I met Maxime a year ago. Maxime is a passionate young design entrepreneur now leading the Collaborative Cities Project. OuiShare has been helping Maxime and his team to make this project possible. I suggested he shoud present Collaborative Cities to the Shareable audience. Here comes the interview.

Hey Maxime, who are you?

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Hi Antonin. I'm a 23 year old designer.

I studied interaction design in Nantes, France, where I became passionnate about the power of the web, and the mechanics behind it when it comes to social networks, p2p services, and online communities. Following the first Obama campaign, I realized that the Internet had become a mainstream tool to meet offline, not just an online exchange platform.

I moved to New York and started studying service design at Parsons where I learned from Cameron Tonkinwise and a few other amazing teachers from the DESIS Lab almost everything I now love about the collaborative/sharing economy.

When I came back to France last year, I joined the OuiShare movement here in Paris. I always had this documentary project in mind since Parsons and I thought that OuiShare would be the best place to start the project. Since then this amazing European community has helped me in many ways, from crowdsourcing the initatives to showcase, designing a truly participatory documentary experience, and finally helping me reach our crowdfunding goal everyday.

What's the Collaborative Cities project all about?

The Collaborative Cities project is a documentary about the collaborative economy. It will showcase inspiring entrepreneurs, communities, and users that are building this new economy everyday. We will travel to 12 cities in North America and Europe to interview these people and ask them how they created, started their project, startup, how they build communities. What we want is for this documentary to truly be about the collaborative economy by using most of the services we will showcase.

You started a crowdfunding campaign a month ago, how is it going?

It's going well, we already raised almost 40%, but we can and we need to do so much more now to reach our goal on July 31st. We have a little less than one month to go to make this project come true.

And this will be done by sharing the word, finding new backers and making sure everyone who would like to support this project, knows about it! That's where the help of a brilliant magazine like Shareable is so important. I also invite all your passionate readers to share the link of our crowdfunding campaign on Facebook, Twitter, or to your friends in a simple mail. And please do tag us, we love to see what this project means to you 🙂

It's time to pass a call: Can we help you in any ways?

For the coming weeks, there is just one link to remember: https://www.kisskissbankbank.com/en/projects/collaborative-cities

Thanks a lot for your support!