Nil Homedes – FLOSS Sustainability: Lessons from a Funding Crisis #FOSSBack

In this session, Nil Medz, the director of the Sedinfree Software Association, discusses the journey of the CDIM, a digital platform for citizen participation, and how it navigated a significant funding crisis. The talk begins with an introduction to the CDIM, which supports participatory processes across the globe, and explains the platform's origins. Medz details the funding challenges faced in 2022, including the loss of grants that led to a negative balance. He outlines the association's sustainability plan, which involved diversifying income sources beyond public funding and hiring a consultant to develop a fundraising strategy. The speaker shares insights on partnerships, public and private funding, and the growth of the team and the ecosystem surrounding CDIM, aiming to secure a more stable and sustainable future.

Thank you very much for having me here uh today. Well, first of all, I'm Nil Medz. I'm the director of the the Sedinfree software association. Um it's a pleasure to to be here today. So today I'm going to explain you a story uh about how we survive a funding crisis in the CDIM. This is the structure of the session. We are going to go across a short

introduction uh to the CDM then explain the origin of that crisis then talk about uh the sustainability plan that we designed and finally we will review how is it going and what are the learnings and the main challenges of all this uh process. So yeah, first of all a short introduction to the CDIM. Uh raise your hand who knows here what is the CDIM exactly? Just only

one person. Okay. Okay. Then we need to do that introduction definitely. So yeah, the CDM is a free software project. It's a digital platform for citizen participation. Using the CDM you can run any kind of participatory processes like participatory budgeting, strategic planning, uh citizens assemblies uh all all kind of uh participatory process. So this is this digital public infrastructure uh where uh all kinds of participation can

happen and can be used by different types of organizations. So now a day more than 480 organizations around the world are using the CDIM such as Barcelona city council that was the founder and the creator of the platform but also we have New York City we have the Brazilian federal government using at a national level we have the European Commission who have been using the for example

for the conference of Europe and it's still using it today. We have the city of Helsinki, some cities in France, in Japan, uh in South America, in Switzerland and so on and so forth. And also we have some cooperatives, some civil society organizations uh using it. So we have present in more than uh 30 countries nowadays. Uh the license the license of the SIM and an AGPL3.

This is important also. I'm going to uh reflect a little bit on that during the talk uh because it it it we need to have this into account when we talk about sustainability. And here you have like a an infography of the community. Okay. Uh the red cycle in the center is the decided free software association that is the nonprofit foundation association that it's the maintainer of

the of the codebase. Okay. And around us we have all kind of organizations and people that are involved in the community like um developers uh activists uh hackers we have universities researchers designers all kind of people that that are uh around and at the center of that community the association that is the central actor of the project because it's maintaining the source code and it's the governance

board of all this project. So the origin of that uh funding crisis, a little bit of history, the first version of the CDM was released in 2017 uh by the Barcelona city council because they need a platform to um to run a participatory process. It was born as a fork of console. Okay. because or due to uh a discussion between the different teams that were running those

projects at the time in Madrid console and in Barcelona the CDIM and uh I don't have time today to to explain that but h the sim was uh first a fork of of console then it becomes to began more international France entered the chat in one year uh later and then in 2019 we created the the association uh when we when once we created the SIM association

then we started to write some agreements of collaboration between different governments at that time because at the beginning the project was hosted uh within the Barcelona city council. Okay. And then we decided to create to create this autonomous organ organization that is the association to um and then something very weird happened that is that the city council sit to the association the right to manage the source

code okay to an independent organization. So then they recognize us as the central actor then they recognize the community as a central actor of the project. Then uh once we signed those agreements of collaboration and about the governance of the code uh in 2021 we received the first public grants. Okay. Uh because at the beginning the association has no money. Uh and then at the time we

have uh received those two public grants and then we were able to hire two workers and then in 2022 the funding crisis happens. personal city council h does not pay to us a grant that was due to us. So that gives us a negative balance of 50k. Why that happens? Because legal political questions at that time inside the the the city council and uh that gives us

uh to to this funding crisis. So we realized that we should d start to diversify our income sources and and to be more resilient. So that leads to our sustainability plan. Uh then in 2022 we hired a consultant company called So Mesa. They are based in Mexico and the US mainly and they work a lot with civil h to to help them to be more sustainable. So

with them we we write this sustainability plan. The goal was to define a fundraising strategy to evate fundable projects and to for for us for the team for the association to to have more knowledge on how the fundraising world works because was something really new for us. Um then to build that sustainability plan we make a a diagnosis. We make a funders intelligent that's a a live

database that we are still using and using like in a quarterly base where we scan and when we collect all the possible funders uh of our of our projects and then we defined an action plan with concrete actions to uh different steps to follow to achieve this uh sustainability plan. So the needs at the time were to reduce the dependence on public funding and diversify our funding

sources to achieve a stable income in the medium or long term uh with the main purpose of having a team uh that that can give us more uh operational capacity. Right? So with that then we identify different source of funding. Public funding what we were already receiving direct public grants from from those public organizations. Then what we call private funds and and here we include philanthropy we

include research we include EU based funding. It's public yeah we know it but it's not like this core public funding that we were receiving. So we are differentiating uh that and then services and then donations and partners. Uh I will talk talk uh later about the services because it's important to say that we are not providing any kind of services to the governments who are using the

CDIM. I will talk about how we created an ecosystem of companies around us. So in that sustainability plan we defi we define it an ideal scenario uh in three years we should have more or less that percentage of distribution uh of incomes public funding 30% private funds 30% partners 30% and services 10%. We define it also uh different glowing scenarios. We define it uh in in red

you can see like the optimistic uh scenario and in blue the realistic scenario. We will see later how is it going. Uh so we defined that growing scenarios for the next years and in the action plan we define concrete actions to to match that goals. Uh the first one is the partnership policy. I'm going to talk about it. Uh also we defined the donations campaign and also

we define concrete actions to do fundraising work. Uh I already talked about this funers database founders intelligence we call it. We started to dedicate time to scan open calls recurrently. We start to build relationships with funders to call them, email them, try to be friends of them. Uh and we start to dedicate time to create innovative or fundable projects. Uh okay. So and also we started to

enter to the EU funding world that it's it can be a nightmare but there's a lot of money there also and you need to invest a lot of time to understand how actually works and also another key thing for us it's okay let's just start to build new alliances with governments beyond the Catalan governments because we have a lot of governments around the world using our software

but we don't have like a close contact with them and we should involve them in the maintenance of the project. So let's see how is it going. Uh so we define the partnership policy. What is the partnership policy? We have created a an economy around us. We have more than 20 companies around the world providing the CDM services and this economy generates around€3 million euros every year

more or less. So then at at that time at 2022 we realized that there were a lot of money going but we were not seeing uh anything of that. So we define it a partnership policy. It's voluntary. It's based on a on a voluntary base. So we cannot enforce those companies to pay us as the maintainers of the code because we don't want to change the license

and if they don't want to pay us they can they can do it. they can not pay to us and the conditions were uh that they should pay the the the 3% of their yearly uh income revenue as a fee for for maintenance. Uh and they gain some advantages as public visibility and and so on. So here is an infography of how the this ecosystem works. We

are the the rectangle and we are the maintainers of the codebase of the CDM and then the service providers come and implement and customize for the government and final clients. So what we are trying to do is to create that path to contribute back to the commons. Right now we have uh 11 companies out of 20 uh who have agreed to pay that uh fee. This is

a screenshot from our open collective page. Uh the first top one financial contributor is uh open source politics. Someone from one of the partners here. Uh open source politics uh is a a a huge uh company in France that they were mainly providing the same services and creating a revenue of one million of euros every year something like that. So they started to paying us this 3%.

And we have other companies like Octry based in Switzerland, Poke Code based in Barcelona, code for Japan, based in Japan and so on and so forth. Uh so yeah, that was one of the actions we set up an open collective page to uh yeah to to manage all these donations. And the second action that we take uh the fundraising work um well a first a first thought

that fundraising work is toughed and yeah most of the times you you you failed. I mean you you need to to know that when when you are writing projects uh the percentage of of successful is low. Here you can see h from the the last two years we submitted 15 projects 13 were refused and two were accept. Well you need to try. I mean we are always

trying and honestly sometimes we even try in some calls that we we see that it would be difficult for us to to be funded. Uh as an example the recent accepted projects are uh an EU project an Horizon um about more related to with a field of um political um and another grant that we received from uh foundation de France uh that it's a philanthropic organization that

they are funding a lot of um yeah open source projects and and so on and they give us money to to invest in hiring a community coordinator mainly during two years. So that was like the perfect grant, the dream grant to be honest. And the multipod project is more related to fund some of our road map uh through that project uh in the frame of how we

improve participation in multilingual communities. Okay, let's talk about public funding because here I think that we have like a quite unique case. Uh I I would say public funding how it works. Um right now we are receiving four public grants for core activities that are mainly maintainance and community work. Uh this is a stable core funding for us and represents around uh 200,000 uh euros every year.

We are receiving money from the Barcelona city council from the Catalan government laadat from a network of local governments called local red and from the city of Barcelona that it's like a medium level of government between the local level and the regional level. So these four Catalan uh public administrations are funding us uh as a as a as a core grant. And then uh also at the

same time Barcelona city council is investing yearly a lot of money on developing new features and the road map. But this money is invested uh through public tenders and the companies that I've been talking about those are the the the companies that receive that money. Okay. We are coordinating that those uh public tenders. Uh we are defining the stories the the user stories. We are doing all

the design all the code review and so on. But uh the the work the development work is mainly done by those those companies. Um and this is the way of how all the public funding uh works in in the CDM. So here that uh we are creating a new line uh from the cities from the governments to the association but as you can see for the moment

it has only been possible with Catalan public organizations. So we have a challenge here on how to uh get money from in from governments that are outside Spain. Uh this is one of our our challenges. So to tackle that challenge we created we defined it a government collaboration ladder. Okay we define four steps on how to involve governments on the maintenance of the sim. The first step

is there's no cost on it. you can as a government start start participating in community events. Then the second step is is that you can fund a road map feature for some governments is much easier to fund. Okay, I need to improve this specific feature of the platform then I give you money to improve it. Uh so if it is aligned with our road map then we

can receive money for that. The third step is to sign an MOU, a memorandum of understanding that gives like a legal framework that finally could hypothetically give us to the fourth step that it's funding core activities of the association as we are as this is happening with the Catalan institutions. Um yeah, so let's review how is it it has been uh going. Um yeah this was the

ideal distribution. So this is what actually happens during uh 2023 and 2024. You can see that at uh at 2023 public funding uh we're representing around 67% partners around the 20 and services around 10. Then in 2024 uh all the effort that we all the work that we've been doing around fundraising uh generates almost 30% of these private funds and we reduce it a little bit the

dependency on public grants and in last year 2025 uh it's pretty much the same. Public grants represent the 54. So we are still reducing it a little bit and increasing the fund rating the fundraising uh piece of of work. Um in terms of the growing scenarios we are between the realistic and the optimistic scenario. Uh this is the yellow line that you can see but are more

close to to the to the realistic uh And another thing to to that that that shows this this growing of of all the work that we've been doing is that at that time uh when the funding crisis arrived um there were two people in the team that were mate and Andreas and right now we are seven people in the team. So we have accomplished part of the

goals of that sustainability plan. So we are gaining more operational uh and yeah just to close uh some uh learnings and and challenges uh of all this journey um yeah the challenges uh that we see is that well as you can see at the beginning of the story the sim was a very localbased project created in Barcelona that was started to use by different cities local cities

in Catalonia and then it started to become a global project with France first but then Helsinki finally Brazil, New York da da da da uh so that was a a challenge for us because then we have like a lot of petitions from different stakeholders and so on and we need to answer those petitions and try to convince them at the same time to be involved in the

community and be involved in the maintenance of of uh the CDMA digital commerce Right. So that leads us to the second challenge that is one of the main I would say unsolved ones for the moment. That is okay. How a nonprofit based in Barcelona receive public money from organizations uh from other countries because the Brazilian government we had like anou in place uh with them. We we

were there uh we have a very good relationship. We are completely politically aligned with them. They want to give us money. But what they say to us is okay if the Brazilian government gives money to a Barcelona based organization, we need to do that through approving a bill in the national congress. So like it's almost impossible. So yeah, a question an open question that we have not

uh yet solved is how we should evolve our legal and financial um structure because yeah the easy answer might be yeah just open uh an office in Brazil. Yeah might might be an answer but this is uh costly for us then you need to maintain it maybe the government changes in one year and then you have the office in Brazil and Bolson is again in the government

and shut down the the city project in Brazil. So that might not make sense. So that's something that's yet an open question and I would say that here uh as a suggestion like these kind of organizations like the digital public goods alliance or even the UN or or the sovereign tech agency the European version or whatever could help us uh projects like ours on on becoming a

fiscal host and becoming the place where this money from outside our borders can can be gathered and transferred to us. And another question that still remains open is how do we finance maintenance work? What how we are doing it is mainly through those core grants that we can say we are with that money we are going to fix bugs and that's okay for the for our funders.

But as the project grows and grows and we are adding more new features also the maintenance work grows but not the core uh uh funding. So this is still like an an open question. uh for for us and learnings um for other projects that are facing similar situation I would say it's better to grow in a sustainable way for example in European projects um we always try

to be the smallest partner in the consortium that might make no sense maybe but for us it makes because if not we are going to create a new dependency of European projects and then you're becoming going to be addicted to the European money wheel that never ends and trapped there and writing longer projects to try to to receive funds. So okay just diversify your your income sources

and try to grow in a sustainable way. So we are trying to grow maximum two new roles every year because uh the question always is okay how you are going to sustain the salary of these new roles. uh dedicate also actively to fundraising in a quarterly base. And also a challenge or learning is that submit projects that do not divert you a lot from your core mission

because funders always want to fund new shiny thing like right now AI two years ago, blockchain three years ago, the metaverse or whatever. But you need to keep to to keep be to be attached to your mission and to your product that the mainly doesn't care about blockchain or AI. But sometimes also you need to submit a project with a little bit of AI that can help

you to do something but like there's always this this balance when you are submitting projects. Uh yeah and as I said we need to international internationalize our legal and financial structure and yeah of course we need a public agency for funding flaws in every country Europe or at a global level I don't care uh so yeah that's it thank you thanks Neil for the lessons for your

project questions. Yes. Uh thank you for your explanation. I'm uh I'm wondering a bit about uh if the organizations that are using the uh the product are actually paying for the product and um uh in in your story it gave me a bit of the impression that the integrators get money from those governments and is that only for support or is that also for using the product?

>> Mhm. And have you ever considered about um becoming a bit more commercial in that point of view and sort of selling the product because I assume that the governments are willing to pay for a platform that is actually supporting some of their processes, right? >> Yeah. >> Um I mean how it works is explain it here. Uh oh, sorry. Yeah, here. Yeah. So, so yeah, the

service providers are generating revenue are providing services for implementing and installing the CDM on the client servers. Let's say you can do that. You can download the code in the CDM and install it on the server that that you want. Um and also the the service providers are making money from um customizing uh the CDM to the needs of the client and also they are providing a

kind of a consultancy service on terms of okay how to actually use the tool because you need to learn a little bit how to design how to go from the paper that I want to do a participatory budget to the platform right so that's the service that they they are providing this schema honestly was not intended like it just happens because at the beginning because the project

was at the beginning um inside a public administration as the personal city council and then suddenly different providers start to appear a company in France saw the code saw the project and see hey let's try this to implement in France and they and just things started to happen and then after a few years then we say okay we have those those providers we don't want to compete

with them. Let's only focus on our main mission that it's maintaining the source code and we don't need to care about providing these uh services and also this I would say that this in part explains the successful of the sim h of like why why the sim has been adopted uh globally because for example in Japan we have code for Japan these are local company that works

there that knows the people there and it's very different that if I go from Barcelona to Japan and say, "Hey, I'm trying to sell you that product." Da da da da. No, it works the the other way around. The the people in Japan saw the code, saw the project, started to get interested, learn how to use the sim, learn how to install it, and then they started

to build to to provide the services in their local context. So, I would say that the other way around, the sim has never been able to to arrive to Japan. But thanks to a local partner, the CDM is now being used in Japan. And also because for example in terms of translating some words of the the CDM platform. translating the antology of the sidim the ontology of

the sidim sorry um also needs you need to understand a little bit of your local context when you talk about participation because I don't know in Barcelona an an assembly is have a have a meaning that can be a bit different in in Japan and maybe the Japanese people know exactly how to translate that word. Um so yeah I would say that it has some some risks

or or or some things that that model had can have some risk but it definitely has a lot of advantages uh and and explain a lot the successful of the city. >> Uh so thank you. Uh so of your team of seven how many persons are like full-time dedicated to keep the project afloat financially? Uh mainly it's me. I mean I'm the director and I'm like leading

on strategic partnerships uh writing the projects uh scanning the open calls and so on. That's that's mainly my work but I'm also part of the product team. >> So I would say I I do a lot of things too much maybe um that I dedicate around 20% of my time annually to fundraising. M um but I also have some help from for example the the product owner

because me and and and and she uh we work together on creating the projects and aligning the projects to the uh the projects that we submit to to to the road map priorities that that in techn that the product has. >> Then thank you. >> Thank you. It was awesome.