crowdfunding

At age 18, Kenyan students take a nationally-standardized test, the results of which determine not only their eligibility for university education, but also the school they will attend as well as their area of concentration. This transition is associated with a lot of stress and depression, since students believe that their entire future relies on filtering sequentially through the formal education system. This doesn't have to be the case.

Our non-profit organization, Tunapanda (Swahili for "we are planting"), believes that due to the high rates of growth projected in ICT, technologically savvy individuals will be in high demand regardless of whether or not they are in possession of an advanced degree. We want to provide a means of technology learning that is both useful and accessible. And, we believe that open source holds the key to making this a reality.

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What excites me about ZWheelz is the potential to improve our education system, environment, energy independence, and economy—all with what I like to call, one "EZ" project.

It all began when I built a plane from a kit, then saw the documentary, Who Killed The Electric Car?, and decided to build an electric car. Turns out, it functioned really well, and I began wondering: "Why aren't there more electric vehicles on the road?"

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When talking about open source, many people's first thought is the GNU General Public License (GPL). While the software world has been revolutionised by GPL, the hardware world has seen little change. 

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Black Friday first spread to Cyber Monday, then Grey Thursday. Now the week-long spending frenzy has turned charitable with Giving Tuesday.

New York’s 92nd Street Y teamed up with the United Nations Foundation to gather a growing group of companies and non-profits "to create a national day of giving at the start of the annual holiday season [and to] celebrate and encourage charitable activities that support nonprofit organizations." » Read more

Are you an academic, scientist, health policy junkie... or just a person who goes to see your doctor every now and then? Well, listen up: a new project by Fred Trotter and Not Only Development was recently granted protection under the Freedom of Information Act and met it's crowdfunding effort on MedStartr to move ahead with plans to generate an open data set that promises to alter the healthcare landscape and have drastic implications on how we navigate it.

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Remember when we told you about MediaGoblin, the open source media publishing system? Now they're building higher and higher, and they're looking for help.

As they write on the campaign page: » Read more

MedStartr is a new way to fund healthcare initiatives—think Kickstarter for doctors, patients, and what ails them. It's headed up by Mike Pence and Alex Fair, two guys of different backgrounds and expertise who've come together to share the same dream and passion for helping those in physical need.

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Last month, this site featured an article about the startup I work for, Unglue.it. Briefly, we think more books should be available to the world under Creative Commons licenses, and we think authors and publishers should be paid for their work. We're doing this through a crowdfunding model: raise enough money up front to make it worthwhile, and there's no reason for authors and publishers not to make their books freely available to all. Of course, any innovative model inspires many questions, but the most common questions we get have been about open culture—from widely differing perspectives. Opensource.com has asked me to share some of what we've learned since Unglue.it completed its first successful campaign. » Read more