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In the case of a center with the MIT trajectory, or a project that seeks to enhance the fields of cultural/technological and social innovation as Goteo, it's easy to think that the profile of people interested in contributing collectively to an idea through donations is closely tied to some ideal of progress, advancement and social innovation. The key to this model is undoubtedly in connection with investors. It offers the opportunity to become actively involved, albeit by small amounts of money in an initiative that identifies potential investor as an interesting, rewarding and dignified cause.

Since its inception, the open source movement (one of the potential nodes of the user network Goteo) has based a great part of its strategies in collective and cooperative development. One of the major obstacles for many communities structured around open source initiatives in areas as diverse as web applications, artistic creation, business solutions, etc. remains the initial funding and its continuity for the initiative.

An interesting case study in this aspect is Joomla!, a popular content management system released under a GPL license. Joomla! emerged in 2005 from an amendment to a previous project called Mambo, owned by the Australian company Miro. It proposed to manage the project through a nonprofit organization, but the Mambo development team protested, claiming that the legal basis of the new organization violated the values of open source which until then had been the basis for its development. By creating the web page OpenSourceMatters.org, developers presented the situation to its community of users, designers and others involved. During the following weeks, with the support of thousands of individual users and the Software Freedom Law Center, the community grew to the point where it dissociated completely from Miro, leading to Joomla!, derived from the English pronunciation of "Jumla" ( "together") of the swahili word. During the first year of Joomla! existence, the system was downloaded 2.5 million times, and five years later is still very popular.

The originating process for Joomla! is a good example of how a community of users using a network platform to exchange information about the project, collectively organizes a change of direction and support to an initiative they trust and believe in. Even more, by creating OpenSourceMatters.org the community grew, attracting users interested in the open source philosophy. A platform such as Goteo could act as a distributed financing solution for groups that require the support of a particular community. But it could also lead to a synergy between these communities of users of various projects, united by a common interest beyond specific initiatives, and act as an umbrella for uniting active groups, developers, citizens, users and agencies in adjacent areas of cultural, social or technological innovation.