The ‘crowd-fund the future’ project

At first sight, would it be correct to day that murmurations would allow people to display locations of an entity or project on a map - instead of using any of the proprietory maps? Is there more to it than that?

At least on the technical side we are nudging along a murmurations profile for this. Getting community platforms to integrate with it will be the real breakthrough though.

What I see is that you've been thinking (together with other people) as have I (alone) as has this guy https://www.postgrowth.org/store/products/the-offers-and-needs-market-a-90-minute-process-to-reveal-and-mobilize-community-wealth as has the entire permaculture movement and probably many other people - about marrying the needs and offers. So there seems to be a common thread there. What can be done with it? And that might require its own thread?

Sorry.. I digress form your proposal to just get some funds together ... What we can see from the few replies here is that different people feel strongly about different things, and they would most likely contribute to what they care about the most today.The question is: would peple be happy to put some funds into the kitty, not being sure in advance what the money would be used for in the end?

'how can we engage people...' is by example? We do it, then others see what is being done, that inspires them too etc... It may not be the only way, but to my mind it's worth more than talking the talk by somebody who has never made a step, let alone walked the walk. On the other hand, stories have their value too...

I can see why you say that Open Project is a complex thing. I always imagine the needs/projects and offers/skills/assets to be matched on an app like a dating app. There are some open source dating apps that could be adapted, I think.

But let's see what happens

Thanks @Ivana You're right of course - often projects need things other than money - and receiving those things saves them needing money! But that's a different project to the 'crowd-fund the future' idea. What you're describing sounds a lot like 'The Open Projects Hub' which I describe half-way down this post, and in this draft presentation. My vision is not wedded to just one project... and I'm actually more excited about The Open Projects Hub idea because I see it as a way to help accelerate projects by providing them with the skills and inputs they need AND/OR money, if that's what they need. But it's a more complex and much harder project to get off the ground than a simple crowd-funding experiment... Maybe there's scope for both, or maybe there are better ideas than these...? I'm very open to input and other ideas because it's clear that we are more effective when we work in small teams... so if the vision needs adapting and evolving, or parking up in favour of other ideas, to encourage collaboration that's fine too! I'm just keen to DO things which might (will!) encourage more, and better (more effective) collaboration at scale...

@Yasuaki Kudo summed it up well below: (although maybe we can still make a difference with thousands and millions and don't need to wait for billions!?):

the complex problems of our economy can only be resolved when billions get engaged in meaningful thinking and actions.

So, maybe a better question is: how can we engage people in meaningful thinking and actions?

Maybe we could ask the worthy projects what it is that they need. Do they ONLY need money? To give money is the easiest, sure, just type in the card number et voila! done. Or not even that. And to receive money is also easy sure. But often the projects would need actual help of experts, and if they get it for free then they don't need money for that. Or they might need a meeting room occasionally, and if they get it for free, they don't need money for that.

I also understand, though, that each of us has a vision which we will defend and want to keep as it is, and if your vision is to simply set up the Open Collective account, and then decide where to put the received funds, then OK. I would probably contribute mainly to projects providing nature based solutions - actual projects that get their hands dirty. There is place for all of us on this planet and for all our visions.

Thanks for all the positive comments and feedback! I agree, there's no doubt a lot of unused resources in our communities... we could all do with more Libraries of things, and more sharing in general... but this idea is aimed at providing finances to an Organisation or Project which needs funds, OR finding other ways to invest our funds which will benefit the future.

For example, maybe we think https://gravitricity.com/ is an important part of a regenerative future (not that we can invest in that yet, but you get the idea) or maybe we think paying a tech co-op, like https://hypha.coop/, (who just integrated Keycloak to provide SSO for meet.coop) to build us a Single Sign On system between Nextcloud, Meet.coop and a Mutual Credit wallet would be a good use of funds - and provide us with a very beta version of PLANET, which we could use and experiment with whilst we raise more funds...

The idea being that whichever projects or organisations the funders put forward would be debated (giving them exposure in the process) and one of them would get funded (giving it a powerful boost), via the wisdom of the crowd...

The big question is whether £10k is too ambitious to kick us off...? It would be a shame if it took too long to raise the funds and interest waned... but any less than £5k might be a bit meaningless... although, as we proved with the Murmurations bounty you can do quite a lot with $1000 if you try!

What do you all think?

To me, on top of the list is workplace democracy (worker coops) - the complex problems of our economy can only be resolved when billions get engaged in meaningful thinking and actions. The root cause is the quasi-military-style command economy - be it called Socialist or Capitalist, it doesn't matter. So I would support funding to promote worker coops 😄

Great :D

• To get a better idea of what might be possible, you'll need to know about the level of sunlight-per-day, the humidity, the height-above-sea-level for both your land, and the surrounding land, the water-rights attached to the land, the range of wind-speeds in that area.

• All of the data required by wind-turbine makers and farmers, so that you can sustainably generate a surplus of energy from that land.

• Have you come across Open-Source Ecology?

https://www.opensourceecology.org/

With the tooling & workshops they've designed, anyone can build a workshop to build the rest of the tools needed to thrive. :D

• The Solar Concentrator mentioned above, was designed by OSEFrance, one of the French branches of OSE.

Building a Jamaican branch would be feasible, but most of their technologies are aimed at USA-size farms, where a small farm is ~200 acres.

With the amount of land that you have, it would more effective to join up with the other local farmers and set up a workshop co-operative, doing group-buys of the materials, and sharing the making and use of the infrastructure you all build.

• It would also be good to get in touch with the engineering department of the local universities, and technical colleges, as they will always be interested in students getting practical experience form working on local projects.

OSE also run regular Distributed-Build Workshops, which would give another approach towards practical events, :D

https://www.opensourceecology.org/workshops-and-programs/

Hi Billy,

The land is sloping facing South, just outside Morant Bay, Jamaica. Of course I am interested in incremental growth in the size of the outlay and also would love to take interest from potential investors.

Greg