Reykjavík Grapevine - 07.12.2012, Page 17

17 The Reykjavík GrapevineIssue 18 — 2012MONEY
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HOLIDAY
WHALE WATCHING
December is the time when the Elding team gets into the holiday
spirit and welcomes you on board our boats in Reykjavik’s old
harbour. We offer daily whale watching tours at 13:00 with the
exception of 25 December and 1 January.
In the holiday spirit we offer you:
Complimentary holiday punch and biscuits in the Whale
Watching Centre
Warm overalls and blankets to use during the tour
We also recommend
The Christmas Island Viðey and its festivities
The Imagine Peace Tours
MAR, a new restaurant, café and bar in the old
harbour
Crowdfunding Credibility
Karolina Fund allows users to track where
money goes when they donate to projects
The year is 1945. After suffering de-
feat at the hands of the Allied powers,
a secret fleet of Nazi Germans flee to
the dark side of the moon, with plans
to construct a giant fortress and an
armada of spaceships, more power-
ful than anything they used in battle
on Earth. They reorganise, regroup,
and hatch a plan to return to Earth
70 years later, in 2018, where they will
once again try to conquer the world.
Hold off on preparing an under-
ground bomb shelter for a Nazi re-
turn: This is the plot of ‘Iron Sky,’ a
Finnish-German-Australian film re-
leased in February 2012. The film was
created not by a team of producers
and directors, but rather by an entire
online community of film enthusiasts.
Anyone who was interested in the
project could contribute an idea, and
ultimately help shape the outcome of
the film.
In Reykjavík, far away from Nazi
German moon space fleets, the people
behind the Karolina Fund are trying to
do something similar. Ingi Rafn Sig-
urðsson and Arnar Sigurðsson, two
of the fund’s creators, used the ‘Iron
Sky’ model of “participatory cinema”
to create a similar crowdfunding plat-
form for creative projects.
Just like Kickstarter or IndieGogo,
Karolina Fund allows creators to pitch
projects and seek investors, who can
choose how much money they want
to donate. Creators set a
goal amount to reach
and have a limited
amount of time to
raise funds. The
website, which
was launched in
October of this
year, currently
has six projects
users can fund.
They range from a
documentary film about
Icelandic horses to a ten-
part musical composition about a
character in Icelandic folklore.
INTROdUCING
THE PROJECTdOCK
Karolina Fund differs from other
crowdfunding platforms, however,
in that it has an integrated project
management tool called ProjectDock,
which adds transparency to a formally
murky process.
“You get the choice to see what the
plan is, and how it’s supposed to go,
and what happens after the project is
being executed,” Arnar says. “The idea
is that everybody sees what the deal is
and where the project is at using this
simple project management system.”
Their solution combats an all too
common problem on other crowd-
funding platforms: the lack of ac-
countability and oversight to ensure
projects actually get done. Accord-
ing to a study published in July 2012
by Ethan Mollick, a professor at the
University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton
School, 75 percent of technology and
design-related projects on Kickstarter
didn’t finish on time. For the millions of
people who have given more than $274
million to 28,000 projects since 2009,
this represents a huge waste of cash,
and more importantly, decreased trust
and credibility among crowdfunded
projects.
“We thought about this way before
the problems became as obvious as
they are today,” Ingi says. “Once we
start hearing about these things and
problems with these platforms, we be-
came more confident that this could
really be a good answer for these
problems.”
PLANS TO GO GLOBAL
The platform is still young, but ulti-
mately Ingi and Arnar hope it evolves
to host projects and connect inves-
tors worldwide. So far, Ingi says that
10 percent of all donations to current
projects have come from somewhere
outside of Iceland.
“I think it’s already proven a good
decision to not be completely limited
in Iceland,” Ingi says. “We don’t
have any boundaries to
stop people from com-
ing in. If they have
the ability to present
their project with a
video and some pic-
tures in a nice way,
then we will host it.”
Much like the
'Iron Sky' project, this
platform allows people
to feel more connected to
the final result. The experience is
different than walking into a store and
buying something off a shelf because
investors know they have had a direct
hand in the final product, Arnar says.
“It’s not just buying something.
You are not just a consumer. You are a
participant in something,” Arnar says.
“And we’re not sure if current crowd-
funding platforms are allowing this
adequately, and that’s why we’d like to
develop it further.”
The team behind Karolina Fund is
still working out the kinks and taking
user feedback and suggestions. Still,
no word yet on whether they will start
hosting projects from the dark side of
the moon.
Words
Kirsten O’Brien
Photo
Karolina Fund
“
It’s not just buying
something. You are not
just a consumer. You are
a participant in
something.
„
To fund your own project or to view and donate
to others, visit alpha.karolinafund.com.