The film explores a new breed of creators, geeks, and artists who cut out the middlemen to make their bold ideas a reality by reaching out to the crowd.
In just a few years, crowdfunding has empowered a whole new generation of artists to create things in a way never been done before.
Capital C is the first feature length documentary dedicated to crowdfunding, focusing on the hopes and dreams as well as the fears and pitfalls of independent creators in the wake of the digital age.
According to MIT Professor Eric von Hippel, “crowd funding is an important contributor to the democratization of innovation – the biggest paradigm shift in innovation since the Industrial Revolution.“
For 20 years Tom Dawkins has been exploring how technology and culture can be harnessed as tools to create a more democratic and participatory society.
Tom is co-founder and CEO of social change crowdfunding platform StartSomeGood.com.
StartSomeGood supports social entrepreneurs to raise the funds and mobilise the community they need to make a difference and has deployed over $6 million so far with one of the highest success rates in crowdfunding.
Tom previously founded several non-profit organisations including Vibewire Youth Inc. which he led from 2000-2008. Achievements included the 2002 launch of the youth culture website Vibewire.net, opening the first co-working space in Australia in 2006, and embedding the youth reporters with the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader during Federal election in 2004 and 2007. He also led dance party production team circuitry from 1999-2004.
From 2008-2010 Tom was the first Social Media Director at Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, in Washington DC. There he helped numerous Ashoka programs and country offices to incorporate social technologies into their work while taking Ashoka’s Twitter following from 0 to over 300,000. In 2010 he moved to San Francisco where he worked with several local organisations before co-founding StartSomeGood (and a Burning Man theme camp) and moving back to Sydney for the birth of his son Bodhi in 2012.
Tom was the Director of the Australian Changemakers Festival 2013 and 2014.
Tom has been recognised with numerous awards and fellowships and has been a regular speaker at conferences and teacher of seminars and workshops for past 15 years, including SXSW, SOCAP, REMIX, The World Summit on the Information Society, Connecting Up, Progress and FWD.
Tom is a passionate advocate for the power of technology and social media to build community, inspire changemakers and empower all of us to change the world.
