Digital Infrastructure and Public Interest
[Source: Grantmakers in the Arts Reader: Volume 19, No. 3, Fall 2008]
What is the best way to promote a vibrant and diverse exchange of
educational information, cultural expression, and political discourse
over the Internet? What type of service—commercial enterprise,
government agency, or non-commercial organization—can be counted on to
insure that quality and diversity are reflected prominently? Recent
experience suggests that a new type of hybrid organization, driven by a
strong non-commercial mission but operating with success in the
consumer marketplace, may offer the optimal balance of financial
sustainability and commitment to the public interest.
The
Internet has permitted, for the first time in history, a highly
efficient method of collective action that permits large-scale
achievements with relatively little investment and operating revenues.
According to Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations,
“Our electronic networks are enabling novel forms of collective action,
enabling the creation of collaborative groups that are larger and more
distributed than at any other time in history.” [See review by Tom Borrup]
Three
powerful examples of this new type of enterprise are: Wikipedia, the
Mozilla Foundation, which publishes the popular Firefox web browser;
and the Participatory Culture Foundation, which has released the online
video player Miro. Each of them operates a popular online consumer
information service, operating with a relatively small paid staff and
thousands of volunteers who help to accomplish significant work for the
organization. Perhaps most remarkable among them, Wikipedia publishes a
user-created encyclopedia that ranks as the eighth largest web site on
the Internet (according to web-tracking service Alexa), operating on a
budget of just over $2 million last year.
However efficient
these organizations are, they are not entirely without costs. And they
are particularly hard to grow from scratch, because they have to
operate at a very large scale to demonstrate their value to potential
creators and consumers. Unfortunately, there is very little capital
available for such start-up efforts. While there are billions of
dollars in Silicon Valley venture firms seeking to invest in the next
Google, Facebook, or YouTube, there is no equivalent capital pool
available for investment in the expansion of social enterprises
operating in the public interest. So the real challenge is for
grantmakers to figure out how to effectively identify, vet, and support
promising new media and information services that put the public
interest before commercial profits.
It may be instructive,
however, to first think about how the market can let us down, even—and
perhaps especially—in the realm of the Internet.
In 1995, Rob
Glaser—fresh from a successful stint at Microsoft—founded a new
company—Progressive Networks, which was initially intended to help
distribute politically progressive ideas to counter-balance the
strength of conservative organizations in getting their message out.
Along the way, Glaser stumbled upon an early version of software that
would make it feasible, for the first time, to transmit audio content
over the Internet. He quickly re-directed his company to focus on
software development, changed the name to RealNetworks and took the
company public.
Now, RealNetworks is a powerhouse in streaming
media, delivering a large share of the market in audio and video
content over the web. Now that RealNetworks has achieved a strong
position in the marketplace, it's interesting to go back to the
original mission of the company—promoting progressive content in the
media. How are they doing?
On a recent morning, the RealNetworks
media service Rhapsody sent out an online alert touting a typical mix
of programming available. Two highlights: One implores users to “See
pics of pop's wildest girls” and another promises images of reckless
celebrities. “Their music may excite us, but their behavior is
absolutely boorish.” Most days Rhapsody offers a similar come-on.
The
simple truth is the market wants what the market wants. And even with
the best of intentions a commercial media enterprise is generally going
to deliver content choices that follow the cold calculus of the
marketplace. For RealNetworks, née Progressive Networks, it is a far
cry from the company's original mission to help spread politically
progressive ideas.
This example is not intended to castigate Rob
Glaser or RealNetworks for abandoning their original mission. And it's
not meant to proclaim moral indignation in the face of more cleavage or
carnage. It's just a reality. There's a reason for the term crass
commercialism, after all.
And there's nothing new or special
about the Internet that drags commercial expression down. Witness the
trajectory of Arts and Entertainment, a cable television service that
started out with a high-minded purpose and, somewhere along the way to
becoming just “A & E,” found itself serving up heaping portions of Dog the Bounty Hunter, a foul cocktail of human melodrama.
Given
the gravitational pull of the market to exert a
lowest-common-denominator effect on programming, the challenge remains:
How to organize Internet services that stick to their missions and
serve the public interest, rather than simply returning a profit to
shareholders. Equally, it is a challenge for grantmakers who would like
to create an information eco-system where the public interest is served
in a sustainable way.
Of the three organizations cited
above—Wikipedia, Mozilla, and the Participatory Culture Foundation
(PCF)—the Miro online video player created by PCF is the newest and
most immediately relevant example for this discussion. Begun in 2005
with initial support from Lotus founder Mitch Kapor's Open Source
Application Foundation and from Skyline Public Works, a charitable fund
of Andy and Deborah Rappaport, PCF sought to create a free and
open-source software tool that would enable users to view any
freely-downloadable video content available on the Internet. Appearing
first in beta form as The Democracy Player, then moving to full public
launch as Miro, the player has quickly become a popular and critically
acclaimed method for viewing video content.
Upon public launch in November 2007, Fortune Magazine's online technology blog declared simply: “I have seen the future of Internet TV and it is an application called Miro.”
The
mission of PCF is lofty—“to build a television system that is more open
than ever before.” Further, the organization strives “to eliminate
gatekeepers, corporate control, and centralization as (it) works toward
a new vision of open media where everyone can create, curate and
participate.” And it is a miracle of the modern public interest
Internet enterprise that Miro is able to compete with commercial
companies that are capitalized at many, many times its size.
In
just a few short years, Miro has provided a way to view, in full-screen
and high-resolution quality, content that might otherwise have to be
delivered via streaming media windows, which for technical reasons tend
to appear in smaller windows with lower resolution. More to the point,
Miro allows every consumer and creator to establish their own
connection, without a commercial intermediary getting in the way. The
response has been tremendous. Already, there are over 5,000 channels of
content featured on the Miro Guide, a catalogue of content viewable on
the Miro Player, featuring everything from nightly newscasts of the
major broadcast channels ABC, CBS, and NBC to daily feeds of Amy
Goodman's Democracy Now. The player is an especially good way
to view science programs in High Definition, such as KQED's Quest, and
astronomy shows like NASA's Hubblecast featuring images from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Miro
is like Tivo for the Internet, in that you can find a program that you
would like to see, download it to your computer, and watch it whenever
you want, rather than when it is broadcast. It's a great way to view
familiar programs from PBS, like Bill Moyers Journal and Sesame Street,
but also public broadcasting programs from other countries, including
Canada, Germany, Norway, and many others. One of the breakaway hits on
Miro is from Norwegian State Television (NRK), called Nordkalotten 365,
in which a guy and his dog roam through the wilderness north of the
Arctic Circle with nothing but their canoe and an HD camera. By
deciding to distribute their program directly to Internet viewers using
Miro and BitTorrent (peer-to-peer file sharing software), NRK was able
to reach an online audience of more than 100,000 viewers at a cost of
just $300, showing that the economics of broadband TV have basically
made it possible for anyone to reach an infinite audience at a
negligible cost.
The arts are also well represented on Miro, especially in PBS programs like One From the Top
at Carnegie Hall, featuring young performers in concert and in
vignettes about their lives, as well as content produced independently
by arts organizations, like the video podcasts produced by the
Philharmonia Orchestra and Wynton Marsalis, and Jazz at Lincoln Center, both of which both feature highlights and previews from upcoming performances and recent recording releases.
Although
it has received support from a few foundations such as the Knight and
Surdna foundations and the Phoebe Haas Charitable Trust, as with many
nonprofit start-ups that do not correspond to standard funding
categories, Miro continues to struggle financially. Even so, it has
been able to compete effectively against much larger commercial
enterprises because of the way it distributes work beyond paid staff to
hundreds of volunteers who carry out significant elements of its
operations, such as ranking content in the Miro Guide, translating the
site into fifty languages, and responding to user problems in a
collective effort to create the most effective service possible. If all
of those volunteers were paid for the critical services they provide to
the site, the budget would have to be roughly forty times as large,
according to Executive Director Nicholas Reville.
Going beyond
their own experience, two of the founders of PCF, Nicholas Reville and
Holmes Wilson, have written a short white paper, Sustainable Public Media Infrastructure,
identifying the special opportunity available to funders who want to
help build sustainable public media infrastructure, “creating
permanent, sustainable public knowledge and communications
infrastructure designed for public benefit.” In their paper, Reville
and Wilson discuss the tremendous success of Wikipedia and Mozilla's
Firefox in serving both to advance the public interest and to reach a
vast consumer audience.
“Mozilla's mission is to promote open
communication standards on the web,” according to the authors. “It
accomplishes this goal by building open-source technology based on
shared publicly-defined standards.” After just five years of
operations, Firefox has achieved an astounding 20 percent market share,
competing with Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser. Given its
extensive market reach, Firefox has also established revenue generating
partnerships that are now generating about $70 million without
compromising its charitable mission.
Reville and Wilson point
out one of the key takeaways of the Mozilla example: “Nonprofits have
competitive advantages in the marketplace: high levels of trust and
credibility, and volunteer communities that can multiply the reach of
the paid staff.”
Firefox, Wikipedia, and now Miro have all shown
that non-commercial media and technology enterprises can achieve great
success in the consumer marketplace without surrendering their missions
to the marketplace. Philanthropy needs to acknowledge that this
opportunity is an imperative that requires us to find ways to identify,
evaluate, and support the non-commercial work that will help build a
public interest infrastructure to promote the free exchange of
knowledge over the Internet.
If we don't, we will always have lots of “pics of pop's wildest girls” to keep us amused.
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