CC Public Wiki - User contributions [en]

Grants/Servers for A Torrent of Our Own (TO3); a project of the Organization For Transformative Works (OTW)

2010-07-01T01:12:39Z

Kate.mollen: Correct dates and credentials

{{Grant Application
|Project Title=Servers for A Torrent of Our Own (TO3); a project of the Organization For Transformative Works (OTW)
|applicants=Organization For Transformative Works
|contact person=Allison Morris amorris@transformativeworks.org Development Officer, Organization for Transformative Works Board, Organization for Transformative Works
|coordinator=Dr. Francesca Coppa fcoppa@transformativeworks.org Board, Organization for Transformative Works Chair, Vidding Committee
|start date=2010/08/01
|end date=2011/07/31
|Affiliation=Organization for Transformative Works
|Mainurl=http://transformativeworks.org/, http://transformativeworks.org/projects/vidding-roadmap
|Affiliated=No
|description=The Torrent of Our Own (TO3) is a bittorrent tracker open to registered users to post torrents for fair-use transformative fanworks, including: fan vids, fic trailers, political remix, AMVs, machinima, and other forms of transformative digital remix. The TO3 will be built to integrate with the Archive of Our Own (the OTW's flagship project: a custom-built, fully functional, open source archive for fanworks designed and coded almost entirely by women) but can also be used to stream and embed fair use video in other social networking systems such as blogs, LiveJournal, etc. The current legal and economic climate in the United States necessitates the creation of a dedicated noncommercial and nonprofit network for fair use video. Large, profitable streaming sites such as YouTube have been forced to adopt content-filtering systems that cannot differentiate between fair and infringing uses of copyrighted material; smaller sites have been driven out of business by the resources (servers, bandwidth) sharing video demands. The system we envision--using a distributed system (torrents) to stream fair use video in an avowedly open source, noncommercial context--solves both the political and the resource issues currently plaguing various communities of fair use digital remixers.
|output=The Torrent of Our Own will adapt open source bittorrent technology for the purpose of sharing fair use video and be installed on a set of dedicated servers (with backups). The interface we will design will help users to embed and stream torrents within the searchable Archive of Our Own as well as other social networking sites. The OTW will also craft an educational campaign about fair use; before posting, uploaders to the TO3 will be required to read about fair use standards and agree that what they're uploading is a fair use. (We will also set up a system for reporting and banning infringing users of the tracker.)
|community=This project was developed, first and foremost, to meet the needs of fan vidders: a thirty year old community of female video artists. While the work of vidders has been written about in scholarly journals, featured in museum exhibitions, and profiled in New York Magazine and on NPR, the vidding community has been increasingly disrupted by inaccurate content-filtering systems, the commercial failure of small streaming sites, bullying cease and desist letters, and wrongful DMCA takedowns. The TO3 would not only provide a stable home for vids, but a scalable home; because torrents work best when there are high levels of collaboration and participation, we can open the network to any and all forms of fair use digital video. We plan to do particular outreach to the anime music video community, the political remix video community, and machinima makers.
|community relationship=The Organization for Transformative Works is a nonprofit organization created and run by fans to provide access to and preserve the history of fanworks and fan cultures; we literally are part of the community we are targeting. Our chair, Naomi Novik, founded VividCon, an annual convention dedicated to vids that is now in its 9th year; board members Rebecca Tushnet and Francesca Coppa testified on behalf of vidders at the DMCA exemption hearings at the Library of Congress. The OTW also supports many other vidding-related projects, including an oral history project to document the practices of pre-digital vidders and a series of vidding-resource pages.

Project leader and vidding chair Francesca Coppa is a member of the board of the OTW and Director of Film Studies as Muhlenberg College. She has written several important scholarly articles on vidding for publications such as Cinema Journal and Camera Obscura and lectured about vidding at such venues as the "DIY 24/7" conference at USC, Media In Transition 5 at MIT, Digital Media and Learning at UCSD, the Open Video Conference at NYU, and IP/Gender at the American University School of Law/Center. She is the director of a six part documentary on vidding, Vidding (2008), made for MIT's New Media Literacies project.
|measurement=A successful torrent literally requires strong participation; we hope to provide a central and sustainable home for the vidding community in particular and fair use videomakers more broadly. We hope to be the internet's version of a public television station: a public-access site that is open to all digital videomakers and remixers. The TO3 will allow us to measure and chart the number of accounts, uploads, seeders and leechers. The AO3's tagging system will allow us to see how users label their work - fan vid, AMV, political remix, machinima, fic trailer, etc. - so we'll have a fairly good idea of who's using our system and how.
|participants=Our flagship project, the Archive of Our Own, which has not yet come out of beta and which has been open to beta users for less than a year, currently has 7,522 users; moreover, the AO3 currently houses fan fiction only, which can be housed at many different places. Vidders, by contrast, have many fewer options as to how and where to archive their work: fan-favorite sites like Imeem and Ning have jettisoned user-generated content, and YouTube's content filtering system wrongfully prevent many vids from being uploaded. The "Vidding" community on LiveJournal currently has 2,035 members. [http://community.livejournal.com/vidding/].

Moreover, through our education projects and legal advocacy work, the OTW has worked closely with many different communities of fair use video remixers. Many of us came together at the USC conference "DIY 24/7: A DIY video summit" [http://www.video24-7.org/] and have worked closely with groups like the EFF and the Open Video Alliance.
|impact=All of the OTW's projects are about supporting free and public creative communities, and the TO3 is no exception. The OTW is a nonprofit organization of and for fans dedicated to the idea that copyright must not preclude creative remixing - and that remixes and fanworks are an important form of cultural commentary and are intrinsically of the commons. Our mission statement [http://transformativeworks.org/about/believe] articulates many of our values: our commitment to transformational fanworks as legitimate creative activity, our committment to our volunteer-based infrastructure and the fannish gift economy, our committment to protecting and defending our work from commercial exploitation and legal challenge. The Torrent of Our Own would literally allow fair use video to be disseminated and streamed to all outside of a commercial context: it would be a true "public access" video site.
|tech needs=The TO3 team already includes torrent guru Leigh Honeywell and a digital librarian, April Steenburgh as well as members of our extant Accessibility, Design, and Technology committee currently engaged in building the Archive of Our Own in Ruby on Rails. We are currently researching the advantages and disadvantages of torrent packages (Tribler, the Ruby on Rails tracker plugin, etc.) and looking at streaming torrent technologies like the Swarmplayer. We will also need significant server space as well as secure backups.
|challenges=The torrent itself is a response to a particular challenge that vidding represents; typically, remixers and independent video artists are looking for ways to get traffic (and eyeballs) to their videos. Fan vidding has a different problem: a popular fan vid can go viral very quickly and use up an individual's - or an organization's - bandwidth overnight. Streaming torrents turn this "problem" into an asset: popular vids will get disseminated faster without taking the server down. Our job will make sure that even less popular vids have enough seeders to make them fully accessible.

The other challenge that OTW faces is that we are an all-volunteer organization. Most of us have full-time jobs or are full-time students in addition to the work we do for OTW; many of us - perhaps even more than is typical because we are overwhelmingly women - are also in caregiving roles: we are partners, wives, mothers, daughters. However, we are in our third year of existence and we have had record donations as well as strong ongoing levels of volunteerism. So we are optimistic that we will continue to attract new members and new staff.
|sustainability=The OTW has an established fundraising system in place, with demonstrated successful growth over the course of the first three years of the organization's existence. In 2007, the year the OTW was established as a nonprofit, we raised $10,069 in the course of general funding drives; in 2008, we raised $22,074; in 2009, we raised $38,627. We expect that our general fundraising will continue to provide capital sufficient for the maintenance and growth of our existing projects, with room for further project development. Fundraising aimed specifically at vidding-related OTW projects has already been initiated from within the community; the Torrent of Our Own is particularly well supported by our membership, and is expected to attract additional supporters as it is realized and sees growth. Our expectation is to be financially prepared to replace or upgrade our TO3 servers within three years, and to continue doing so going forward in a manner that is responsive to both usage and to further developments in torrents and related technologies. Fundraising for specific project aims may be conducted as necessary to supplement organizational capital reserves, and we will continue to seek additional grant support to further this and other OTW projects.
|scalability=As we noted above, the entire idea of a torrent-based streaming video network is designed to address problems of scalability; the best part of the project as we envision it is that it can continue to support greater and great numbers of users and videos. We never have to exclude anyone who's doing anything that's original or fair use; we never have to say no. Moreover, more and more people are becoming digitally literate; we will surely see exponentially-increasing numbers of people communicating with and expressing themselves through video, even as mainstream sites are becoming more restrictive, professional, and commercial.
|resource needs=The OTW is proud to already be using CC-licenses on many of its products; our academic journal, Transformative Works and Cultures, as well as its sister blog, The Symposium, are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. The Torrent of Our Own is an opportunity to help our users learn more about CC, as well as open source and fair use, so they can make informed choices about what kind of licenses they might want to put on their vids or remixes. We are currently planning an educational campaign on fair use; before posting, uploaders will be required to read about fair use standards and agree that what they're uploading is a fair use. We also want to help our users understand the various rights associated with copyright and with various licenses. We ask that Creative Commons aid us in these goals by providing informational materials and public support for the project, and we would also like help with establishing an officer in the OTW responsible for liaising with Creative Commons, carrying out educational initiatives, and continuing to seek situations in which CC-licenses are appropriate to the organization and our membership.
|communication=The OTW maintains a blog at http://transformativeworks.org/ with mirrors on various other sites. A full list of networks and communications methods can be found here: http://transformativeworks.org/about/where-find-us. Contact forms for many of our committees can be found here: http://transformativeworks.org/contact.
|budget=TO3 budget.pdf
|legal=Yes
}}

Grants/Conference Funding for Transformative Works And Cultures

2010-07-01T01:07:41Z

Kate.mollen: Created page with '{{Grant Application |Project Title=Conference Funding for Transformative Works And Cultures |applicants=Organization For Transformative Works |contact person=Allison Morris amorr…'

{{Grant Application
|Project Title=Conference Funding for Transformative Works And Cultures
|applicants=Organization For Transformative Works
|contact person=Allison Morris amorris@transformativeworks.org Development Officer, Organization for Transformative Works Board, Organization for Transformative Works
|coordinator=Dr. Karen Hellekson and Dr. Kristina Busse, Editors, Transformative Works and Cultures.
|start date=2010/08/01
|end date=2011/07/31
|Affiliation=Organization for Transformative Works
|Mainurl=http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc
|Affiliated=No
|description=Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) is an online, international, peer-reviewed journal published by the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) and copyrighted under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. Since TWC's launch in September, 2008, we have published four issues of scholarship about transformative works such as fan fiction, fan vids, film, TV, anime, comic books, fan community, video games, and machinima, as well as articles about media studies and articles about the fan community; a fifth issue is in copyedit, a sixth in draft, and further issues are planned through 2012. However, as the OTW is a small, member-supported nonprofit, we are not currently able to send our editorial staff to the national and international conferences they should attend in order to promote our journal, solicit new work, network with potential peer reviewers, etc. Despite the evolution of new technologies that could make conference attendance more open (live streaming video and audio, Second Life, Twitter, liveblogging) many, if not most conferences, even those on media and new technology, remain closed to those who cannot afford to go there in person, pay the registration fee, and sit in the room. We believe that it is important for our editors - who represent a new, more open, more accessible form of scholarship - to engage with the larger academic world; we are therefore applying for editorial conference funds to support our work.
|output=We will track what conferences our editors attend, the presentations they make, and what TWC essays, interviews, reviews, etc. they solicit so we can generate press releases and other materials explicating our evolution as a truly new form of media scholarship. We will also develop a byline for use on TWC materials noting that the journal both uses Creative Commons licenses and has been supported by a Creative Commons grant.
|community=Transformative Works and Cultures offers top quality, peer reviewed scholarship on media studies, fan studies, gender studies, and related disciplines for free and to all who are interested in these subjects regardless of academic affiliation. At a time when traditional journals are increasingly cowed by the chilling effects of copyright, we are committed to fair use and strongly support our writers' right to quote, cite, clip, and embed. Also, while most media studies journals are still anchored to print, we are entirely online and can support audio, video, images, and other forms of multimedia scholarship. We also encourage fans who are not academics to write for the "Symposium" section of TWC and try to promote dialogue between academic communities and fan communities.
|community relationship=The founding editors of Transformative Works and Cultures - Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse - are the editors of a noted fan studies collection, "Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet" (McFarland, 2006) and both have published related work in various prestigious venues. TWC is published by the Organization for Transformative Works; many members of the OTW's board are themselves noted "acafen" - or academics who are also fans - and the OTW has always supported academic work on fan studies, media studies, and television studies, as well as legal scholarship promoting open access and fair use.
|measurement=By its nature (online, open-source, CC-licensed) and because of its subject matter (media studies, fan studies, gender studies), Transformative Works and Cultures is known within a certain subset of the academic community: online, media-savvy, highly technological first-adopters. However, for us to reach potential collaborators - and readers - beyond this sphere requires that we maintain some physical presence in the more traditional spaces of academe. We believe that we will be able to evaluate our success by seeing a broader range of contributors on a broader range of subjects on our TOC.

An illustrative example: last year, the OTW was asked to co-direct the IP/Gender conference at the American University School of Law. We helped them develop their program of speakers, and in return, they provided funding for many of the independent scholars associated with the OTW or TWC to be able to attend the conference. As a result, our editors solicited essays on quilting as transformative work and on filk singing and wizard rock; these papers came from outside our typical orbit and greatly added to the scope and vibrancy of our third issue. We believe that with additional funds, we can extend and amplify this result.
|participants=We are seeking conference support for our two editors, who otherwise work for TWC on an entirely volunteer basis. Their purpose is to network with potential contributors, readers, and reviewers and to solicit essays and other materials to ensure that TWC continues to publish the best material available and to maintain the depth and quality of TWC's scholarship. We see these goals as largely self-sustaining, as TWC is, as an academic journal, the sum of its contributors and their contributions, creating an ongoing scholarly dialogue.
|impact=TWC literally produces new knowledge for the commons through Creative Commons licensing. Most academic institutions and scholarly commentators agree that the way we have traditionally produced scholarly knowledge needs to change and evolve; your support of an independent, online, Gold Open Access, open source, CC-licensed journal would help us change academic culture.
|tech needs=TWC is published online using OJS (Open Journal Systems) software on servers owned by the member-supported Organization For Transformative Works. However - and somewhat ironically - we are seeking support in order to engage in less technical forms of academic engagement: conferences and face-to-face networking, meaning that we do not need additional technologies or tools. Our editors, Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson, have extensive experience successfully soliciting contributors for academic publishing, building relationships with scholars, and growing the prestige of their disciplines through conference work. They have both earned respect as editors and as scholars, and are valued members of both the fandom and the academic communities. Busse and Hellekson's roles in a conference setting extend past article solicitation, editing, and publication as well, encouraging citation of TWC articles, fostering continued academic discourse, and growing both the prestige of the journal and the legitimacy of their field.
|challenges=Launching Transformative Works and Cultures has been all about overcoming challenges: we have had to build the kind of open source, open access, supportive space that we needed to publish quality scholarship about transformative works. We know that we have no leeway if we want to be taken seriously: we are an unaffiliated journal edited by two independent scholars on the subject of fan cultures, remix, and transformative works. Consequently, we have the highest standards, we are scrupulous about peer review, and - unlike most academic journals - we publish exactly on time. We have also solicited a number of guest editors to helm particular themed issues to broaden our reach: for example, Henry Jenkins, Sangita Shresthova, Catherine Tosenberger, Julie Levin Russo, Madeline Ashby, Nancy Reagin, Anne Rubenstein, and Rebecca Carlson all have or will guest-edit issues for us. Our biggest challenge, however, continues to be access to academic spaces that assume institutional support.
|sustainability=The OTW has an established fundraising system in place, with demonstrated successful growth over the course of the first three years of the organization's existence. In 2007, the year the OTW was established as a nonprofit, we raised $10,069 in the course of general funding drives; in 2008, we raised $22,074; in 2009, we raised $38,627. We expect that our general fundraising will continue to provide capital sufficient for the maintenance and growth of our existing projects, with room for further project development. Transformative Works and Cultures will doubtlessly attract additional supporters as our values - fair use, open access, multimedia and multimodal scholarship - become known and our standing within the academic community becomes more established. Fundraising to build on successful conference work may be conducted as necessary into the future, and we will continue to seek additional grant support to further this and other OTW projects.
|scalability=The goal of TWC is not to be scalable, but to be sustainable: to continue to produce two issues of quality scholarship a year well into the future. Ideally, we would inspire others to adopt our model and our values. We believe that TWC is part of a new wave of quality, online, open access, CC-licensed scholarship that will change the way new knowledge is shared.
|resource needs=In addition to having Creative Commons support for the goal of fair use, open access, CC-licensed scholarship, we are seeking financial support in order to give our editors the chance to promote TWC and network with scholars at important national academic conferences. The OTW is proud to already be using CC-licenses on many of its products; our academic journal, Transformative Works and Cultures, as well as its sister blog, The Symposium, are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. We are currently planning an educational campaign on fair use; we also want to help our users understand the various rights associated with copyright and with various licenses. We ask that Creative Commons aid us in these goals by providing informational materials and public support for the project, and we would also like help with establishing an officer in the OTW responsible for liaising with Creative Commons, carrying out educational initiatives, and continuing to seek situations in which CC-licenses are appropriate to the organization and our membership.
|communication=Transformative Works and Cultures publishes online [http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc] and also publishes a sister site, the Symposium Blog [http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc]. The OTW maintains a blog at http://transformativeworks.org/ with mirrors on various other sites. A full list of networks and communications methods can be found here: http://transformativeworks.org/about/where-find-us.
|budget=TWC budget.pdf
|legal=Yes
}}

File:TWC budget.pdf

2010-07-01T01:06:32Z

Kate.mollen: Detailed budget and justification.

Detailed budget and justification.

Grants/Servers for A Torrent of Our Own (TO3); a project of the Organization For Transformative Works (OTW)

2010-07-01T00:57:07Z

Kate.mollen: Created page with '{{Grant Application |Project Title=Servers for A Torrent of Our Own (TO3); a project of the Organization For Transformative Works (OTW) |applicants=Organization For Transformativ…'

{{Grant Application
|Project Title=Servers for A Torrent of Our Own (TO3); a project of the Organization For Transformative Works (OTW)
|applicants=Organization For Transformative Works
|contact person=Allison Morris amorris@transformativeworks.org Development Officer, Organization for Transformative Works Board, Organization for Transformative Works
|coordinator=Francesca Coppa fcoppa@transformativeworks.org Board, Organization for Transformative Works Chair, Vidding Committee
|start date=2010/08/01
|end date=2010/07/31
|Affiliation=Organization for Transformative Works
|Mainurl=http://transformativeworks.org/, http://transformativeworks.org/projects/vidding-roadmap
|Affiliated=No
|description=The Torrent of Our Own (TO3) is a bittorrent tracker open to registered users to post torrents for fair-use transformative fanworks, including: fan vids, fic trailers, political remix, AMVs, machinima, and other forms of transformative digital remix. The TO3 will be built to integrate with the Archive of Our Own (the OTW's flagship project: a custom-built, fully functional, open source archive for fanworks designed and coded almost entirely by women) but can also be used to stream and embed fair use video in other social networking systems such as blogs, LiveJournal, etc. The current legal and economic climate in the United States necessitates the creation of a dedicated noncommercial and nonprofit network for fair use video. Large, profitable streaming sites such as YouTube have been forced to adopt content-filtering systems that cannot differentiate between fair and infringing uses of copyrighted material; smaller sites have been driven out of business by the resources (servers, bandwidth) sharing video demands. The system we envision--using a distributed system (torrents) to stream fair use video in an avowedly open source, noncommercial context--solves both the political and the resource issues currently plaguing various communities of fair use digital remixers.
|output=The Torrent of Our Own will adapt open source bittorrent technology for the purpose of sharing fair use video and be installed on a set of dedicated servers (with backups). The interface we will design will help users to embed and stream torrents within the searchable Archive of Our Own as well as other social networking sites. The OTW will also craft an educational campaign about fair use; before posting, uploaders to the TO3 will be required to read about fair use standards and agree that what they're uploading is a fair use. (We will also set up a system for reporting and banning infringing users of the tracker.)
|community=This project was developed, first and foremost, to meet the needs of fan vidders: a thirty year old community of female video artists. While the work of vidders has been written about in scholarly journals, featured in museum exhibitions, and profiled in New York Magazine and on NPR, the vidding community has been increasingly disrupted by inaccurate content-filtering systems, the commercial failure of small streaming sites, bullying cease and desist letters, and wrongful DMCA takedowns. The TO3 would not only provide a stable home for vids, but a scalable home; because torrents work best when there are high levels of collaboration and participation, we can open the network to any and all forms of fair use digital video. We plan to do particular outreach to the anime music video community, the political remix video community, and machinima makers.
|community relationship=The Organization for Transformative Works is a nonprofit organization created and run by fans to provide access to and preserve the history of fanworks and fan cultures; we literally are part of the community we are targeting. Our chair, Naomi Novik, founded VividCon, an annual convention dedicated to vids that is now in its 9th year; board members Rebecca Tushnet and Francesca Coppa testified on behalf of vidders at the DMCA exemption hearings at the Library of Congress. The OTW also supports many other vidding-related projects, including an oral history project to document the practices of pre-digital vidders and a series of vidding-resource pages.

Project leader and vidding chair Francesca Coppa is a member of the board of the OTW and Director of Film Studies as Muhlenberg College. She has written several important scholarly articles on vidding for publications such as Cinema Journal and Camera Obscura and lectured about vidding at such venues as the "DIY 24/7" conference at USC, Media In Transition 5 at MIT, Digital Media and Learning at UCSD, the Open Video Conference at NYU, and IP/Gender at the American University School of Law/Center. She is the director of a six part documentary on vidding, Vidding (2008), made for MIT's New Media Literacies project.
|measurement=A successful torrent literally requires strong participation; we hope to provide a central and sustainable home for the vidding community in particular and fair use videomakers more broadly. We hope to be the internet's version of a public television station: a public-access site that is open to all digital videomakers and remixers. The TO3 will allow us to measure and chart the number of accounts, uploads, seeders and leechers. The AO3's tagging system will allow us to see how users label their work - fan vid, AMV, political remix, machinima, fic trailer, etc. - so we'll have a fairly good idea of who's using our system and how.
|participants=Our flagship project, the Archive of Our Own, which has not yet come out of beta and which has been open to beta users for less than a year, currently has 7,522 users; moreover, the AO3 currently houses fan fiction only, which can be housed at many different places. Vidders, by contrast, have many fewer options as to how and where to archive their work: fan-favorite sites like Imeem and Ning have jettisoned user-generated content, and YouTube's content filtering system wrongfully prevent many vids from being uploaded. The "Vidding" community on LiveJournal currently has 2,035 members. [http://community.livejournal.com/vidding/].

Moreover, through our education projects and legal advocacy work, the OTW has worked closely with many different communities of fair use video remixers. Many of us came together at the USC conference "DIY 24/7: A DIY video summit" [http://www.video24-7.org/] and have worked closely with groups like the EFF and the Open Video Alliance.
|impact=All of the OTW's projects are about supporting free and public creative communities, and the TO3 is no exception. The OTW is a nonprofit organization of and for fans dedicated to the idea that copyright must not preclude creative remixing - and that remixes and fanworks are an important form of cultural commentary and are intrinsically of the commons. Our mission statement [http://transformativeworks.org/about/believe] articulates many of our values: our commitment to transformational fanworks as legitimate creative activity, our committment to our volunteer-based infrastructure and the fannish gift economy, our committment to protecting and defending our work from commercial exploitation and legal challenge. The Torrent of Our Own would literally allow fair use video to be disseminated and streamed to all outside of a commercial context: it would be a true "public access" video site.
|tech needs=The TO3 team already includes torrent guru Leigh Honeywell and a digital librarian, April Steenburgh as well as members of our extant Accessibility, Design, and Technology committee currently engaged in building the Archive of Our Own in Ruby on Rails. We are currently researching the advantages and disadvantages of torrent packages (Tribler, the Ruby on Rails tracker plugin, etc.) and looking at streaming torrent technologies like the Swarmplayer. We will also need significant server space as well as secure backups.
|challenges=The torrent itself is a response to a particular challenge that vidding represents; typically, remixers and independent video artists are looking for ways to get traffic (and eyeballs) to their videos. Fan vidding has a different problem: a popular fan vid can go viral very quickly and use up an individual's - or an organization's - bandwidth overnight. Streaming torrents turn this "problem" into an asset: popular vids will get disseminated faster without taking the server down. Our job will make sure that even less popular vids have enough seeders to make them fully accessible.

The other challenge that OTW faces is that we are an all-volunteer organization. Most of us have full-time jobs or are full-time students in addition to the work we do for OTW; many of us - perhaps even more than is typical because we are overwhelmingly women - are also in caregiving roles: we are partners, wives, mothers, daughters. However, we are in our third year of existence and we have had record donations as well as strong ongoing levels of volunteerism. So we are optimistic that we will continue to attract new members and new staff.
|sustainability=The OTW has an established fundraising system in place, with demonstrated successful growth over the course of the first three years of the organization's existence. In 2007, the year the OTW was established as a nonprofit, we raised $10,069 in the course of general funding drives; in 2008, we raised $22,074; in 2009, we raised $38,627. We expect that our general fundraising will continue to provide capital sufficient for the maintenance and growth of our existing projects, with room for further project development. Fundraising aimed specifically at vidding-related OTW projects has already been initiated from within the community; the Torrent of Our Own is particularly well supported by our membership, and is expected to attract additional supporters as it is realized and sees growth. Our expectation is to be financially prepared to replace or upgrade our TO3 servers within three years, and to continue doing so going forward in a manner that is responsive to both usage and to further developments in torrents and related technologies. Fundraising for specific project aims may be conducted as necessary to supplement organizational capital reserves, and we will continue to seek additional grant support to further this and other OTW projects.
|scalability=As we noted above, the entire idea of a torrent-based streaming video network is designed to address problems of scalability; the best part of the project as we envision it is that it can continue to support greater and great numbers of users and videos. We never have to exclude anyone who's doing anything that's original or fair use; we never have to say no. Moreover, more and more people are becoming digitally literate; we will surely see exponentially-increasing numbers of people communicating with and expressing themselves through video, even as mainstream sites are becoming more restrictive, professional, and commercial.
|resource needs=The OTW is proud to already be using CC-licenses on many of its products; our academic journal, Transformative Works and Cultures, as well as its sister blog, The Symposium, are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. The Torrent of Our Own is an opportunity to help our users learn more about CC, as well as open source and fair use, so they can make informed choices about what kind of licenses they might want to put on their vids or remixes. We are currently planning an educational campaign on fair use; before posting, uploaders will be required to read about fair use standards and agree that what they're uploading is a fair use. We also want to help our users understand the various rights associated with copyright and with various licenses. We ask that Creative Commons aid us in these goals by providing informational materials and public support for the project, and we would also like help with establishing an officer in the OTW responsible for liaising with Creative Commons, carrying out educational initiatives, and continuing to seek situations in which CC-licenses are appropriate to the organization and our membership.
|communication=The OTW maintains a blog at http://transformativeworks.org/ with mirrors on various other sites. A full list of networks and communications methods can be found here: http://transformativeworks.org/about/where-find-us. Contact forms for many of our committees can be found here: http://transformativeworks.org/contact.
|budget=TO3 budget.pdf
|legal=Yes
}}

File:TO3 budget.pdf

2010-07-01T00:48:07Z

Kate.mollen: Detailed budget, budget justification and quote from HP.

Detailed budget, budget justification and quote from HP.