 So, last but not least, Daniel Pocock is going to talk about fundraising and crowdfunding for free RTC. Thanks, Anisa. So, who has given money to a crowdfunding campaign? Yes? So, okay. Why did you choose that campaign? Would anyone like to share an example? Just grab the microphone from Anisa, who just put your hand up if you can give us an example. Anybody? Any volunteer? I've been giving money to a few open source communities and open collective. Okay. Can you give an example of a community you donated to? Webpack, for example, Babon. Why did you choose that donation? So, I'm one of the co-founders of Open Collective, so we receive it. But also because I think it's important to sustain those open source communities, because otherwise right now they have to work during their free time in the evening, during the weekend, they burn out. So right now there is one person in Berlin working full time for Webpack, for example, paid by the community. It's important that as a community we should be able to work during daytime to sustain the common infrastructure that all the startups that everybody is using will need to create great products. Yeah, excellent. Can someone else give an example of something they donated to? Who else has given money to a campaign recently? Yeah, let's grab the microphone. I donated to Triskell Operating System and KDE. And why did you choose to donate to these projects? Because they are, in my mind, essential for being able to work with free software. You could also choose another operating system or another social manager. But you need to have one. Excellent. Can I ask you another question? How did you discover these crowdfunding campaigns? How did you learn that they were looking for money? Through their own websites. From their websites. Excellent. Can anyone else give me another example? Anybody? Any volunteer? Okay, so we move on. So who has used crowdfunding to raise money for a project? Yep, got one person, Xavier. Anybody else? Okay, if you want to take the microphone. So just tell us again which platform did you raise money with? It was not for a software project. It was for a community process together for the city of Brussels. But that is operating with the ethos of open source. But it's hard. It's hard to raise money. Yes, it takes work. Okay, and did it work? Well, it's an ongoing thing to some extent. But I mean, few lessons is nobody wants to be the first. So at the beginning you need, like on Kickstarter, you need to find the first backers yourself. And really ourselves for it, as family and friends. And then it's about always reaching out, giving updates and telling people what we need to use the money for. Yes, the communication is important. Okay, so who earns a living here as a software developer? Yeah, and who is a developer of communication software? So things like SIP and Jabba. Okay, so do customers ask for features, the customers who pay, like businesses, do they ask for features like federation and peer-to-peer? So who wants to give me an answer? Yeah, does someone want to take the microphone and give me a... Yeah, yeah. So I just want to ask a couple of questions about this. No. No, so they don't ask for these features. Did you ever offer these features to one of the customers? No, unlikely. They come to you and they tell you the things they need? Exactly, they don't care how you achieve this. So they're often looking for the same features they have with a traditional phone system. So they're not thinking ahead to how the phone system is going to work in the future. They're just thinking about how they can recreate the phone systems we have today. That's correct. Yes, but over internet protocol. Okay, so do individuals, like private users of a telephone like ourselves, do we value the same features that those business customers look for? So just think about that for a minute. Who uses more than one service or more than one app for communication? So, yeah. And who has noticed that as one medium, say SMS, gets flooded with publicity material and advertising and messages from businesses, that people start moving to another app or another technology for their personal communication with their friends? Does anybody notice this trend? So once the businesses get into any communication technology, there's a kind of conflict there. Even if people will not say it explicitly, they gradually move to another platform. So there's a bit of a challenge here in the requirements of businesses and the things that businesses will support in crowdfunding and the things that private individuals want and are willing to support. Have you noticed that as time goes by, a lot of services that start without advertising gradually add more and more of it? So Twitter, for example, had very minimal advertising to begin with, but now it's everywhere on the site. Have people noticed that? Now, you know, WhatsApp is offering solutions for businesses to get into WhatsApp. So eventually people will move away from that to something else. The big question is, will they move away from those things onto a free and open source solution or will they just move to another proprietary network? Will they just go from WhatsApp to Telegram or something else? So the question is, Zafir, do you want to take the microphone? Just one note. The phone systems and the SMS are actually a very good example of a federated system. It's not easy to get into that, but it is a federated system and the SMS system is actually slightly newer than the internet. So the traditional phone system is a good example of federation, but it has other serious failings, like there is no TLS encryption in the traditional ISDN-style digital networks. So on the one hand they've become very widespread, but on the other hand they don't have some of the other features of the internet. So that's a really good example. So just with this question of things that individuals want and things that businesses want, so businesses push individuals into other technologies. So if we're talking about a crowdfunding campaign, do we offer things in that campaign that businesses will donate money to and also try to offer things to private individuals at the same time? That's a challenging question. Businesses can donate larger amounts of money, but they will have different goals. They won't necessarily want to donate to a technology where they can't reach the consumers, although then again they might donate to things that are for the common good, like codecs or encryption systems that benefit everybody. So a lot of businesses in financial services are now asking for encryption and it's been insisted upon for anything they do over the internet. So that's something that is in common with end users, but they might not be keen on anonymity. So that doesn't protect you from sales calling and other problems. So is anyone using crowdfunding for projects outside real-time communications? So Xavier, you had... I'm leader of a knee-learning platform, a free software platform, and we've tried crowdfunding before, but actually in retrospect we get less funding than the actual costs of organizing the crowdfunding campaign. So it's not productive, we stop doing that. Okay, so when you say that you had financial costs or time costs or both? Mostly time costs. It's mostly the people working on the project, their time could be better invested in other efforts, again in retrospect, you know, and seeing the results then we could definitely work on something else. Do you see there being possibilities if several projects work together on a campaign that they could collaborate to reduce that burden? I feel that... I'm not sure, but I feel that the issue is mostly that in open source and free software projects we are mostly the people who start the projects are really the opposites of marketing people and that you need to convince people to want to invest in your project and that's very difficult to do for us geeks because initially we're into a less communicative behavior and we tend to underestimate our own work in some respects and so it's very difficult to sell it to others. I'd love to react to that. Yes, I agree, the prime of traditional crowdfunding platforms is that it's a one-off, so you spend a lot of energy to raise money once and then all that energy is gone and so that's why on Open Collective what we've been trying to do is get people to do recurring donations so that at least they keep on going money and then the other problem that is absolutely right, most open source projects are doing what they do because they love coding, the last thing they want to do is what you explained and so that's why what we did is we created this nonprofit, the Open Collective, the Open Source Collective, which is a 51C6 in the US and now we have 460 open source communities on the platform and for example some projects do have more people that are community driven and so for example I think of Sean Larkin doing the Webpack which is a JavaScript bundler, he's been doing an incredible job at getting sponsors for Webpack and so now they're able to pay someone full time to work on this but what's interesting is there are companies like now, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and so on who give money to them but because of that now they're on the platform so they can easily give money to other projects and so those other projects didn't have to do all of the work and so there is kind of a natural network effect that is happening to your question of actually coming together. Okay, I want to give another example of crowdfunding. Anisa, can you grab the... So Anisa is from Open Labs in Albania and they also organize an event, not as big as FOSSTEM but it's the biggest free software conference in the Balkans so it's Oskal and when is Oskal? Well, this edition is 19, 20 of May. So every year what do you have to do to fund Oskal? Well, in the beginning we only were waiting for sponsors and sending a lot of emails to receive sponsorship and now we have our Patreon campaign and we're trying to crowdfund. Okay, so you mentioned Patreon. Yeah. And have you used this before? Well, not me personally but in the hackerspace, yes, everyone uses it. Okay, and what have they used it for? To receive money for the hackerspace, to maintain it. Okay, and how is that being successful? Well, kind of. Okay, it's a start. Yes, it's a start. And how much time do you have to put into the Open Labs Hackerspace Patreon? Well, we have a specific team that is working only with online infrastructure and I think they are putting a lot of effort and a lot of time on it. Okay, so there's a lot of competition there from different projects also looking for funding. So this is another thing, is how do we deal with this competition for attention, the competition for funds? People who give to Open Labs, for example, are they private individuals or businesses? Well, at Patreon, so far we have had individuals giving money for the hackerspace since they have been in our conference or maybe in the hackerspace and it's a place they love and they are connected to it. So at least I think they give money because they like or love or enjoy the place. But for your event? For the event, it's the opposite because we have more sponsors people that get the money that supporters, the ticket, sorry. So these are like companies? Yeah. Yeah, so you've had experience both working with private individuals and with companies in different campaigns. Yes. Yeah. So this is good. So, yeah. We do, actually the contrary, so what we do is we organize events that are for costs. So then you participate, it's not like Open like for them and what we do also, events like for them for our software in particular, but then we organize other more kind of professional events where we do workshops and we do conferences from different use cases of our customers and that is actually something new that we launched two or three years ago and that is transforming itself into a revenue stream. So it's also, I mean, we've been inspired by the Drupal Con conferences because they have like 3,000 visitors every year. We have like a hundred. And they're really, I mean, if you look at the accounts of the Drupal Foundation, I think it is, they have, I think in the income $800,000 a year or something like that. It's a very successful model to finance the project but it's also very specific and I think it is bound to be specific to the kind of project that is there but because they have thousands of developers, professional developers working with Drupal so they have a lot of people interested in knowing the things about the project specifically and they have a lot of people in particular in the US of companies, sorry, in particular in the US trying to find developers to work for them. So that is a very good revenue stream for sponsoring because they have companies that want to promote to be able to have more developers so they're easily putting $10,000 or something like that just to have a boot there. There's all some great examples. Well, we're running out of time so I'm going to wrap things up here but certainly anyone who's developing real-time communications in SIP, XMPP and other projects, if you're interested in looking at this as a fundraising source for your business, feel free to contact me. I'm reaching out to a few projects individually at the moment and looking at whether we can collaborate on a campaign to reduce the overheads to do some of the marketing and publicity together. Is that reduces the amount of time that each individual project has to put in and it can also help us to achieve a larger financial goal overall. So I look forward to speaking to you afterwards. Thank you for coming to FOSSTEM and I hope to see you next time. Thank you very much, Daniel.