Patricia Ilin and Dimitris Platis
Insights into the trilateral relationship of crowdfunding campaigns, open source and communities
Crowdfunding campaigns enable individuals to bring their ideas to production by appealing directly to the end-market and the global community. A number of these projects are open source, seemingly, counteracting the funding process.
We interviewed founders, developers and managers of 13 crowdfunding initiatives involving open source products to determine how communities, crowdfunding campaigns and open source are associated.
Our findings verified the existence of common characteristics among the cases, the emergence of a family-like relationship between the organizers and the community, as well as the community perceived as a success factor. We suggest that the development of certain niche products inherently leads to the adoption of open source as a licensing model and crowdfunding as the capital gathering process.
Patricia is a MSc student in the Digital Leadership program of Gothenburg University. She has a keen interest in emerging technologies, startups and novel ways of funding niche products. When she is not busy with her studies she volunteers in Food2Change to fight food waste from grocery stores as well as DataTjej to attract more women into IT.
Dimitris is a software engineer at Aptiv in Gothenburg. During the day he is working on bringing Android to the automotive industry. In the evenings, he develops open source software and hardware projects that he likes to blog about. He is enthused about robotics, IoT, autonomous driving and DIY gadgets.