W4P, a CHEST Call 3 winner, is the development of a social crowdsourcing platform by Open Knowledge Belgium, iDROPS (a digital innovation agency) and Underlined (a creative and co-design agency).
The concept is for an open source template that “will give anyone access to a one-project-a-time platform to ask for funding, volunteers, coaches and/or materials” and is a response to the increasing crowdfunding market in Belgium. It advances on traditional crowdfunding channels by considering non-financial contributions in addition to the funding itself, whilst being a ‘lightweight solution’.
During October and November, the project team conducted research of the Belgian crowdfunding and crowdsourcing market and the data from this is recorded in a spreadsheet. The key findings are illustrated by an infographic (below) that shows the conclusions reached on the crowdfunding platforms in Belgium in 2015 and social crowdfunding in Belgium in 2015. It also introduces the W4P concept and its benefits.
The W4P team have also investigated over 25 leads and received another 5 since the first blog (by Pieter-Jan Pauwels from Open Knowledge Belgium), was released last month.
The W4P platform is currently being built on GitHub and will be released under an MIT license to maximise its open character. Pilots will start in April 2016, with one focussed on monetary aspects (sourcing funding) and the other concentrating on the non-monetary aspects (such as sourcing volunteers and materials).
To find out more about W4P, you can also visit the official website: http://w4p.be/
