like that. So we have a database with all the possible
funders and their programs. Then the last workshops we started to develop an action plan defining
well these different scenarios at three years or four years and defining concrete activities to
achieve those goals. So yeah that's what we've been doing with La Soura Mesa and then I can show
you a little bit the sustainability plan more in concrete. So regarding the needs we define that
those needs to as I said reduce those dependencies and achieve an stable income for the
long term and also because the main goal of all these was to have like an stable team because at
that moment we were only two people and we know that we needed more workers on board to maintain
the decision project in a sustainable way. Also there are also needs like improving the external
community, education, encouraging the participation of the community and so on. But well here is
this is stated the main goal of the sustainability plan as I said strengthing the
operational capacity of the association to fulfill all our responsibilities and then show the
sustainability of the city. So in that sustainability plan we'll find it for income alternatives.
The first one is public funding the one that we were already receiving then we find it private funds
and here we include philanthropy research like EU projects and so on or other types of private funding.
Then we started to refine services also as a possible income alternative and the donations from
members and partners that I will talk a little bit more on that on the nexus slides. So we find that
this chart by as the ideal distribution of our incomes. Having a perfect balance between public
funding, private funds, partners and services because at that time the public funding was representing
the 80% of our income. So the idea is to achieve this distribution we will see how is it going
before. Also what we have done in that plan is to find different coastal scenarios with
an idealistic scenario and optimistic one the red one and a more realistic scenario of growing
and we will see also how that has been and to see these two scenarios the realistic one
aims to reach a budget around $400,000 by 2026 and having a team of six people pay by the association.
And the idealistic scenario will $700,000 and 10 people hired by the association.
So let's see how it is going. So in the actual plan we find it in different specific actions
when was the partnership policy that I will talk about now also the donations of the of
the members and other people also start doing like a fundraising activity and to build new alliances
with public organizations. So we define it a partnership policy because we the decision association
we are the ones maintaining the source code of the system and taking care of the community but
we are not providing services to all those governments who are using our technology. We have
a creative and ecosystem of service providers around the world who has been providing
the CDM services. When a government reach out to us and say hey I want to implement the CDM
we always say the same to them. You should look for a local IT company on your context and
told them what you want to do and see if they want to start building a business model on the top
of the CDM or not and that has been I would say a key aspect on the successful story of the CDM
because right now we have more than 20 companies around the world that provide the CDM services
and those companies are have present in in more than 10 countries I would say. So that's a key aspect
of that project and a quite the unique aspect maybe of in the open source community.
So when so we have all of these and and we at some point realize okay those companies are
making a lot of money and it's okay for us but we should create a path and easy path for them to
contribute back to the comments to contribute back to the association who is the actor taking care
of the digital comment that is the CDM. So we created a fee of the 3% of the year income generated
by the CDM activities but this partnership policy is based on trust so we cannot enforce those
companies to pay us. We cannot in fact some of us companies that are making money with the CDM they
are not paying back to us but some of them are so we are building this race in trust because we
don't want to change our license or anything like that and we cannot enforce those those payments.
Here is a lot on how this works exactly so the CDM association is augmentating the code
and then the service providers most of the times are the ones who are implementing and customizing
for the final client the NGOs cities or governments but sometimes also happens that the
governments are the ones that are implementing or using their in-house capabilities to
install and deploy the CDM. So with the partnership policy we just create this path to contribute
back to the association who is maintaining and taking care of the CDM code base and I think that
this is quite red code because we have made a clear decision that we don't want to compete with
the service providers we are not providing any kind of services. Well so these are right now the
official partners of the CDM we have here 12 companies you can see we have some some as a
pocket code from from Barcelona we have all three for example from Switzerland and then we have
code and omega from Mexico or open source politics from France code for Japan also people from Switzerland
from Sweden and so on so you can see that there's a huge variety of actors here and here you can
see how is it going in fact and our top financial contributions this is an screenshot of our
open collective page I will talk about this later but yeah here you can see the the money that we
that we have been raising during this last year from those companies so as you can see open source
politics is a main with huge different the main contribution to the contributor to the CDM
because for they the CDM is I think the 90% of their business model almost so open collective
so how are we managing all this contribution all these donations and so on we have our open collective
page and we have defined it these three tiers one tier for members for members who want for people who
wants to be a member of the association it's for the years per year and then here the partners can
also add their donation there three percent donation and and also if you want to donate to a CDM
you can go there to the open collective page and and make us a donation and also we are using
open collective as as a transparency portal where we reflect all the number of the economic
numbers of the association on where how and where we are spending the money and how many
grants are we receiving and from who and so on so everything is easier
well let's say also an important aspect of all this process that has been all the fundraising
work but we've been doing so well it's it's hard to start doing fundraising work
because you need to start thinking okay which projects should be interesting for the funders which
now then well it's something that you learn by doing I would say but well during these two years
we have submitted 15 projects nine well reviews and six accepted not that bad I would say our rate
is not not that bad and the most recent accepted projects are those one well the first one is
from people power it it's like an NGO, an network NGO based in the US and they are very
focused on all the cities and participation field and also in digital technologies also we receive
a fund from the Metagop project this is a US more research based project and they pay
test to make some improvements on the interoperability aspects of the CDM then we have been
this year collaborative rating with the Barcelona Super Computing Center on a European project
that they they have been they received and mainly they are paying us to improve the API capabilities
of the CDM and also we have been selected in a EU project we are starting in this world of the
horizon projects it's something that we are still figuring out if we are happy with that or not
I will come in a few years and tell you if if it's a good set here or not to to a start
participating in those projects but it's a lot of money I would say to be honest and and it's an interesting
project on how we can improve political participation in multilingual communities or spaces
and finally the one that you all may be aware of the NGI 0 comments fan we have received an
small grant to to make some improvements in some core aspects of the platform
so while coming back to the ideal distribution let's see how this is going
so this was 2023 and as you can see public funding were still almost the 70% then the
money received from from partners was almost 20 and services 12 so we started using a little bit
the dependence on public funding but not that much and then in 2024 we opened door to all these private
funds that I were mentioning so public funding is decreasing a little bit the the the the piece of the
buy so we are right now around this 56% of public funding and also well the the partners
I don't know if the the total money of partners or nations having increased but I think it's
pretty the same between 2023 and 2023 and 2024 the thing is that well we are achieving our
main goals so we are reducing the dependence on public funding so well yeah just to start closing
and have a bit of time for questions some challenges and learnings well one of our main challenges
right now is that as I said we were born as a very local based project in Barcelona and so on
and now the community is growing faster and we have like a little bit of growth crisis line
right now and yeah and like how to transitate from a local based one international project is one
of our challenge also another key challenge for us is how to receive public grants because I mean
we really believe that the theme is a digital public infrastructure and should be mainly publicly funded
and we want more public organizations involve in the maintenance of the CDM but this is very hard
for example the Brazilian federal government we have like 100% alignment in political terms with them
they they know what it means to to use an open source software and they want to contribute but they
cannot because if the Brazilian government makes a donation to a to a Catalan based association this
this payment should be approved by the National Congress of Brazil so it's impossible so that's
that's one of the key questions that we are asking ourselves how we can involve how we can receive
money from public organizations outside of Spain and also one key question that's around
of this problem is how we finance a maintenance work because we see that it is easy to raise money
for AI blockchain or whatever is the best word of the year and of the shiny new things and all that
stuff but it's hard to to get funded for maintain and work to fix bags and so on so that's
one of the key challenges and learnings I would say that we should grow in a sustainable way so
rather than like receiving a lot of money and and don't know how to do with that it's better to start
going little by little step by step and and and chose like the ideal size of your team to
not grow in for the sake of growing only also one other killer thing is how to submit projects
that are pitchable are a fundable are interesting from the funders but that do not
divide you from your core mission because maybe you can see yourself like presenting some proposals
that divide you from your from your core mission and and also one of the learnings is that we
need to internationalize our legal and financial structure we are figuring out how to do that
maybe opening different headquarters in in other countries that would allow us to receive money
from from those countries and the last learning I think that we all share is that we for sure
we need a public agency at a European level at a country level I don't care following the example
of the this German agency take fan I was thinking on the old name I don't know the the new name
but but I think that we we all should push forward for this we are in fact trying to do
to do at a Spanish level and at a Catalan level so yeah this is a culture action for a lot
of us in the room to push for and to advocate for public funding for open source projects and that's
all thank you very much
okay I see three questions go ahead
so in the earlier slide you said you had about six people working in your team
so you can correct me if that was done the right interpretation I just have a curious
how much time was spent fundraising so for the planning project we're going to
planning and trying to get people to fund your organization and this kind of curious
how much time of dedicated that without an individual person was that working on this and how much
time of what they spending doing this versus a working on the project so okay so the question he's
how much time we are spending on yes I'm doing that so the question is how
how much time we spend in fundraising work I don't know I don't have a clear answer on that
I'm being mainly the responsible of that and working a lot on this but I have also
other responsibilities like I'm also part of the product team of the project I'm not leading it but
but I would say that depending on the time of the year but 20 to 30 percent of my time is
a little bit too fundraising and also a key aspect here is that we have like a we call it
coordination committee is the board of the civil association and it's made of volunteers and some
of these volunteers has been helping us a lot on doing these fundraising work and for example we
which has been receive a grant from the foundation for a foundation of friends and this has been
thanks to colleague of the committee who is French so so that's the question next question
depending on this you spend the significant amount of resources fundraising and so the grant
proposals and things like that what is the key reason why you didn't choose the service provider
because that would be been a regular stream of income from government and companies to fund
development like canonical does that for example okay so your question is how is
why we are not providing services okay I mean because at the beginning we were not interested on that
and because the project was born inside of of a public administration and then we create
this association and we become more autonomous and for the moment we we have an agreement with all
the actors of the community that we are not going to be competing with these other service providers
because we really think and this is like quite unique I would say in the case of the scene that
that we can be mainly publicly funded a four-month payment work so if this hypothesis
I mean if we can maintain this hypothesis during the years we would never need to start
doing implement an installation and providing those services so so we we stay as a neutral actor on
all this because you know if we start to doing some services maybe our vision could change
maybe we were like giving more attention to the needs of our clients rather than having like a
high-level vision about the product that's the key aspect of it we are taking care of having
this global or high-level vision shared by all the needs of the community because most of the time
the clients are asking for customization and new features and things that most of the time we say okay
this is a model that you should develop on your own and that you should maintain this is not going
to the core so that's part of these balance I think that there were yes there first
yeah
ah I can issue the question yeah how we decided to to hire the consultants or you want to
tell me well the consultant agency and how one we spend on it that the name is La Solemeza
they're basically Mexico and in fact we chose them because one of the colleagues of the
coordination committee knows the boss of this agency and and is somebody who is really connected
to the civic tech community and field so so here I she really knows to which funders we should
talk and so on so she also has like a really real good contact agenda so she can connect us to some
people and that's that's why we we chose them and I don't remember how much we spent on them
nine thousand something like that yeah something like that and at that time the thing was that
Barcelona City Council is one year okay and it was one year we didn't give us the grant but the
next year they give us the the double amount of money so two compensators so with that money
we use that to start doing this and I think that we need to close yeah well so thank you very much