background preloader

Democratic upgrade

Facebook Twitter

ROAR Magazine. Top 40 Platforms for Crowdfunding Social Change |  REconomy. This post is a guest blog by Josef Davies-Coates and it originally appeared on the P2P Foundation blog. Crowdfunding is a new word for an old idea. The Oxford English dictionary defines it as “the practice of funding a project or venture by raising many small amounts of money from a large number of people, typically via the Internet”.

Crowdfunding’s poster child, Kickstarter, launched in April 2009. It wasn’t the first online crowdfunding platform (ArtistShare launched in 2003), but it was the first to become widely known and scale. In just 3 and a half years Kickstarter has helped over 32,000 projects raise a total of over $350 million. But Kickstrater is now just one of over 450 crowdfunding platforms worldwide. In 2011, these platforms together raised almost $1.5 billion and successfully funded more than one million campaigns. Source: Crowdfunding Industry Report So, crowdfunding is big and growing fast. An example of particular interest to P2P Foundation readers might web | facebook web. Sociétal... Finland is about to start using crowdsourcing to create new laws — European technology news. World We Want 2015. Category:Politics by issue. New Politics... Votez Nul !... Ben Leo: It's Time to Ask the World's Poor What They Really Want.

The U.N. -led process for determining the next round of global development goals is officially underway. Politicians, technocrats, and bureaucrats have been effectively deputized to determine what should build upon and replace the existing Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which have a rapidly approaching deadline in 2015. The development community is planning a flurry of conferences, meetings, and consultations in at least 50 developing countries over the next six months.

This process will include country and thematic consultations, a high-level panel of eminent persons making recommendations, and a web-based platform to solicit views from the general public. Simply put, these high-stakes discussions will set the development agenda for a generation and will likely influence how hundreds of billions of dollars are spent by both developing country and donor governments.

But something is missing: the views of the world's poorest citizens. So, what does the existing data tell us? Observatoire des inégalités. Organisations et mouvements du ParalleliB.