I have contributed to a variety of charities including Kiva, Medicine Sans Frontiers, and Habitat for Humanity. Here we have the next generation of charity or "crowdsourcing" creativity.
Meet Kickstarter. What is Kickstarter you may ask:
Kickstarter is the world's largest funding platform for creative projects. Every week, tens of thousands of amazing people pledge millions of dollars to projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields.
A new form of commerce and patronage. This is not about investment or lending. Project creators keep 100% ownership and control over their work. Instead, they offer products and experiences that are unique to each project.
Artists often have to give up control of their work in order to get financing for their project. Most consider it the messy part of the creative process. Now we have a chance to support the arts in all its forms directly.
Just this week funding rolled in for the new game, "Double Fine Adventure."
We did it! 100% funded in just over eight hours. You people are amazing! But it's not over yet. The number keeps going up and now the question is just how much news do we want to make with this? We're getting a lot of attention already and it seems like this little project could have an impact beyond itself.
All money raised will go to make the game and documentary better. Additional money means it can appear on more platforms, be translated into more languages, have more music and voice, and an original soundtrack for the documentary, and more!
Your backing and comments have been truly inspiring to me and the team, so on behalf of Double Fine and 2 Player Productions I want to say THANK YOU!!!
I can't wait to see where this thing can go!
What happened is this game went to Kickstarter asking for $400,000 in development costs and within 8 hours they were 100 percent funded. As of now there are 28,599 backers pledging a million dollars toward this project.
So why am I talking about an obscure geek project? Because there is another worthy project that hasn't been fully funded:
Call Me Kuchu
Specifically:
Ten days ago we were told that CALL ME KUCHU, our documentary film about the first openly gay man in Uganda, David Kato, has been invited to have its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival, on Saturday February 11th. We’ve been working on this project for more than two years, and now we need YOUR support to help us raise some last minute funds to finish this important film and to bring one of the Ugandan LGBT activists featured in it to Berlin for the premiere. This will kick off our outreach campaign, and enable a member of the kuchu community to engage directly with the audience at the premiere - and to see the film on the big screen! Take a look at our video above. If you’re interested in what you see, then please read on...
This project is currently at $7,973 of the $10,000 needed. I am not pushing anyone to contribute, but I believe this is a worthy cause and funding the arts is just as important as funding the sciences if we are to advance and thrive as a culture.
Generally I don't get a big audience for my diaries and I am quite okay with that, but please consider sharing.