Eric Wahlforss is one of the guys behind SoundCloud. This is where he jots down thoughts on the web, music and strategy, among other things.
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Interview for Berliner Gazette
This an english translation of an interview I did for Berlin based e-zine Berliner Gazette (only available through e-mail).
How did you end up in Berlin and what are you doing here?
The main reason why I decided to go to Berlin was because I was promised a record deal at Sonar Kollektiv when I was here in summer 2000. Since then, I knew I would move here as soon as I had finished my studies in Stockholm.
After I came here in the beginning of 2001, I worked at gate5 as an interaction designer for a year.
I soon realized that it wasn’t realistic to produce an album while working full time, so I decided to save up and go for the on-the-road option instead. During 2002 I travelled around in Europe for 9 months and when I came back (in November last year) I had about 90% of the album done. I’m really happy now that I took my time and did something different. In our society it’s easy to get absorbed by comfort — and that leads boredom and lack of inspiration. Basically I tried to artificially break out of that (if only for a year), by putting myself in strange — sometimes awkward — places and situations. I still remember sleeping on the street in Milan, Powerbook close to my chest…
Aside from making music I’ve been promoting the Indyfund, our “project funding community”. Basically we are a bunch of people (about 170 now) supporting each others projects.
As I write this, the album (entitled “Soulhack”) will be mastered in a week. When it’s done, I will go back to Stockholm and write a paper in the philosophy/computer science field.
I will return to Berlin this summer when the album is released, and then I will probably go on tour over summer.
On the Forssfolio you mention that you are interested in philosophy — how does it come into play in your projects?
Studying philosophy is a luxury. It makes you to think hard about interesting questions/problems which are avoided or forgotten in everyday life.
The idea of Indyfund formed during discussions we had when I was studying. I do not think the idea would have come to life otherwise, because we wouldn’t have had a possibility to think so deeply about organizational forms/social problems as we had then.
Philosophy definitely plays a part — but In the end I think realizing projects is about 10% inspiration/philosophy and 90% down-to-earth work.
I’m looking forward to do research on more computer science oriented philosophy. I really hope to be able to create an interesting overlap.
Probably that means my future work will be more influenced/tied to philosophy.
How/when/why did you start Indyfund?
As I mentioned above, there was an interesting situation back in 2000 with many creative, young and idealistic people in one place. I merely collected good ideas and arranged them/us.
The reason we started thinking about organizing ourselves in the first place, was because we were annoyed by the difficulties involved in running independent projects. We quickly identified that the most important external factors in succeeding with such a project was good context/community and adequate funding/resources.
It’s a sign of our time that people avoid becoming part of organizations. This applied to us as well — so we found it very important to not create yet another “underground” organization with vague goals, regular meetings, traditional board etc. Instead we wanted:
- An organization as non-obtrusive and discreet as possible — Indyfund doesn’t have a logo, and we avoid talking excessively in public about it.
- A platform that would augment people’s social networks
- To fund projects in a non-beurocratically way. Today we fund projects in real time using direct democratic methods (more on this here).
- To enable people to work with projects more efficiently
- The framework/organisational form to be clearly set and formulated from the start (so that we wouldn’t have to deal with endless discussions on “how to develop/organize ourselves” etc.)
- An international network with “sub-communities” forming sporadically.
- Minimal administration. Indyfund is entirely web based and is administered by a handful of people (and they spend only a few hours time a month).
Luckily enough we were a couple of people who were already developing web applications, so we decided to get together and create the web platform. In early 2001 we got funding from Future Culture Foundation in Sweden and then work started for real. We put together a project group, including two skilled programmers. I did the site concept/design.
Indyfund V1 was launched 31st of March 2001.
The 2nd generation of the site was launched here in Berlin the 2nd of February 2002.
Where is Indyfund drifting to nowadays?
There are many possible ways for Indyfund to go from now.
First and foremost, I’m happy that the project is still up and running and that it looks like it can continue running without major efforts. We have funded about a dozen projects in 2002, and there are more being funded right now.
It’s really important to emphasize that Indyfund is really about people and projects — not the fund or the organization itself. I’m happy for each project we can finance in “our way”, and I know the members are too.
There are of course some inherit problems in the organization today - e.g. due to the fact that you have to be “invited” in order to become a member, our member base have grew slower than we have expected (we will try to address this issue by simplifying invitation procedures…). There are also issues connected with paying the membership fee (EUR4/month, 95% of which are used for projects), because currently it can only be done over subscription based credit card payment internationally (other options involves much administration, but we can take cash if there are no other possibilities).
There are also other, more radical, plans:
- A small group of members might be trying to pitch for EUR100000 from Future Culture Foundation in 2003. If we get the money it would definitely mean a big boost for the whole project. Basically we would split the money so that as much as possible would be used directly for projects and the rest for development/administration.
- There are organizations/people who are interested in buying the platform as-is, to be able to run their own Indyfunds. Due to the circumstances, I can’t give more details on this at the moment.
- We have been thinking ourselves about creating different instances for different needs/purposes/subgroups. It’s definitely an interesting possibility, and it’s quite doable. There could also be a possibility for the different instances to communicate with each other in a peer-to-peer fashion…
- We also have plans for a major site update, with the addition of more advanced communication features.