We Have a Dream... Machine

By Katherine Dodds

Help us reach our goal of 5000 boosts by midnight April 25!

At Hello Cool World we really are dreamers, and it's a good thing too. We dream of tools for social change, amplification engines for all our visions of alternative futures. The dream is what keeps me going.

There is a story behind every dream. Since I learned to read (such a long time ago), the technology that is the alphabet changed my life forever. But I also had the first massive moment of facing my limits because I had always assumed that once a person learned to read, they simply went on to read all the books. Which is what I set out to do.

The moment when I realized I could never read all the books was devastating. I also discovered there were more languages than I could ever learn. The tower of babble fell on my five-year old self, already drunk on fermented knowledge apples. It was one of my most profound moments, the friction between desire and reality, and I never recovered from learning my personal limits.

Since then I have been obsessed with systems. And collaborations. Things that help people do more than what they can do alone. And which is why, in such a personal way, I fell in love with the possiblities of the internet.

When we began working on The Corporation over a decade ago, our dream was to mobilize a grassroots network that connects audiences to ideas and actions. I remember excited conversations with Mark Achbar, before the film was even in production, about grassroots outreach and the possiblities of email. We were excited about websites and heady over hypertext. It was a time when blogs barely existed, and Facebook and Twitter were years away.

But the people and projects behind the technology were the point all along. What I fell in love with was the power of connecting people. We had a grassroots hit on our hands armed with little more than an email list. As we foraged forward, we built the technological infrastructure to go with it, a centralized platform to create and launch campaigns. We always liked to say that our platform balanced content, technology and outreach.

And I could not have done ANY of this alone. Films take teams of people. So do websites, databases and strategies. What we built in the early days (with the strategic advice of Scott Nelson and the hands-on help of Phillip Djwa, followed by David Griffith, and more recently with Atef Abdelkefi & Sandy Haksi), has been serving us well.

But now, we at Hello Cool World are up against the limits of our old code, and in the face of new frontiers it's time to BOOST our platform to new heights. In a way that will offer the economy of scale to our potential user and investors.

This platform connects all the work we have been doing. We are putting into practice everything we have learned before, during and after the launches of The Corporation and other documentaries The Take, Scared Sacred, and 65_RedRoses, as well as from book projects like Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine and Picturing Transformation, Nexw-áyantsut, the book I am co-writing (with Chief Bill Williams and Nancy Bleck) for the Uts'am Witness Project. We're drawing on our experience with LACE Campaign, promoting cervical cancer awareness, and our many sexual health campaigns and cross-cultural projects, all of which require mobilizing and connecting people around a cause. We're proud of what we've accomplished and if we can scale it up, we believe we can do more good for more people.

Make our dreams come true, not only for us, but for you.

If we get into IdeaBOOST we will get monetary support and mentoring to not only work on the protoype of our improved platform, but the lean start-up expertise to build a business model to boot! It's kind of like what we've already been doing, but bigger and better.

Please support our project where the benefits to those who join us will be greater than the sum of its parts.

-- Hello Cool World Founder & Creative Director, Kat Dodds

The Dream Machine Creative Team currently includes:

Katherine Dodds, Sandy Haksi, Scott Nelson, Atef Abdelkefi and Terry Sunderland.

Read Sandy's blog on The Corporation site!

Hello Cool World is an interactive agency that works exclusively on social cause projects and campaigns. We did the grassroots marketing and produced the online campaign in four countries for The Corporation. We create, support and promote transmedia content and use grassroots and mainstream methods to get the good word out! As social entrepreneurs we run a triple-bottom line company. As film distributors for The Corporation (educational version) and 65_RedRoses, we are defining fairer trade for films with a social message. We use our profits, including all sales from our web store, to sustain campaigns.