Empowering dreams through collective action.

How it works

1. 1

   Submission

   Members of a community (even if it's just two people) or an institution submit their ideas for projects (e.g. creative, ecological etc.), including an estimated budget, through the web-based “Dreams platform”, developed, hosted and maintained by the community (or a hosting provider in service of the community). Each project must have a clearly specified minimal amount of funding to be able to execute the project at all, a "cut-off date" for its funding, as well as one or several individuals who are fully in charge of the realization. These individuals are then called the "leads" of the respective project.

2. 2

   Funding

   Either the community members can allocate funds which the organization obtained from another source (e.g. membership fees), or the public gets an incredibly easy to use interface to give money to each sub-project, through one-time payments, but importantly also with the option to set up recurring subscription payments.

   At some point, the allocation is closed as well. That is, from that point onwards, no new money can be poured "into" the project. If money's tight, money's tight. If you've estimated too much, the unused money stays within the organization, i.e. you must refund expenses (see step 3) instead of getting the money upfront.

   Traditional donations typically have a lack of transparency regarding where in the organization the money actually goes, lack of accountability regarding who executes a project, and lack of possibility for the public to suggest budgetary optimizations. Instead, the organization utilizing the Dreams platform is thus logically subdivided into its sub-projects, each of which has a clearly defined lead. Additionally, all leads are non-hierarchical, because for them, it would be just stupid to compete. Leads are awesome people, who take care and share responsibility for the common good. Thus accountability is more decentralized, but external donors can still have maximum certainty about that their funds are actually used effectively, because they are the ones that believe in a lead. And because each lead has a social responsibility, they must do their job well, otherwise people would be very angry very quickly.

   Democracy is flourishing, because people don't vote, people allocate budget, which is even better: Financial grassroots democracy.

3. 3

   Reimbursement

   By default, the community members initially make expenses with their personal money and then submit the receipts to the Dreams platform, which then handles refunding the money as well as all regulatory requirements (e.g. issuing donation receipts for tax purposes, bookkeeping etc.)