Flouzo - Community-driven donation campaigns
Using our experience on the Ryzom.org campaign, we want to foster the creation and setup of community-driven online donation campaigns.
Such campaigns have been around for a long time, and numerous examples have proved they can be a good alternative way of financing projects, especially when such projects do not fit the profile business angels or banks want to see.
With Flouzo, we want to create a plateform where anyone with a good idea can setup an online donation campaign. We will provide - under a Free Software license - all the tools that we needed or dreamed of when we had to run such campaigns : certification, payment methods, communication tools, money meter, etc.
And, who knows, perhaps one day we will prove wrong the saying: "money goes to money".
Mar
14
Project news
Flouzo Book & Use cases
by Xavier Antoviaque
We are currently working on the use cases for the beta version of Flouzo. The work is about 50% done, but there is already more than 30 pages, and it is starting to give a good feeling of what it will look like once it has been implemented.
I have thus added an extension to the wiki, to generate two books based on the latest changes on the wiki:
Just for fun, here is a mindmap that helped refining the relationship between users, campaigns and organizations in Flouzo:
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Feb
13
Donation campaigns
Donations, A Business Model, Really? Wikipedia's Example
by Trevas Walker
If you talked to most business experts about garnering capital through donations they would probably laugh in your face. Of course there are always colleges, and other non-profit organizations who are run mostly through donations. Swarthmore college in Phoenix, for example, finished their seven year fund raising campaign (on Dec 31, 2006) with over $245 million in donations. Start quoting numbers like that to those same “experts”, and I bet you would get their attention.
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Nov
15
Project news
First campaign: Iliad & Freebox
by Xavier Antoviaque
The first campaign can be found at : freebox.flouzo.net:
Several free software writers have called Iliad, one of the main telecom companies in France, to respect their work, and a judicial proceeding has begun to demand the respect of their licence. This action follows repeated refusals of Iliad to publish the source code of the Free Software included in their Freebox. Although the writers appreciate “the innovative contributions that Iliad has made in the telecommunication industry, along its historical inclination toward Free Software”, they are concerned about the reasons that may have led Iliad to this philosophical swing.
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Aug
6
Project news
A few steps away from launch...
by Xavier Antoviaque
Almost there! :-) The company statutes (in French) are ready and have been signed by all founding members, we are still gathering a few remaining items before being able to hand them over to the French admdinistration. The contract with Neuf Cegetel for EasyNeuf is going well, it should be enough to give Flouzo enough founds to begin its activity - and I investigate other opportunities. The work load becoming quite heavy, we are looking for a community coordinator; the job offer is in French, but if you know enough French to be able to understand it, you may apply - international profiles could fit the job.
Also, we are working on the first campaign : Loic is looking for founds to develop a Free Software alternative to Google Reader. In the meantime, Ayo is working on the design of the website, so soon it should be very nice looking. :)
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Jun
19
Project news
Concrete stuff?
by Xavier Antoviaque
The project matured the last few weeks. Loïc Dachary joined to take care of development, and we have worked a lot on the Use cases of the future website. They are of course open to comments...
The ethical comitee is being finalised, this should be done within the week. In the meantime, the comapny statues are being written (I'll add them to the wiki when the lawyer is finished), and a huge pile of paper is being prepared for our lovely French administration.
I've also started working on several contracts to get some money for the project, as we have to pay the lawyer, the development, the servers, the limo... The project which is taking me the most time is for Neuf Cegetel, a French ISP, on the EasyGate project - btw, it is a quite nice Free Software project, which won the French FS "Lutece d'Or" award, as a special choice from the jury.
You can find other details in the brand new wiki. And if anything is unclear or weird, the forum (which is new, too), is there for you.
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