One of the founders also informed us during the same interview that she drew on her experience of training project creators when authoring two virtual courses on the American education platform Udemy (which also hosts online courses accredited by Kickstarter): ‘I use this platform a lot, just in terms of guidance about tone, because they have very strict criteria and I’ve put two courses online, so I try to transfer this experience to campaigns.’ In her doctoral thesis, Marine Jouan writes about her experience as a ‘project moderator’ with KissKissBankBank, a role that brings together two complementary missions: ‘giving advice to project creators and looking for new projects for the platform’:
My work then consisted in ‘moderating’ requests for fundraising that arrive on the platform [...]. I would also advise them on fundraising. I would show them how to achieve their goal by sending e-mails or getting their family and friends involved. Some project leaders asked for my help during fundraising, worried that the amount raised might stall as the end of the campaign came nearer. I then tried to see with them what they could do in order to achieve the goal they had set. The second part of my work consisted in attracting new projects to the platform, I also did a review of the public and private bodies, associations and organisations that might come into contact with project creators looking for funding. I tried to contact them via e-mail to present the work of KissKissBankBank and invited them to contact us if they were interested. I also made many phone calls to these bodies to ask whether they had any artists in their network who might be interested. I ended up going to some of them to give presentations to interested parties. I responded to their questions about how the platform works and how a fundraising campaign works. (Jouan 2017: 22)
She concludes this brief account of her internal experience with the platform by emphasizing that it ofered her the first signs of what she went on to observe in her research—in particular, ‘the tensions between the values of mutual aid and the financial dimension, between a generous image of crowdfunding and the realities of fundraising, centred on financial matters’. These values of mutual aid and this generous image seem like a veneer that attempts to dissimulate the true nature of the ‘teachings’ which these proselytizing managerial discourses proffer to project creators who then, in turn, must repeat the same process among their own little ‘crowds’.
Participatory Cultural Platforms and Labour
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