We need tech funding without venture capital

Speaker 0 0:00 – 0:50

So this is the big tech aligning with authoritarian political forces, not only in The US, of course. It's not necessary that we have just another Instagram. We can have a small version of that for our community and curate our media. We cannot think that some of us will be millionaires and the rest of us will be poor. That's not. That's not right. It's not working. And they have this crowdfunding methodology. They call it a Trojan horse for social emancipation. We wanna see open source and collective ownership models like cooperativism, for example. All the projects that wanna work on that, we invite them to to present their crowdfunding campaign. And as Citi, we double that. And that's really powerful because the Citi wants to see local initiatives that are transformative. Right?

Speaker 1 0:52 – 1:42

Hi, everyone. You're listening to All Models Are Wrong. I'm your host, Joshua Davila, and I'm here at dWebCamp twenty twenty six in Berlin or just outside Berlin in Altehulle in Brandenburg. And today, I'm speaking to Wouter Tebbenz, the founder of Free Knowledge Institute and many more things. We're going to explore his lore. What's really great about being at DWebCamp is that there's so many people here with such a deep history and have, contributed to the decentralized web space in a way that, should be known more about. So, Wouter, I kinda wanted to, speak to you first to start off. If... Maybe if you can introduce yourself a little bit, give us a little bit more of your lore, and then we can get into some of the some of the cool stuff that you've been building over the past twenty years.

Speaker 0 1:43 – 3:59

Thank you, Josh. Really nice to be here, at the camp and with you in this interview. Yeah. Like, I've been working, with people at the area of, digital autonomy, basically. How can we, gain more, digital autonomy with people? How can we re... Reclaim and rebuild the Internet built on social and public values? So, yeah, it was, like, I think six months ago that we found out that, the the webcam would be coming to, Berlin. And then, we were meeting in Amsterdam at the Internet Archive Europe offices there, doing a cocreation session for... About the Democratic Tech Fund, which we'll be talking about later. And there we said, hey. Can we not get together with our communities at the d webcam and connect with the wider decentralized web and see how we can shape that transition socially, not only technologically. So can you maybe give us, like, why why DWebcamp today? What what brings you here? Yeah. I think we are in a very alarming situation. Right? There, we... We've been building the Internet with so many people for such a long time, and we see that it's, like, completely, almost completely centralized in the hands of a few large corporations. The... We call them GAFAM. Now we can call them MAGA with double m. Right? They have Microsoft, Apple, Google, and, Amazon. And, yeah, I Didn't realize that. That's the one. Right? And, mister Trump wears that on his head without the first m, but they are aligned. Right? So this is the big tech aligning with authoritarian political forces, not only in The US, of course. Right. Alright. So that's really worrying, and they're accelerating the process towards, wow, collapsing planet and people all over the place for just private profits and maximizing their power. Mhmm. So we do have to do something, really increase our ambition to bring the web to much more people.

Speaker 1 4:00 – 4:24

Probably a lot of the listeners agree with this, assessment of the current tech landscape. I think the question is, what does the distributed web, what does DWeb bring that is different than, like, what big tech is providing us? Like, what what happened that big tech did that dWeb is meant to reverse the trends of,

Speaker 0 4:25 – 5:31

of authoritarianism that we have right now? Yeah. Well, if we look at, like, many people nowadays know that we have lost sovereignty, in the digital realm, and some people know about the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Right? That was, like, a big trigger last year for people to understand, at least at the political level, that we have to do something about that. But also just living inside social networks from the big tech social networks, people cannot really express themselves freely. Right? Because they're, they know that they are surveilled. So, yeah, Mark Zuckerberg told us about that. Like, the end of privacy was there years ago, and we don't think that that is the way. We can do that differently. But... So these communities, there are many vulnerable communities who are being deplatformed and harassed at the social networks. And, yeah, that's like the queer communities, the feminist communities. The... So the the people of color, they they Palestinian journalists. Suffering this every day.

Speaker 1 5:32 – 5:45

Yep. What do you think DWeb brings that is that is different than this? Like, how does... What what does it change to change the affordances? I think, like, for some people, I imagine it's difficult to imagine what is the alternative.

Speaker 0 5:45 – 7:23

Yeah. I think that's that's really the core thing. So maybe here we know that we have basically everything to rebuild the web under... On our terms. We're doing that, but we are a small group. Right? If you look at it, at large. So to give the rest of the world this idea that it is possible, that we have actually the tools and that are... Many people are doing this. And that is, I think, the first step to not only raise awareness for how things are going wrong, but raise awareness and mobilize people for how we are doing things very well. There are so many stories of people building their own connected community spaces, and we're seeing some of that here. People building the Internet on their term... Terms, like with cooperative ownership, with collective ownership models. There are so many. There are people who are building social networks for smaller communities and then connect to other like minded communities. Not... It's not necessary that we have just another Instagram. We can have a small version of that for our community and curate our media, like the Newsmass Foundation, for example, is doing with with communities or the Bonfire community is doing for, I don't know, the the the Totnes, transition town in The UK, for example, or the Jacobin, Germany news, media. Right? The community is involved in creating the news. And then they're connecting to the larger Fediverse, which is our decentralized social network. Mhmm. Wow. We are maybe small, but we are more than 50,000,000 people there.

Speaker 1 7:25 – 8:05

So, I guess, to you, a distributed web is one where we are able to change the relationship and probably the business models around, the use of technology, that is very different than the centralized versions that we're used to with big tech. And dWebCamp is kind of the place... Is the shelling point where everyone is coming, meeting together, sharing what they're doing, sharing the progress that they've made, and looking for collaborations to expand out this, you know, technological alternative that maybe at the moment is not like, doesn't have the distribution surely that Google has, but we're trying to get there.

Speaker 0 8:06 – 9:58

Well, yes and no. I mean, there are many places. There... This is not going on only at DWeb. Sure. Let me say that also at DWeb, I... We see a lot of, hardcore technology people who are building really good stuff, but they are thinking primarily at your tech. And I think that's really one of the problems that we have been encountering for decades. And it's not building open source tech and then the users will come. Right? It is starting with the real communities, the users, and what is their needs. And then from there, build... Take the tools that we already have. We don't have to reinvent so many wheels. Please. Look around, what we already have and then shape your own connected spaces or your clouds or your communication infrastructure. And that is going on. Like, in Germany, we have the the the DI days, the digital independence days. Right? And then every first Sunday of the month in January, people are learning about what can we do this month to, in... Become a little bit more autonomous in the digital realm. And that's going on in many places, like in Spain, in The Netherlands. In so many places, we have these kind of of networks. It's... Yeah. It's... I think we need to start more thinking with the communities and then, think also of the economics about that because it cannot be just a voluntary exercise. And that's really something that I think is really critical. If you wanna grow big, we have to provide an alternative to the venture capital based startup scene. Mhmm. It's not it's not Totally. That's not the future. We cannot think that some of us will be millionaires and the rest of us will be poor. That's not that's not Right. Working. Right. Sure. Sure.

Speaker 1 9:59 – 10:05

I mean, maybe this is a good time to transition to... If you could share about the Democratic Tech Fund and how you're trying to make an alternative.

Speaker 0 10:06 – 15:08

Yeah. So, that... I think that's really interesting where, the founding, partners is our four foundations. I'm with the Free Knowledge Institute in, based in Amsterdam. We're working, through Europe. We've been working on freeness and liberation, liberatory tech. We have the commons network from Amsterdam who's been working on commons and digital commons for many years. We have WACH FutureLab, also in Amsterdam, working on open tech. And we have the Goteo, the Platonic Foundation in Spain. And so let me first introduce them because they have a very interesting model. It has been, explained here by Olivier. They're one of the founders, and they have this, crowdfunding methodology. They call it, like, a Trojan horse for social emancipation. So if you have a community, you wanna build up, this transition towards digital autonomy, you can use crowdfunding like they've been doing with Goteo for the last twenty five... Was... For the last fifteen years, they've been mobilizing 25... More than €25,000,000 from people making a small donation to a cause, to a collective project, social protest, vulnerable communities, climate change projects that wanna tell about that, or people denouncing corrupt politicians, and they brought, like, these politicians to jail. Thanks to, amongst others, Goetheo. And that is really amazing. And we think that is, like, one of the building blocks. Right? We, to make this change, crowdfunding is really good tool because then you can... You force yourself to sell your project, communicate, connect with your community, the wider community. And then in the process, build up some donations, some funding for realizing your project. But then still, it's a challenge. Right? Because we know if you have done crowdfunding, that's not... It's not easy. Yeah. So it's work. Right? Yeah. But then comes in the MET funding, what they have also been, doing together with cities like Barcelona, for example. So that's like this this idea to to run a a program where the city says, well, we wanna see open source and collective ownership models like cooperativism, for example. All the projects that wanna work on that, we invite them to present their crowdfunding campaign. And at Citi, we double that. And that's really powerful because the city wants to see local initiatives that are transformative. Right? Many cities are firsthand, experiencing how their citizens are suffering this new form of capitalism. Right? This tech hyper capitalism that we're suffering. And then to help promote these alternatives, this kind of experience with Goetheo works, and that's what we what we're building in the Democratic Tech Fund, to take these communities, these community projects, help them make the step. And that's what we wanna focus on, with communities, local communities in different places. We focus first on Europe, but this can be wider international effort to work with these communities that wanna make the step and reclaim and rebuild their, digital autonomy to go away from the big tech, GAFA, MAGA, alliance and to, to do that in a way that is sustainable, that you're not depending on just a voluntary hacker role. Someday, maybe burn out. No. A team of tech people, community organizers, campaigners, people who work on the caring and the governance of such a community. And that that requires time. And that's time that some can be paid for with livelihood work, and some can be voluntary love work, like our friends at the Disco Cope say. Right? These are like combining love work, paid... Voluntary work, and livelihood work. So then you need some resources to mobilize that, and we think that we can do that better from the bottom up than just depend on, government funding. We can combine with government funding, but we don't wanna just depend on the European Commission setting up a sovereign tech fund, which is really good. Let's do that. But we also think that we need this, bottom up, make sure that we connect to the real needs of the people. And it cannot be, corrupted by some politicians who don't get the idea and that we just need to do WhatsApp, SAP, and Siemens, can do, big tech on the European version. Right? Like, that sovereign tax, European Silicon Valley, is that? I don't think so.

Speaker 1 15:09 – 16:33

Right. So if I understand correctly, Democratic Tech Fund is a coalition of various projects and groups that are working in the space to build... To create some sort of alternative funding avenues Yeah. For democratic technology, maybe perhaps, with a small, base in Europe at the moment. And I think what I like is that it's a multi pronged approach approach. Right? I mean, one one, kind of side of of of the debate could say, like, no. The state should just fund alternatives. But I think, you know, there is there is a lot of... There is, you know, a lot of state funding that maybe doesn't go to the right people, but, there are also certain incentives within that funding structure that doesn't necessarily always work. And we also don't want to go towards, we can't build this with venture capital. And so the... We need to create a space for a third way, and that effectively means engaging civil society as you as you... As I like to put it one way or another, to use... To to play a space in the middle, where there's maybe a little bit more creativity, a little bit more freedom outside of the control of, corporations or this... Or venture capitalists for the state.

Speaker 0 16:34 – 20:00

Yeah. Let me say that I'm not a fundamentalist against venture capital. Sure. There can be venture capital, like, that is patient capital or non extractive capital. There are people working on these kind of things, and that's good. But we also have to recognize that the mainstream venture capital movement is like a way to take a stake in a startup that might one day get the $1,000,000,000, mark, the next unicorn. Yeah. And then the founders might exit and the venture capital sells it off to the big tech. That's what... That's... It's not that Google has been much more innovate... Innovative after building an interesting search engine in the nineties. Right? Then they were just buying it, and it's the same what Facebook has done. Right? So we need to be careful with the venture capital. And I think still there are people believing that venture capital is away. But, yeah, we also see that we have this, popular power that can be built with cooperativism, building social solidarity economy structures in the twenty first century. Right? We have our friends here from PlatformCope Germany, for example, who who are doing that. And we we have many interesting examples. Oh, and and and taking us to the now, like, at the European Commission, there's good stuff going on. And there... At the European member states level, there's this really interesting network building up now. They had, last year, they set up this digital commons for the EDIC. You you know that one? I think I've heard of it. Yeah. But I don't know what you're saying. This was founded by Germany, France, and The Netherlands. And then Italy and Germany joined to build up, well, state capacity for... Together with with civil society, but especially dominated by the member states. And then... And, like, the French have been doing really interesting It's like a... An an an online, collaborative, work environment, alternative to drive in teams. And that is something that is built by... With government funding all in open source to help civil servants. But then in France, there is this cope, and they are setting up as lasuite.coop. We interviewed them last month, and they wanna be replicated. Can you imagine that every region in Europe and beyond can have their own cooperative platform, which is offering, an an avenue to to help people, get digital autonomy away from Google and Microsoft. Mhmm. And I believe that is more powerful than just say, okay. We get a, a limited company who provides that service to you because it's a social process. We need a lot of collective intelligence. So just depending on a limited company who could provide open source, they're also there. We need them. But we also need this civil society capacity building, and I think that's really powerful. So Yeah. Yeah. With the democratic tech firm, we want to accompany these kind of projects Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To build, like, a sustainable business model around these kind of projects and help them get the funding. Yeah. I think it's... I mean, yeah. Just to to add on to what you're saying, I think it's interesting that

Speaker 1 20:01 – 20:47

there... I mean, now it's become fairly obvious to Europe that something needs to change within the technological sphere. Geopolitic... Just for, like, hard geopolitical reasons right now, the the the US government is just not a stable ally to have. I'd argue it probably has not been a stable ally for longer, and they should have done something earlier. But, you know, we get there when we can. And, so now it's it's become a priority for European governments to find and fund alternatives because they realize all their infrastructure is American all of a sudden. You know, technology is geopolitics by other means is what they've realized at this point, I think, at least to some degree, somehow. Yeah. It's a power game at the end. And the European

Speaker 0 20:48 – 21:12

Union is definitely aware of that. But I would say that the high level politicians are not really, well, aligned with building up social power, really. So they Right. That's so weird. Like, building up Weird contradiction. Yeah. There's a contradiction. So they're building up maybe

Speaker 1 21:14 – 21:25

corporate power in Europe, or they hope to do that. Which I think is a... I mean, that's just not gonna... I don't I don't think you're gonna make, like Yeah. Google, but Europe. You know? Like, I... That's not gonna... I don't think that's gonna happen.

Speaker 0 21:26 – 21:38

And what is the time frame? I mean Yeah. And maybe then in ten years, we have a European Google. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. I don't know. And then still, what... How does that will save us against the authoritarian

Speaker 1 21:38 – 22:17

stack that they are building up? Yeah. Yeah. Nice website, though. Authoritarian stack. Did you check it out? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I... Yeah. I I maybe know some of the people working on it. Yeah. But... So I kinda wanna go back to... I believe maybe the nineties or two thousands, you started the Free Knowledge Institute. I'm curious to hear more about this term free knowledge because it feels like a term of its time, perhaps, and it's not... I, like, I assume this is... You meant something similar, but maybe different than what we would call open source today.

Speaker 0 22:17 – 22:50

Yeah. So let let me then start. I was trained as an engineer, but I was really intrigued by the Internet in the nineties. And, yeah, this corporate, world was not really my world. So I I decided I would start a Internet company just when the .com bubble burst in 2001. Darn bad timing. Yeah. Good. Good timing, actually. Because then it was, like, people are not, aware of how they could manage their own website. You had these $1,000,000, content management systems.

Speaker 1 22:51 – 22:54

Everyone everyone made a website but didn't know how to run it.

Speaker 0 22:54 – 27:23

So... Yeah. So we started making open source run, websites. I was, like, really intrigued how these open source communities worked. Right? So, our customers were, like, enjoying for really little money to get powerful tooling. They just had to pay a good tariff, hourly tariff to us, and then they had the tools that could self man... They could self manage their their stuff. So that was cool. And then I found out that there was this whole free software movement behind it actually from the seventies onwards, and it was about free software as in freedom. And, we found it very powerful. Free as in freedom, the the four freedoms to use... Well, we know that here. But then that was a liberatory movement. Right? And I think that is still why we then started talking more about free free Libre Mhmm. And open source because we wanted to keep those movements together. Yeah. But we said, well, this is beyond the software. This is... Can be applied to every domain of knowledge. Right? Open access in science, open educational resources, but there are free and open hardware... Open source hardware. All that stuff was then, evolving in the beginning of this century. Mhmm. And so that's why we said, it was then two thousand six, two thousand seven when we started up the the the free knowledge institute in Amsterdam. And, yeah, we have been doing projects sometimes funded by the European Commission or others and sometimes not funded. Yeah. And that was, like, you know, up and downs. And, and it was like... Yeah. I was living between Amsterdam and Barcelona. My partner is from Barcelona. So, we we were working. Also, after the occupy movements, the fifty May movement in in Barcelona, we said, hey. This is about commons. And that is actually where this becoming really interesting because that's a combination of open source and commons, this old tradition, how you can manage shared resources by a community. And this may be the oldest human tradition. And we said then in 2011, in the back of the fifty May movement, we started this school of the commons in Barcelona. Learning from different social movements, what can we do with commons. And I was like... I was, like, exploring, how can we do, an industrial society that is built on open source hardware and, the... Like the gen, what was that? The global village construct... Construction set. You might know these guys? I'm not sure. That's, like, fifteen years ago. It's not so, known anymore. But it was the open source ecology that was at those times. But it was also, like, people building cooperative housing movement. Yeah. And that's, like, combining all these different movements, that was really what we saw that would be transformative. Mhmm. And in Barcelona, it was like this political party dance putting up, the Barcelona in in commons... In Komun. They won the elections in the city. And, yeah, around that, we help them think about how can we do sharing economy, building commons, like this commons cooperative sharing economy, collaborative economy, which was not the Airbnb. So the city, like, stopped Airbnb. Or... No. They limited them and gave them fines. And, you know, Uber, it was kept out of the city of Barcelona. We were then invited, through a participatory process to run, like, an incubation program built on a model that we've been developing called the five pillar model for common sustainability, which is on our website, Free Knowledge Institute. Sure. And then, we help, like, cooperative startups or collectively organized open source, startups who would, build for becoming good. And that was, yeah, was transformative experience for many people. Mhmm. Yeah. We did that four years with, like, 60 or so projects. Mhmm. Some of them are still alive.

Speaker 1 27:24 – 29:10

Nice. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things that is, you know, if people listening get the chance to go to Barcelona, there is, a a thriving cooperative ecosystem in the city. And if you know where to look, you can find it, and you can kinda see, you can see the successes. I mean, you go into... I've been some cooperatively owned, buildings and, like, co working spaces. And, I mean, you wouldn't necessarily know just by looking at it or going in that it is per se. You could tell it's like a thriving a thriving ecosystem where people are doing real things together, and, you know, doing production together in a way that, I think for some people who've never had the experience of being in a cooperative organization or in a more flat, organization would think is... That's maybe possible. But this happened because there was a social movement behind it, and support from the municipality, I I suppose that, like, kind of helped build this up. And and Catalonia generally has has this history of, of the cooperative movement, I guess. So free knowledge, I guess, was this, like, I I guess what I'm hearing from you is, like Right. It was this first term that, of people trying to make sense of an alternative with digital systems that also coincided with this, I mean, I guess, the financial crisis in Spain and the social movement, Emma Quince, that was going on there and kind of this then created this, primordial soup of of different people working on what they realized were very similar ideas and things maybe in their particular domain and was able to now produce, at least some change in in in Catalonia.

Speaker 0 29:12 – 30:05

Yeah. Absolutely. But I think there are many good things going on in many cities. In Berlin, in Amsterdam. I mean, people are working on this combination of, well, cooperative collective governance and how can we reclaim and rebuild popular power and an economy that works for the people and is not extractive. And at least for local first, like, we have here. And when we're talking about AI, there's lots of opportunities to do good stuff. Right? But the thing is, how can we find out about it? What's going on in all these other place? I always think that the most interesting things are generally happening in other places because the world is much larger than your own local place. So how can we connect between all these places? And I think that's really good what you are doing with, these interviews, like, showing what's going on. I'm producing free knowledge.

Speaker 1 30:05 – 31:16

Free knowledge right here. Really? Well well well well, Josh. But I guess that... Yeah. This this term free knowledge, I think is, like, it feels very much of its time, like, early in... Like, the... You know, like, when Wikipedia came out, I remember my dad was, like, immediately addicted to Wikipedia because I think for him, it was, like, such a, like, crazy how easily you could find all this information versus having to go through, you know, the encyclopedia physically. Now you can just kinda click through and you have access to information, you know, at your fingertips without having this this idea of free knowledge now is, like, taken for granted Yeah. Amongst maybe millennials and and Gen z because you can... I mean, we kinda grew up on it a little bit and kind of... We already we already know. We have too much information. We have too much free knowledge probably available to us to some degree. But, I also wanted to talk to you about, some of the projects that you built. You built quite a lot of, applications and infrastructure for I understand, like, digital, applications like meet.coop. I'm definitely forgetting some of the other ones. The Commons Cloud, for example. Yeah.

Speaker 0 31:17 – 31:19

I was part of several cooperatives.

Speaker 1 31:20 – 31:37

So, like, in this in this experience of building technology from a cooperative framework, do you have any, like, tips and tricks on how to do that, what to expect that's different than maybe in a corporate environment, and what are some, like, pitfalls to avoid in in this context?

Speaker 0 31:38 – 34:14

Yeah. That's really an interesting question, Josh. Yeah. Well, for example, I was part of this, we were part of this cooperative as a family, actually. In Spain, we had... For a long time, we had so much sun, but the the sun was not captured into renewable energy. So, like, the ministers of industry in, who would govern, the... And regulate the electrical network were doing that at the interest of big organizations, big, companies. Right? So there was this group of people in Girona, in, in Catalonia who want to set up a cooperative called Som Energy. Som... We are energy. And actually inspired by experiences in, Greenpeace Energy in Germany, I think, who had, by the time, already 100,000 members, if I... I'm not mistaken. In any case, this was like a bottom up kind of way that we take we we we take the the social power to, connect the existing energy grid, become a co... An an an energy company as cooperative and have our community produce energy, solar power and wind, and consume it through the network. Right? That was a... The transformative idea. And in that process, we would learn as users and, co owners of that cooperative how bad actually the energy market was work... Working, working against the people in favor of two or three, large energy companies and trying to keep solar energy out of the grid. Right? So I remember that, well, we were, like, going to local general assemblies in our region, with our little baby to to learn from people who were actually working in the energy market, putting up solar power energy. And, we would learn about how that energy market works. And then we... Then it was like, hey. But I wanna put up a solar panel. Yeah. But then the new ministers declared that you have to pay tax for... A special tax for having solar powers on your roof. So we started this, solar rebel kind of, campaign. And we put up solar power panels without paying that tax, without registering, which was obviously also not the right thing to do, but just as a symbol. Right?

Speaker 1 34:16 – 34:16

I forgive

Speaker 0 34:17 – 38:36

you. Oh, thank you. So... But it it was, like, really, interesting as a transformative, experience to learn about that. And and the energy market is definitely not the market where I work in, but I learned about that from... And we are now 100,000 people Wow. As members of that cooperative. That's just one. Right? We have this, telecom, cooperative. So my mobile works, with the Spanish land... Spanish mobile line through them. The fiber optics to our house are serviced by the cooperative. That's, like, 20,000 people, members of that cooperative. It's building up, like, social capacity in that field. So what do we learn from that? Well, it's hard to build that up. I think in the beginning of these years, people that... Especially the driving teams behind that had been in a precarious salary Yeah. Yeah. Situation. Yeah. It's just super calming. As well. I mean, there's like, hey. This is like combining work and activism. And that's what we what we what we did also with the cooperative cloud, the commons cloud. We started that. The idea initially came from the Free Knowledge Institute. We said, hey. We wanna do an alternative to to Google Drive. We cannot set up our own next cloud. We are too small to run that. And by that time, we want to do this well. So why don't we do this with a... An alliance, a little alliance? So we convened 10 organizations, and we said, hey. Can we do this as a cooperative members... Member based service? And then the ball started rolling. Yeah. We can do that, but we also need, like, to self manage our users. If our collective has access to these and these tools, I need to be able to manage my users. So with a tech guy, we developed, we developed, like, a a a graphical user interface to manage users that ten years ago was not existing. Now it... Nowadays, there are many more good tools for that. And then we did a crowd train... A crowdfunding campaign at GoTeo. And in the parallel, we set up this cooperative FemPro Comoons. We do comments. We make comments. So it's not we are energy, but we make comments. We try to be, like, more active, hands on. Another kind of approach to help people build a job inside that that economy. And that went sufficiently well that we could pay a little bit of salary to our small team, precariously. And so the first years, we were working with a group of people to make that happen. Unfortunately, with an alliance of other parties who were also chipping in time, and many were very generously contributing time or little contributions. And, yeah, there's now, like, 2,000 users and more than 100 organizations who are members of that. Like, four, five people are having a part time job maintaining those services. And I think that's one way to do it. Right? It could be an example. I'm not working there anymore. Yeah. You mentioned MeetCope. That's something that during the pandemics we started. We said something similar. We said we we need an alternative to to Zoom. Right? We knew the censorship machine, like, if you would be campaigning, or having meetings in The US with people from Palestine, they would be censored by the universities in the Jewish lobby. That was, like, well, that was, like, terrible. And there were other vulnerable communities being censored. We wanted to have a good open source alternative. We had that, but to run it, you need, like, some money and people to run that. So we said we can do that together. And then instead of doing it with the three cooperatives that needed that, we said, well, we can open it for other members. And, again, we made our life more difficult to invite people in, right, and become members. Right. And it was really cool transformative experience again.

Speaker 1 38:37 – 39:04

Yeah. But also hard. Like Right. Good... Precarious economy. Right. So is part of it that, like, if you're going to do this, you kind of got to accept that you're doing it a little bit the hard way, and probably... Like, my feeling is that if you're going to do this type of cooperative business, you probably need to get to revenue quite quickly, if you want to survive or at least to be able to... Like, a goal should be that you are able to economically support

Speaker 0 39:04 – 39:53

someone to sustain it. Yeah. So I I think the... We did it quite the hard way, with some support from the ecosystem and, like, the city of Barcelona has been helping us with this, commons cloud scope several times. With the democratic tech fund, we try to do make that experience more positive. Right? Where we say, hey. As a community, you wanna do this, but let's... The wider community accompany you and let let us work together that we have the best open source tech as decentralized or disputed that we can get it and work on collective campaigning and crowdfunding and match funding. Do that together so that the team can really have more success

Speaker 1 39:54 – 40:17

in in doing that. This sounds like almost like the, like, the importance of network effects within, like, this... A cooperative context is that, like, you have to... Like, your your distribution is in part reaching out to the existing cooperative network is one thing, or, like, a major part of trying to build out this type of stuff. Yeah. But everybody,

Speaker 0 40:19 – 41:51

nowadays who knows a little bit about the suffering, by big tech and the apocalyptic vision that they are having. It's a good message. So it's like a... It's a it's a very convincing message for people. It's not not hard to convince people that the alternatives are needed. Yeah. The alternatives are needed. We only need to show them that the alternatives are there. Yeah. And it is a little effort to make that into a real life service for those people. So... But then the story is that we can do that and that we have so many cases who have been doing that through goteal.org or in our cities. And the story here to our, audience is that, hey. We're doing that together. So let's make sure that we connect, and let's make sure that, we work together on that. And, why don't we connect and join and become part of the Democratic tech fund? Make sure that it is doing what we need. So become members. Sure. Become members. And Of course. Yeah. You could become, like, an individual member or a collective, organizational member, make a little contribution or a larger contribution, become a... Just a user sharing your path of transitioning, or maybe even become a benefactor, small funder, or an institutional funder if you have more money to give and amplify the impact that we wanna establish together. Mhmm. So, yeah, we're we're there. We were about to set up new programs, to to make this this happen. Cool. And

Speaker 1 41:51 – 41:58

where can people go to keep up with with the Democratic Tech Fund and and what you're building? So the democratictech.fund

Speaker 0 41:59 – 43:09

is our website. Since yesterday, we launched here at the web camp, the new website, and it... We tried to explain a little bit what we're talking about today. You have some stories there about cases that are inspiring, and there is, like, ways that you can join. So... Yeah. Become part of it. Become a member. And together, we build this. So for members, we ask to give a contribution in time or little money, expertise. And, I mean, democratic tech is something that we care for together. It's like the demo... Democracy, that, we would like our countries, to live. It's also something that we do together. Right? Yeah. Unfortunately, it's sometimes hijacked by large interest. But if we do that from the bottom up for the democratic tech, we can do that together. And then that's, I think, the powerful thing. So let's care for for the tech that we need in a democratic way and making it more powerful. So do you know what DTF stands for? Down to fund? Down to fund.

Speaker 1 43:09 – 43:11

The downtrack tech fund.

Speaker 0 43:12 – 43:12

Exactly.

Speaker 1 43:15 – 43:22

Awesome. Great ending. Thank you out to Devons for coming on, and, yeah, looking forward to the rest of the web camp with you. Thank you, Josh.

We need tech funding without venture capital | Wouter Tebbens (DWeb Camp)

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