We invest the money in staff and operating costs for adhocracy+ and staff and equipment costs for other projects of Liquid Democracy e.V. in the field of digital democracy. This is how we pay our full-time employees in the areas of development, design, project management and support. As of November 2019, the expenses of the association are divided into 83 % personnel costs and 17 % material costs (rental and office costs, travel expenses, equipment, IT). The costs for adhocracy+, which we want to cover, are divided into operating costs and costs for the further development of the functions. The operating costs are the costs spent on renting servers and other IT infrastructure and staff costs for security updates for the platform, server monitoring and especially email support. Since the platform has just started, and the actual cost of running it is heavily dependent on usage, we currently have to estimate. We expect operating costs to be around €14,000 over the next 12 months. In addition, we of course would like to add new functions to the software. An iteration with our development team currently costs about 20,000 € for staff and material costs. In the context of an iteration one can normally implement a larger feature or three to five small improvements. In the medium term we would like to finance 2-5 iterations per year for adhocracy+ through donations and institutional grants to extend the platform with new features. More information about the use of funds can be found in the activity reports and annual financial statements of Liquid Democracy e.V.

Smaller organisations, citizens' initiatives and small NGOs usually have no or only limited funds to pay for software or services. At the same time, however, they are important innovators for democracy. In order to make the democratic culture in Germany and Europe genuinely modern and transparent, solutions are needed that are financed by donations and other means. We want to offer such a solution with adhocracy+. For this reason the use of the platform is free and the code Open Source.

Currently, we finance the development through savings and surpluses from our business operations. adhocracy+ is based on our open source software Adhocracy. Since 2009 we develop this software in the context of projects, which were financed by donations or commissions in the economic area of the association. Most of the functions of the current platform are the result of developments in our open source projects in recent years.

Yes, we talk to various foundations and other organisations at a national and European level in order to receive funding. We do this within the framework of funding programmes and idea competitions to help finance the operation and further development of adhocracy+. If you have ideas and hints for suitable funding programs, please let us know.