Ind.ie Crowdfunding and Roadmap Update

The first three weeks of crowdfunding have been a crazy roller-coaster ride for Ind.ie. With one week to go, I want to give you a brief update on everything that’s happened and about our latest roadmap.

Before anything else, however, I want to thank you for the outpouring of support we’ve received so far. Here are some brief stats on our crowdfunding campaign so far:

• Over 1,000 people have supported us
• We’ve raised over $88,000
• We’re now accepting donations with Bitcoin in addition to credit card.
• The kind folks at Open-Xchange issued us with a $10K Friday Challenge, which we met thanks to your kind help.
• We’ve got a week to raise just over $10,000 to meet our $100,000 crowdfunding target.

What’s the buzz?

Here’s a brief list of events that have happened and what our tiny but dedicated team has been working on these past few weeks in addition to keeping the crowdfunding campaign going.

• We ended up forking Syncthing to Pulse. We’ve made two maintenance releases so far and we are gearing up for our first feature release this week that brings some usability improvements. Pulse will now be developed using a design-led process.
• We’ve hired George MacRorie to work full time on Pulse.
• Andy, who built our crowdfunding site in record time and who was instrumental in launching the Ind.ie web site and a number of our internal systems has now wound down his activities on Ind.ie and will be concentrating on his freelance work. I want to take this opportunity to personally thank you, Andy, for all of your hard work and friendship. You’ll always be part of the Ind.ie family.
• This week, I added Bitcoin support to the crowdfunding site. So if you’d like to support us with Bitcoin, you now can!
• I gave several talks on privacy and human rights at events like Digital for Good, TEDxYouthBath, World Usability Day Berlin, NESTA’s Future Shock, and at an event on Data Protection and Cyber Security at the House of Commons. Laura presented a session on designing for accessibility at dsgnday in Amsterdam.

Our outreach and educational work is central to Ind.ie. When we aren’t working on creating alternatives, we spend our time talking to the public, policymakers, politicians, and educators about privacy, surveillance, independent technology and human rights. Your donations will help to support these activities also. We are not a typical for-profit company but a social enterprise pursuing a social mission as part of its commercial activities.

You can find a list of upcoming events on the Ind.ie events page.

Updates to the roadmap

As we had not planned on the additional effort of forking Syncthing, we have re-evaluated our road map. Instead of rushing the Heartbeat and Waystone pre-alpha, we’re going to push the release date to 1st January, 2015.

A new year, a new beginning.

This will give me three extra weeks to work on Heartbeat and Waystone without the distraction of the crowdfunding campaign.

One last push

We’ve almost reached our goal of raising $100,000 to support our work on Heartbeat and Pulse in 2015. (This money will be supplemented by any income that I receive from professional speaking engagements in the new year.) With a little under $10,000 and seven days to go, please do tell your friends about our crowdfunding campaign and, if you haven’t had a chance to, please donate if you can.

Here’s to hitting our crowdfunding goal this week and to starting the new year with a new, independent alternative that lets you share the things that matter to you with the people you care about.

If you want to help us, the time is now.

Thank you.

Aral