Introduction
Seasons Greetings to y’all.
With #Easter Festivities taking place all aound the world, the season of redemption is in the air.
For Steemians and prospective Projecteerians it’s truly a season of redemption from the centralized and traditional systems of funding bright ideas and projects.
Last week, I got in touch with one of my closest pals. I have not been in touch with him for a while now. Guess, I can say I placed the call at the right time.
During the course of our conversation, he told me about a project he has been working on for some time now. I got particularly interested in it when he told me he would be fusing it into the Steem blockchain and it would involve crowdfunding. It is an open source software and he calls it PROJECTEER.
To be honest, I am relatively new to this, he is the brains behind it all while I am only the mouthpiece and face. Positions I am more than happy to help out with. We plan to go big with the project and achieve our goal of providing a platform where money can be raised for execution of life changing projects. You are all welcome to ride with us.
So let’s get a few things right. For a proposed project to come into reality, money has to be spent.
Hence, a project owner has to source for money or funds from investors, who most of the time have something to gain from the project, mostly money-wise after they must have agreed to invest in a project.
These days projects carried out by organizations (NGOs) and individuals are funded by people. From the billionaires, to people with much lesser financial capabilities. This brings us to Crowdfunding.
Crowdfunding
Crowdfunding like the name implies, is a form of alternative finance. With the use of Internet, it involves the process of raising money for the execution of a certain Project (which could be anything you can imagine :) ) usually from a large number of people online. This way, everyone gets to give a small amount of money.
Crowdfunding has been in existence for ages, It gained popularity on the internet especially in the entertainment industry. It was carried out through Media platforms such as the Newspapers before the advent of the Internet.
Crowdfunding has been used to raise money for the production of music albums, movies, software and even to save lives. For those who know about this already, popular crowdfunding websites include: Kiva, Kickstarter, GoFundMe and Microventures among a list of names.
It is a prospective way of funding creative works such as blogging of curated content and any form of good Journalism.
Kiva was started by Matt Flannery and Jessica Jackley. According to Wikipedia, kiva.org is a non-profit organization that allows people to lend money via the Internet to low-income entrepreneurs and students in over 80 countries.
It is crowdfunded by grants and donations from its users and national institutions. It has gone a long way in helping a lot of entrepreneurs around the world achieve their goals of establishing their selves. It provides a platform where a member can borrow money which will be paid back with no interest. That is something rare these days I believe. We all know how important the interest rates are to the banks.
GoFundMe was opened in 2010 by Brad Damphousse and Andrew Ballester. It is the biggest for-profit crowdfunding platform with operations in countries like France, Ireland, Spain and the UK.
They have executed quite a number of important projects including Las Vegas Victims’ Fund (which is for the victims of the mass shooting that occurred in Nevada), Saving Eliza (launched to fund research work on how to stop terminal diseases in children) and many others.
What Are The Potential Advantages That All Crowdfunded Projects Share?
Certain advantages and benefits can be realized from using crowdfunding as a source of funding for a project.
• With crowdfunding, a huge amount of money needed for a project can be realized within a short period of time. This can help in timely execution of projects which can be of benefit to people.
• People come up with a lot of interesting ideas and innovation. What most people don’t have is the chance to bring investors on board. Crowdfunding helps to finance such ideas by eliminating your worries about convincing conventional investors to help out with the project. This time around, they will have to indicate by themselves if they truly want to be on board.
In addition, when people are interested in raising money for your cause, it literally means your idea will definitely sell in the market, making it a good way of testing people’s reaction to your project or idea.
• To facilitate crowdfunding, you definitely have to share your idea or project with a community of people. This provides a means of getting feedbacks, suggestions, modifications and expert guidance where necessary, to improve the idea or project, which adds value to it and makes it better.
• Since it is an alternative finance option, crowdfunding can be used as an important form of marketing an idea or project. In which Investors can keep tabs on your progress with the project and even become loyal customers through the whole financing process.
• Various Businesses, Organization and Individuals have benefited from crowdfunding either directly or indirectly. By breaking barriers, Projects and ideas which would originally be non-existent have been sustained and our world has become a better place to live in.
Which emphasizes the fact that when people come together to join hands and hearts, nothing is Impossible. We can always achieve our goals and dreams in our world.
Are There Downsides To Crowdfunding
As interesting as it all sounds #Crowdfunding is only an alternative finance option. This does not necessarily make it easier to achieve compared to the traditional way of funding projects.
• Many proposals do not get to be presented on these crowdfunding platforms, as only the projects in which certain investors get to make big returns on, get to be presented to users of these platforms.
• Also, to achieve anything on these crowdfunding platforms, a lot of work has to be done to build up enough interest before a project can be launched. Achieving this feat might require some money and/or time which of course are essential.
• In most situations, a funding target is set for any project going up on these platforms. As we all know, the future remains obscure to us all. There are certain times, when these funding targets are not met. If this happens, every penny that has been given or pledged is usually returned to the investors while you receive absolutely nothing. Even the money or time that might have been spent to build up interest and attract investors all goes to waste.
• Another downside is the fact, that for a project to be viable, a strong and established network must exist to provide the necessary backing needed. Without this, even the brightest of ideas don’t stand a chance to be successfully coordinated and executed.
• If the investors are not kept in check, getting returns or rewards wrong can be bad for business. It could mean giving away too much of the business to certain investors who are only looking to enrich their pockets.
Crowdfunding In The Emerging Crypto-economy
With the introduction of Cryptocurrencies, crowdfunding has taken a new dimension. Platforms such as fundition.io and utopian.io (with the condition that the projects are open source) can now be used to raise money for projects. Open source projects, release the source code to the public so that anyone can study it, see how it works, change and redistribute it if they want to.
Some popular open source projects include; Steemit, Dtube and WordPress to mention a few.
Since their inception till now, open source projects have suffered from the lack of reliable and steady funding models.
Contributors to projects on these platforms are rewarded with cryptocurrency, Steem being a major contender.
To earn enough rewards, submissions have to be in line with the platforms’ guidelines. The platforms accept certain writings on specific topics. They have moderators who go through posts that have been submitted, ensure the posts contribute to an open source project and ensure the quality of the posts, before they are upvoted by people and the official platform account.
Platforms like utopian.io and fundition.io operate in this manner. They are built on the Steem blockchain with the aim of replacing centralized platforms such as Kiva and Kickstarter.
They provide a decentralized platform where bright entrepreneurs with their projects can be directly linked to like-minded supporters. Find out more about these platforms from their official websites.
Enter Projecteer
Projecteer is a project/task/content management tool that can be used by creative teams to keep track of projects and various tasks under the project.
The idea behind Projecteer is to create a platform for communities and remote teams where they can collaborate, undertake and execute different projects.
According to the introduction post submitted by the lead developer 
#Projecteer aims to create an environment where:
• Team members can be assigned tasks at the discretion of the team lead
• Users can join or get invited to teams that are open to accepting new members and collaborate on projects by completing tasks with team members
• Team members can communicate and keep themselves updated on the progress of their projects
• Users can add, modify and remove projects /tasks
• Users can share their thoughts and opinions about projects /brands either personal/ not personal.
• Users will be able to add unlimited number of projects and tasks under each project.
Projecteer comes with its own goodies and benefits as well:
• Unlike Utopian, which is only used for rewarding open source projects, Projecteer will reward both open source and closed source projects. In fact, it will reward any project, as long as the validity of the projects and their relating tasks can be established.
This makes the list of things that can be achieved with Projecteer almost infinite. It can be infused into carrying out tasks and operations in various Professional and Academic fields, even our daily activities are not left out. The amazing part is the rewards gotten from these valid and established tasks will be used to fund these projects.
• Projecteer also has an edge over a platform like fundition.io. fundition funds any project, but fundition does not provide a platform for managing team members and delegating tasks to these members which have to be executed. Their prioritized mandate is to provide a platform crowdfunding exclusively.
Projecteer provides this and also provides a community of like-minded people, including the project owners and every other user working towards achieving a task. They can share educational and valuable content about their project and their prospective roles in the project.
The interesting part is, everyone is carried along, as nothing is hidden since Projecteer is established on a decentralized system.
What Projecteer Has To Offer
Projecteer is here to provide solutions to specific downsides and challenges faced in the centralized system of crowdfunding.
• Projecteer will be resourceful in helping to easily build up interest in the project. It will attract like-minded people and prospective investors.
Projecteer will achieve this by using the power of the steem blockchain to provide seed funding and initial visibility for the project through upvotes of project updates and task updates, while It will also create an environment where team members can work and collaborate on completing tasks on the project.
• On centralized crowdfunding platforms, it happens that when the funding target is not met, whatever amount that has been gathered is returned to the investors. The project is then left abandoned. Projecteer aims to solve this by rewarding projects for project creation, task creation, project updates, task updates.
Team members will also be rewarded after completing tasks and submitting task reports on any task they just completed. This will ensure continuous backing of the project by the entire projecteer community.
• In order to do away with scams, false claims and manipulation on the platform, Projecteer will employ the model used by utopian.io, which makes use of moderators and content evaluators. They ensure the quality and validity of the projects and tasks being submitted and executed by users.
These Moderators also help in deciding how to duly reward each project. Projecteer thus solves the problem of getting the rewards or returns wrong. Which will consequently, give away too much of the business to investors.
• Projecteer can help build a strong, established existing network. Allow me to say “this is the Central Nervous System” of an effective crowdfunding operation. This network is vital to the success of any project.
Projecteer will encourage this by creating a community of backers who are not only willing to support the project through upvotes, but will also be able to help ensure the progress of the project by working on created tasks while also getting rewards for their support.
• Projecteer also puts any investors in the project in check at all times. In this case everyone is happy.
Check out
the git hub link is : https://github.com/olatundeee/projecteer
We’ll keep you updated on the progress of the software.Kindly upvote and feel free to drop your comments and suggestions.
All images are courtesy of Google Images.