© BarcelonaActua
Free guided tour, courtesy of BarcelonaActua, of the exhibition “Ferran Adrià and El Bulli: Risk, Freedom and Creativity”, at the Palau Robert until February 2013

If there’s one benefit of wiki communities, it’s that they can start up with a tiny budget and grow spectacularly in a very short time. It’s all about having a good idea and carrying it through at the right moment. Economist Laia Serrano (born in Barcelona in 1973) had one: to set up a solidarity network in which the people of Barcelona could give their time, work, activities and objects they no longer used.

We’ve met up with her to hear her story. “It all started in late December 2010 when, on a RAC1 radio programme, the show’s host Jordi Basté posed the question: what would we not be doing that Christmas because of the recession?” says Serrano. Lots of people rang in with moving stories about losing their jobs, about the lack of presents and about loneliness, until one woman rang offering someone her home. That made me think that we all have a latent sense of solidarity and when it’s made easy for us, we bring it out. I could see that it would be a good idea to connect the new enlightened poor – in other words, all of us – through new technologies.”

And that’s how BarcelonaActua came about, officially launched on 30 October 2011. From the outset, Laia Serrano (who spent 11 years working in Codorniu’s marketing department and four months as a volunteer in Cali, Colombia) was very clear that the keystone to all this was to link up the world of solidarity with the world of communications. Thus, she built the BarcelonaActua platform on three pillars: putting people with needs and people with something to offer in touch with each other; creating a community that is not only virtual but also face-to-face; and raising awareness of our social reality.

Since then, the platform has been creating contacts between people who have basic needs that must be covered, charitable people and lonely people, and every city has many of those. “We’re all in the same boat and we can all go through any of these three situations at different times in our lives. There are no beneficiaries or volunteers; whoever gives now may receive tomorrow and vice versa,” explains Serrano. And she has plenty of examples to illustrate this: “One girl donated a piano that ended up in a school in the Besòs district; it was really touching to see how happy the children were to get it. We were also contacted by a guy who helped out with homeless people and he got 42 sleeping bags and 15 blankets in record time, just as the cold snap arrived. People really want to help, but they must be asked for very specific things and it needs to be made easy for them.”

Laia Serrano knows that the key is to generate trust, and this is one of the reasons behind the face-to-face meetings, such as the ones held in the Raval or when members met up to swap clothing in the garage of one of the BarcelonaActua activists, a widow who was alone and looking to meet other ladies like herself. “It has changed her life and now they’re a tireless group of women,” says Serrano. “I believe that proximity is essential for shifting the virtual world into the real world. That’s why we’ve restricted ourselves to Barcelona. We’ve been in touch with the people at the Banc del Temps [Time Bank], who are even more on top of the issue of proximity because they are organised by district, so that way we can also spread their initiatives.”

The website is very user-friendly and it takes just a few seconds to sign up. You then have to select your area of interest: work, leisure, household goods, clothing, teaching, company, advice, arts, electronics and others. Serrano believes that the arts area is very important because it helps members to get involved with a range of activities that they themselves suggest. The day this article was being penned, Agustí had discovered an Irish pub near the Sagrada Família where they had live music and he suggested a visit. Within a few days, he had willing companions. Meanwhile, Susanna was offering tablets to strengthen fingernails and hair “to someone who really needs it” and Jordi proposed swapping clothes for shoes, while Xavier looked for a cheap rental flat because he was out of a job.

Bearing all this in mind, of course, there is one question that must be asked of Laia Serrano: how do you earn a living? “I don’t. We’re in the initial stages. We’ve made it. And now we have to go and get funding, with all these successful experiences that we have behind us. There are Catalan companies out there that have strong links with Barcelona and that want to demonstrate their social responsibility.” The platform’s slogan is Tots per tots a la ciutat (All for all in the city). There’s no doubt that through this network, this “all” that we all wish for is gradually becoming a reality.

© Albert Armengol
A Wikiartmap user consults the service on his digital tablet in the area near CaixaForum.

Maite Oliva, the driving force behind Wikiartmap, tells us that it all began three years ago when she was curating a series of open-air photography exhibitions and realised that there was no tool for disseminating the creative work that is shown in public spaces. That tool is now the newly-launched Wikiartmap. But it is more than that. “It’s a global platform where people can advise and enter content to put on the map any information relating to art, creativity and historic and cultural heritage that is accessible and outdoors,” explains Oliva.

This young lady from Figueres has taken Wikipedia and Google as her reference points “because of their vision when creating new tools that other people can then use to develop other applications”. That is precisely what she has done, using Google maps and texts from the free online encyclopaedia.

Her project was always intended to be global. “If the tools allow it, why limit it? There were already maps for specific organisations, but this project wants to go much further, with an international reach and dynamic content.” The platform will soon be accessible in six languages: Catalan, Spanish, French, English, Italian and Portuguese.

Oliva is well aware that this is a collective effort and she emphasises that she and her team have only laid the first stone of a project that will grow through everyone’s contributions. “I think it will be useful for helping artists to spread their work. We also provide statistics that can be useful to various organisations and players on the arts scene. It will also help to spread heritage. All the tools can be freely used by any user.”

Wikiartmap is on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+, and it will also work on its own social network to allow users to share and follow content or to illustrate their own blogs with maps. Everyone is invited to take part in constructing this art dictionary: the developers point out that “it doesn’t have to be perfect; it’s about wanting to describe our cultural heritage that is there for everyone”. However, neutrality is advised, although we all know that in this domain “what is crucial for some is questionable for others”.

Oliva was always very clear about this aspect of free use of her project and she insists that “the authorities must support open content”. Wikiartmap is a tool that is operated under a Creative Commons licence and incorporates and ­restructures existing content from Wikipedia and its Catalan language version, Viquipèdia. It also allows users to add new content, referencing them on the map and cross-referencing them. To make the tool a really good source of information, a mechanism has been created to review the content suggested by users.

Various categories have been created to help navigate all this information, and they give an idea of the project’s scale: architecture, sculpture, wallcovering, sketch, sound creation, festivals, urban exhibitions, etc. The contents are located on the map and the user can search by place, genre or keyword. The map always displays 100 entries ordered by popularity, never by any quality criteria. The information files open up on the map itself so that the user never loses the location.

@ Albert Armengol
Screenshot with one of the pages on the Picasso Museum.

To give an example: if you want to know where all of Gaudí’s works in Barcelona and its surrounding areas are, you can either click on the map, enter the architect’s surname or type in modernisme. The information that comes up will be pictures and texts that already exist online, but you will have come to it via a different route. In other words, this is not an encyclopaedia compiled for specialists; its basic purpose is to disseminate and provide access to these contents. Its dynamic structure also makes it a useful tool for finding out about the latest artistic events, even if they are ephemeral, like exhibitions or happenings.

The initiative was publicised this spring at the Santa Mònica Arts Centre in Barcelona and is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Culture, Girona Provincial Government, the Girona Costa Brava Tourist Board, Figueres Town Council and the Pyrenees-Mediterranean Euroregion. In order to continue to move forward it is working to secure the support of private partners who see opportunities in the tourism and arts industry.

© Albert Armengol
Poet Sílvia Bel with the book she has published thanks to financial support received through Verkami.

In December 2010 the Sala family received the gift of a good idea: to create a platform to provide financial support for artistic creativity. Joan, a trained biologist, and his two sons –  Jonàs, a physicist, and Adrià, an art historian – pooled their varied knowledge and rolled up their sleeves. They were united by one thing: all three are passionate about creativity.

And thus Verkami was born, inspired by the Kickstarter platform that was developed in the United States a year and a half previously. The Sala family’s idea was to transport this initiative. “There was nothing similar in Europe or in South America, and it all started with our own desire to shoot a short film for which we needed funding,” recalls the elder of the sons, Jonàs Sala.

At the time of writing, 280 projects have been funded, with a 72% success rate, and Verkami’s home page proclaims an ambitious initiative: to fund the newspaper El Público with 30,000 euros. A sum of 14,000 euros has already been secured with 25 days remaining for making donations. That is how it works: people pitch their project and have a 40-day deadline to get the money they need from user donations. The creator has to come up with a way of giving them something in return and this is where the most original ideas emerge: “One group even offered to play at your wedding if you gave them a sum of money to fund their first record,” says Jonàs Sala.

For the initiative to be successful, the elder of the Salas believes that it is essential to “know how to get your idea across and address your potential audience, bearing in mind that they are not moneyed people who do it for philanthropic reasons; they are consumers like us, who want to see works that interest them. People don’t pay more for a DVD or for a book, especially if they haven’t been made yet. You have to know how to convey trust and understand that, because you are cutting out the middlemen, you can offer your products at a better price.” Another piece of good advice is to pay attention to the communication aspect and to use every possible channel, both social networking and blogs. “Crowd-funding is a good tool, but it demands a bit more from creators, and that is dissemination. Some of them are not used to it,” says Sala.

© Pere Virgili
Lleida-born musician Jordi Gasion launched the fourth Music from a Balcony Festival on Plaça del Comerç, Sant Andreu, in December 2011. This edition of the festival was funded via Verkami.

Someone who is used to it is the poet Sílvia Bel, who has just published her new book with funds secured through Verkami. She is full of praise for the experience. “I wanted to bring out my second book of poems accompanied by the music of Clara Peya, but including a CD in a book makes it very expensive. The publishers couldn’t cover the cost. In the end, I found a way: by putting it in QR codes. But of course the expensive part was the recording. And it was then that I decided to use Verkami to pay the whole multimedia part of the project. The whole experience was very enriching and it really made the project grow, above all because it was a way of beginning to disseminate the book. Day by day you can see how the donations from sponsors continue to grow – I call them my angels – and it is very stimulating to feel that they believe in it, are excited about it and want to support it.”

“The strength of micropatronage lies in the fact that participants help the artist directly”

But Bel has also been very conscious of the work involved. “Getting people excited about a project like this also carries a great responsibility and commitment. I now feel like I’m engaged to be married to 80 little angels. It is they who have given me wings. They and the publishing house, whom I thank for the freedom and absolute trust they have given me to carry out the musical and videoclip part. I think I’ve put in nearly a hundred acknowledgements to different people in the book. I hope I haven’t left anyone out!”

This poet now has direct experience of the world of crowd-funding and warns that “the Ministry of Culture wants to regulate micro patronage. I think they’re mistaken. The strength of micro patronage lies in the fact that whoever does it feels that they are directly helping the artist, without any middlemen or regulations to follow. I don’t know how long this system will last. Obviously, people cannot and should not have to finance every project that comes up ad infinitum, especially because we pay taxes. All I hope is that it doesn’t end up becoming a political tool. If we reach a ceiling, we’ll find a way of turning it into something else! I think that artists have led the way.”

Because of this, the multimedia book Fila índia enfora (Outside Single File), along with hundreds of other initiatives, is now a reality.