Support MediaGoblin!

Why support MediaGoblin?

MediaGoblin has a great community of volunteers! We've made a ton of progress over the last year and a half, and you can already do a lot with it! But there are some things that need some serious hours of work; such as federation, administration tools and easier installation. With time and a little funding, we can reach the level of polish and stability we need to be the best media publishing option there is.

The internet used to be a more resilient and decentralized place. But recently the internet and the web have been moving in scarier directions. With larger and fewer media hosting institutions, we're seeing more and more problems of automated censorship (for example, NASA getting takedowns for its own content or even remixes of totally freely licensed stuff). The more that media publishing moves toward a few large providers, the harder these things are to prevent. And with more and more content on large services, what happens to all that media if that service goes away, the way GeoCities disappeared (or how Google Video nearly did)?

The web is becoming more and more fragile. We can make things awesome again... but we need your help to do it!

Who's behind this thing?

MediaGoblin has a large and diverse developer community... over fifty contributors from all over the world!

In the video you see above Christopher Allan Webber, formerly senior software engineer/tech lead at Creative Commons and MediaGoblin's lead developer and project founder (who quit his job to focus on MediaGoblin!) and who has previously worked on other free software video projects at the Participatory Culture Foundation, including Miro and Miro Community.

Deb Nicholson, who also appears in the video, is MediaGoblin's community manager, formerly staff at the Free Software Foundation, and lead organizer of the Women's Caucus. She now serves at OIN as Director of Community Outreach, and serves on the board of OpenHatch and on the advisory board of The Ada Initiative.

Will Kahn-Greene, who doesn't appear in this video, but helped organize the fund-raising campaign, is MediaGoblin's infrastructure person. He worked at Participatory Culture Foundation on Miro and now works at Mozilla as a web developer.

MediaGoblin is part of the GNU project, which runs on millions of computers worldwide. The infrastructure for this campaign is handled by the Free Software Foundation, an organization devoted to defending user freedom for everyone.

What we'll do with the money

This is your project! We'll be keeping you informed on development progress as we invest your money in a federated future.

If we make the current campaign goal of 60k, we'll be able to hire our lead developer fulltime for a year (after rewards and the finance processing overhead, that'll come closer to 45k) which will help us coodinate and advance development. If we exceed these goals, we can contract out work to other people, including other developers and designers, to do even more awesome things. Since we're going through the Free Software Foundation as a nonprofit, we're accountable to do the work before we can get the money. So you have assurance that money given will actually go to make MediaGoblin as awesome as possible... for you, and for everyone!

(Plus, donations are tax deductable if you live in the USA!)

What people are saying

We're excited about the GNU MediaGoblin project, and we're thrilled to be providing its grassroots fundraising infrastructure. Without a doubt, we need a decentralized, free software system for sharing our photos and videos. We need a system that doesn't require using nonfree software or handing our memories and artwork over to a single point of privacy-violating, proprietary ownership-claiming failure. MediaGoblin can be that system, and its future users can make it so. I look forward to the result -- and to the example this could set for funding other critical free software projects.
  — John Sullivan, executive director of the Free Software Foundation

With its combination of ambition and moral and communicational clarity, MediaGoblin is looking like a project that we’ll be hearing more about in the next few years.
  — Bruce Byfield in "MediaGoblin: Saving the Internet Through Federation"

Interested in talking to us? Email press@mediagoblin.org

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