[wos] Re: cultural projects to be included in wos4

[Saul Albert]

On Fri, May 26, 2006 at 09:57:08PM +0200, cornelia sollfrank wrote:
> And I would also love to get your opinion on the specific position 
> openmute holds in the landscape of 'open cultures' in gb.

hi Cornelia, Kapi,

Just to add another 2c to this...

OpenMute is probably the first port of call for most art/cultural workers
exploring FLOSS for the first time and wanting to get their hands dirty.
They've provided an invaluable service to many with scant resources and
time who want to try and infuse and inform their practices with some of
the ideas and tools they've been reading about in theory...

In this sense OM has been a real facilitator - and the hundreds of sites
people have started are testament to that.

The only problem is that their development process is a bit too slow.
Due to lack of resources and time I think they don't get a lot of help or
contribution from their user community - which has little money and few
relevant skills... There is a trickle-back of funding reciprocity (mute
offer a platform, people use it to bolster their projects, they get
funded, a little comes back to OpenMute) but I worry that it's not
financially sustainable.

Their publishing platform is a very promising way of changing that
equasion: Mute's Print on Demand system has been used really effectively
by a few different projects to publish exhibition-related readers etc..
and I think that's a bit more profitable - if the book becomes popular,
possibly even more so. 

Tying in content production and distributing authorship through their
network is also just now being experimented with (after about 10 years
of planning!) with the re-launch of metamute.org.

I think it would be really interesting to hear Simon talk about these
aspects of the business as well as the range of services and plans they
have for the future. 

As to their 'position', I'd say that along with Resonance FM, Mute are
probably one of the key platforms for open culture and production in the
UK.. even if their scale and capacity remains quite small, the tools
they're using and the networks they maintain are invaluable..

Cheers,

Saul.