@InspectorGadgit: Strategist/Event Producer/Community Builder.
(NEW YORK & SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA)
Leveraged experience as a beta tester, startup advisor, content producer, community builder and ‘crowdfunding junkie’ to create a consultancy. Acquired over 50 clients through referrals and raised over $10 million in funding and grants. Projects include: SpaceVR, Femsplain, Fitlot, BetaNYC and the "Undocumented & Unafraid" immigration reform campaign.
The daily dot: Women’s publishing platform Femsplain successfully raises $25,000 on Kickstarter
Amber Gordon, the 25-year-old founder of the feminist publishing platform Femsplain, just successfully managed to crowdfund $30,000 for her site through Kickstarter. Her campaign reached its goal on Tuesday, with seven days to spare. Although the site is just four months old and has a small audience, Gordon has quickly become somewhat of a media darling, getting glowing write-ups in the last year from the Huffington Post, Mother Jones, and the New York Observer. There’s a different theme every month; Gordon and her band of volunteers publish a few posts per day. A lot of the essays are confessional in tone and there is a growing comment community. For the young company, Gordon said, the Kickstarter was about more than raising money: “It was a testament that people do care about what we’re doing.”
the verge: Spacevr launches a kickstarter to make VR movies in SPACE
If you want to go to space, you either need a Warren Buffett-sized fortune or the kind of patience only the Dalai Lama can relate to. A new company called SpaceVR wants to change all that, and if it's successful you'll just need $10 and a VR headset to orbit the Earth. The plan is to send a tiny 12-camera rig that shoots three-dimensional, 360-degree video to the International Space Station aboard a resupply mission in December. New virtual reality footage will be available every week, but will only be accessible with a subscription. As Isaac DeSouza, SpaceVR's cofounder and CTO puts it, "it's like Netflix, except you get to go to space."
WIRED: Undocumented, Unafraid: Immigrants Find Power Revealing Themselves Online
The connective powers — and relative anonymity — of the Internet are starting to break down these walls of secrecy, finally enabling undocumented people to find each other and remind each other that they’re not as alone as they think they are. Starting in 2010, an intrepid group of young undocumented immigrants in Chicago uploaded videos to YouTube, telling the world that they were undocumented. Since then, thousands more videos have landed on YouTube. Undocumented people have created page after page on Facebook. They’ve used the hashtag #UndocumentedandUnafraid to band together and share their stories on Twitter. And advocacy groups have sprouted up with the explicit purpose of getting undocumented people and their allies to reshape their own narrative using the tools of the Internet. “I would argue this is the first civil rights movement that has grown up in social media,” says Vargas, who launched Define American’s Coming Out campaign last summer.
aarp Community Challenge: nola gets fit
A FitLot is an outdoor fitness park that makes the benefits of indoor exercise training free and accessible to the public. At the FitLot park in New Orleans, Louisiana, coaches provided 36 hours of free training to an extremely dedicated group of seniors in a community that suffers from one of the largest health disparity gaps in the country. AARP Community Challenge grant funding also helped to construct a footbridge and walking path from the community fitness lot to the Lafitte Greenway, an active rails-to-trails pedestrian path.