isummit08

There's always a business model question hovering around iSummit, and 08 is no exception. Jamie King talked about what he'd learnt from Steal this film -with some great pidgeon pictures - but also talked about VODO, a platform for users to  donate for cultural production on peer-to-peer networks. Each work has a paypal account linked to it, and the community can identify files as being tokens of a "work''. Donations get aggregated. Now, the nice twist I liked here was Jamie's idea of giving works the option to specify that some percentage of donations will be spread back into the community of previous donors - by donating you are buying a share. This will appeal in some places and in some communities. You will need to fix the shape of pyramid, etc - and you could let donors specify _who_ their share was going to go to --- good, for example, in communities where the scheme seemed too Wall Street -like for comfort. 

More generally, it struck me that getting good ways of chanelling funds for specific types of production is something that all publishers on the commons are trying to do. So here is another opportunity for iCommons to think about shared infrastructure.How about iCommons created buttons -- and systems behind -- that I could embed on a piece of content and which said: 

``I'd like to support this piece of content''

``I'd like to give general support to this organisation"

``I pledge $x to this project as long as total pledges amount to $y"

In all these cases, I think that standardisation across Commons  sites would be useful - the donor would come to learn what a button meant; could have an account at the shared piece of infrastructure , etc.

OK, and iCommons could have a pyramid-shaped button for VODO :)

They print it on the spot, within a few hours. You get a template - this one had the iSummit08 logo on it, you tell it what Flickr stream you want (I asked for openDemocracy's) and you make your t-shirt.

Here is the one I did yesterday

Let me have your orders, Yen1,000 per shirt.Tony

I spent yesterday in the Local Commons Global Context track of the iSummit event which was focusing on publishing on the commons. oD was there as one of 2 other publications for whom the ethos of the global commons is important. GlobalVoicesOnline, which we know and love, and Overmundo - less familiar because it of its Brazilian language and culture focus.

GVOnline is a digest of blogs that is orchestrated by a remarkable volunteer network. One of its most impressive achievements has been the development of translation communities around GV, Lingua, which is now, in part at least, available in 15 languages. I spent a lot of time talking to translators---how they organise the volunteer networks; why they are motivated to do it ("many of our volunteers are away from their home countries and cultures; translating is a homage to home" was one answer). 

Overmundo has developed a community of citizen commentators, of editorial democracy that seems very remarkable -- energetic, popular and self-asserting. A sort Slashdot of Brazilian culture. 

 Rebecca Kahn,  convenor and connector of dots on the Local Commons Global Context track, wanted to know what all three publications could share --- apart from basic ethos. At first, it seemed hard to think of this --- all three publications are living experiments whose way of working is an integral part of the qualities the publications exhibit. So mixing and matching seems hard. (oD sometimes carries GV material, so some mixing and matching is very straightforward). But beyond using content, which we can do anyway under the CC licenses, what more could be done to combine our strengths? As Chris Salzberg, the Japan Lingua editor, said: `` even within GV we have trouble keeping with everything. The bottleneck is time and attention!"

 Well, on reflection, I think there are a number of things we should be doing to combine our strengths:

1. sort out the search engine stuff that I keep going on about (here and here)- we are all affected by it, so let's have a joint approach to it 
2. move towards a common open-ID login infrastructure - give people who want to login a common identity across the global commons publishers and provide a sense of a ``family of publications" that you are a part of
3. participate in cross-advertising. The overlap of our potential readerships is likely to be quite large - so let's make sure that we regularly point readers to the other publications. For oD, one of our most effective means of promotion is the 50k strong email distribution, where, on a monthly basis, we could include a link to the family of commons publishers. Even better, of course, if someone took on the task at iCommons of writing a summary blog post of what is going on in the publishing commons, and linking to that...
4. some degree of editorial forward planning. so, for example, we might have a quarterly skype call for publications in the ``commons family" simply to talk about what each of us has coming up, to make sure we're not missing any tricks in possible collaborations, joint fundraising or marketing activities ...