The Citizens Media® – the-CM.com – provides social media and digital exchange tools for developing resilient, self-sustaining communities. It gives agency for using your voice to attract and uplift funding for developing a local network of businesses and critical services.

You work by sharing inspiring and insightful conversations about you and your community – the business, activities and services you want to make happen where you live. We work by developing tools and relationships for using your voice to inform, attract and direct funds from both small and big donors.

Funds your voice attracts go to help local businesses make products you need. You are rewarded through tokens – CM Coins™ – that you can use to purchase products they make.

Here’s how it works.

First you’ll need a Community Coordinator. Community Coordinators are responsible for ensuring content and its authors are the real deal. They work with the community to engage, govern and support participation, and to distribute funds that come in.

To get you going, your Community Coordinator will be an established nonprofit or cooperative that’s actively working within your community. As participation grows, they’ll help you – the people who live there – to launch your own coop for taking on Community Coordinator activities yourselves.

Community Coordinators begin by launching a Community Page. This page connects all content by the people who live there. Content can be shared through comments, posts or forums on both your Community Page and its Business Pages. Any kind of media will work. Business Pages are created by locals seeking funds to help develop their business. To appeal for funds, they add Funding Opportunities – budgeted requests for money they need. Funding Opportunities include a list of products they promise to give to their community in return for funds received. This is their Commitment Pool. It’s the method we use for paying funds forward within the community it was intended to serve.

Another of the Community Coordinators tasks is to work with participating members to develop a Community Empowerment Plan. This involves identifying critical community services – how will they operate and what funding is required? Funding is met by adding a percentage to Business Funding Opportunities – bit like a tax but the community decides together how much the tax will be and how it will be used. All funding gets directed through Funding Opportunities.

What other percentages are added on?

5% is added as the platform service fee, which contributes to development, hosting and maintenance costs, the CM Coin™ exchange, and analysis services. Community Coordinators may also add a percentage to Funding Opportunities, to offset costs such as merchant banking and those related to inclusivity, such as participation gatherings or workshops and the hiring of Media Facilitators. Media Facilitators can help underserved community members to overcome inclusivity challenges such as access to technology, literacy and translation. They are typically students or graduates.

CM’s revenues will be complemented through capped investments and Sponsorships attracted through podcasts and promotional events. Events include summits and sensemaking sessions that take a deep dive into activities taking place on the platform, what we can learn and what we can do.

Note that The Citizens Media’s® exit strategy is not to go public, but rather to release ownership to the people and communities who take part.

The percentage being added to Funding Opportunities for its Community Coordinator and Empowerment Plan is displayed on its home page.

How your voice attracts funds

Funds are attracted by Community Members, sharing comments and stories that communicate community opportunities and needs:

… local business that serves local needs by:

Funding comes from individuals through instant pledges of support, and through lump sum donations which can be targeted by region or another nonpartisan criteria, then awarded to Funding Opportunities over a fixed period of time. People will give because of our values, mission and goals, and CM’s ability to analyse and maximise impact of funds. This is in part achieved as funds given through CM are paid forward within the community’s marketplace.

Community Marketplace

Funds are paid forward as people use CM Coins™ to purchase products from the Commitment Pools offered up by businesses seeking funds. Product is exchanged in a community digital marketplace, which most will access through a mobile device.

Once a Funding Opportunity has been fully funded, for every dollar's worth of product promised through its Commitment Pool, 10 CM Coins™ are released. The coins are distributed to community members whose voice helped attract funds. The CM Coin™ values of products in a Commitment Pool is based on their equivalent value in national, fiat currency.

The more a business gives back through its Commitment Pool, the more the community will want to help them get funded again. It’s a system of reciprocity.

CM Coins™ a business accepts in exchange for products, can be used to help pay workers, or to purchase products from other local businesses participating in CM. The more each business gives back on funds it receives, the more members of the community will want to be a voice that helps it and other local businesses too. The more businesses get supported, the more funding there will be for critical community services. The more conversations – challenges, ideas and solutions – shared through conversations, the faster sustainable, scalable change can occur. Communities become motivated to connect and work together holding each other accountable creating a new, bottom-up economy as they go.

CM Coins™ can only be released and used in connection with local, sustainably produced products and services. As activities ramp up, analysis of how CM Coins™ flow will be used to advise communities on whether to release additional coins into their CM Coin™ Marketplace. Additional coins could be released by either:

  1. Paying Critical Service workers in CM Coins™, or;
  2. Inviting businesses to add specific products into the CM Coin™ Marketplace

Algorithms – such as identifying what content earns what share of CM Coins™, and how impact of funds is assessed – will change in accordance to what we learn along the way. They will be determined through informed collaboration with our partners. This includes Community Coordinators – who represent participants – and leading economists too. Discussion on these matters and more will be incorporated in Sensemaking Sessions made public to all participants: funders, investors, sponsors and recipients of funds or CM Coins™.

By working together we can do so much more

This initiative uses technology to bridge understanding, build connections and scale up innovative, impactful and realisable ideas. It strives for equal opportunity and employs us in shaping our world and our humanity into something we believe in and can thrive in too.

By collaborating in CM you are uplifting communities, turning disenfranchised, disempowered people into powerful agents of change. You are building a new economy made resilient from within. An economy that's by the people, for the people, and for the world that sustains us too.

To learn more, check out the links below.

Think New. Think Forward.® the-cm.com