Thursday, February 08, 2007
Grantmaking and Web 2.0
CROSSPOSTED FROM IMAGESPACE--ARTS AND WEB 2.0
The business of grants is all about relationships. Grantmaking networks are a variation on the social network.
Last week I was in Great Falls Montana and today I was in Salt Lake City. In both cases I was intersecting with individuals who are interested in TourWest--WESTAF's grant program.
In Montana, they have developed a culture of co-operative block booking--the activity of several presenters working together to bring in an artist or artists who then tour from place to place. Often block booking is the only way to get a high profile performer to come to your community. These block booking networks are social networks that rely on one another to resell product--the show.
Networking for a shared purpose is occuring online more and more. For example, on Revver, you can create collections of other people's media and make 20% off all ad revenue when someone watches that video from your placement. Interestingly, Revver has not created a method for you to see/know who has syndicated content. I would think that it is in everybody's best interest to be able to network with those who have similar content and to collaborate.
In Utah, one of the things I observed immediately as the grant writing workshop began was the need of the participants to begin a social network. Where do you present? Who are you working with? Do you want to work together?
This brings my thinking to Web 2.0 and the impetus for humans to form groups. I believe that there is an opportunity to create a Web 2.0 site that fosters presenters need to network. Some work has been done on this by the New England Foundation on the Arts with Matchbook.
Taking this one step further, it seems to me that presenting activities of these groups can be directly related to the grants that they apply for. For example, an application in TourWest is more competitve when the applicant can demonstrate block booking activities with the artist(s) they are bringing in. It would be interesting to create a Web 2.0 system that would allow virtual booking conference where there is strong communication between the presenting parties. A mashup could put the location of each booking on a Google Map and indicate dates. The explosion of APIs make this concept viable and relatively inexpensive.
Tags: web 2.0, mashup, REVVER, grantmaking, TourWest
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