It has been a while since we last wrote a post on this blog. But now, we have some exciting news to share.

As we’ve previously discussed on Datastories, RAWGraphs was born as a self-initiated side project more than 6 years ago in an academic context during our work at the DensityDesign Research Lab at Politecnico di Milano, mostly thanks to the work of Giorgio Caviglia who lead the project in the initial years.

Apart from some sponsorships, we always worked on maintaining and improving RAWGraphs during our spare time and for free, we added charts and features according to our needs and user feedback as we went along, without a specific roadmap. We did some experiments but we were always too busy with other professional, teaching and research activities, and did not get the chance to finalize them and make them accessible to everyone.

We got to a point where we realized that if we wanted to keep working on RAWGraphs and improve it, we needed to invest more time and energy into it. Especially because, what was born as a self-initiated project, has now become an important tool for professionals and teachers around the world (we have more than 4,000 unique visitors every week).

This is why we decided it was time to find a sustainable way to maintain the project. The goal is to fairly compensate the people that work on the project, enlarge the team and dedicate the right amount of time and resources on it.

In order to accomplish this, we’re launching a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo after the summer to raise funds to support the design and development of a brand new version of RAWGraphs. We went for the crowdfunding option because we thought it was an interesting way to get in touch with our users while continuing to be independent. The most important thing for us is to keep the tool 100% free and open to everyone, staying true to the original spirit of the project.

In the coming weeks we will write more details about the campaign, the perks, the features we are planning to implement and our goals for the campaign.

Help us make it possible by spreading the word about the campaign through social media and within your network. Visit our pre-launch campaign page on Indiegogo and subscribe.