Ben Werdmuller

Like many of you, I blacked out my site for the protests against SOPA and PIPA. These are bad laws that describe themselves as being anti-piracy but will hinder business, destroy jobs, undermine the working of the Internet, and – to add insult to injury – won’t stop piracy. Khan Academy has a great overview; my previous post about it is over here.

In this post, though, I’m going to rave, because I’m majorly impressed.

The major feature of my SOPA blackout page was a simple widget that detected your location, listed the representatives you needed to call to tell them about your opposition to the bills, and then let you call them straight on the page. This is like magic to me, even though I know it’s a Twilio integration. Brilliantly executed.

The three developers, Drew Inglis, Nick Meyer and Tess Rinearson, built Grassroutes as part of PennApps, a weekend hackathon at the University of Pennsylvania held a couple of days before the protest. It’s not just for SOPA and PIPA: you can relabel it for any political issue that you want to drive action for. Like nothing else before it, it turns slacktivism into direct action that spreads virally among site owners. And, again, it’s slick, simple, beautiful and well-built.

Grassroutes made it to the front page of Hacker News, where hackers continued the work by (for example) turning it into a Facebook app, and I certainly used it to call my representatives. My hope is this is part of a new wave of apps that will overcome the traditional criticisms of politics online and lower the barrier to direct participation in the democratic process.

I’ve got a phone number: +1 (312) 488-9373. Feel free to call or text it.

If I’m walking around, you’ll get me on my Samsung Galaxy S II. If I’m in transit (but not driving), you’ll probably get me on my iPad. If I’m at my desk, I’ll answer and take the whole call through my laptop. For you, the experience of contacting me will be exactly the same (give or take some background noise). For me, the experience fits my context: I can make and receive calls and texts on any of my devices. The same is true for email.

Consumption works the same way. All my important files are stored on Dropbox. If I need to get at something – for example, a work-in-progress piece of writing, or a receipt – I can pick up any of my Internet-connected devices and grab the contents. Similarly, my notes, which I take through Evernote: I can create and consume these anywhere.

A final example: I love movies. Watching them at the theater is still magical for me, but I also enjoy them elsewhere, depending on what kind of movie it is. (My favorite streamable new release right now is Midnight in Paris. A great film.)

At home, I use my dedicated media PC to play through a sound system and flat-screen monitor. It’s not perfect, but it works. Elsewhere, I might use my laptop or my iPad. On the road, I can play the same movie through the same service on my phone, or I may be able to take a downloaded version for offline consumption.

So far, so obvious. These are all known use cases that demonstrate why the consumer Internet is so powerful. But I have a question:

Shouldn’t applications, services and content be sold to me, instead of my devices?

Right now, I have to set each of my services up on each of my devices, and tell them to use the same account. That sometimes doesn’t work perfectly: for some reason, for example, I seem to have two Path accounts – one for my US handset, and one for my UK handset. I’m not sure how this happened.

Ideally, I want to sign up:

1. Once for each device, to tell them that I own it, and where I store my identity.
2. Once more for each service or application, to associate them with my identity.
3. The filesystem would be networked and bound to the identity. So rather than storing it on its own infrastructure, Evernote would save notes to my filesystem, which could potentially be accessed by other networked software.
4. Each identity would have an Internet-accessible unique identifier and point of entry.

The applications would then automagically become available on each of my devices. Crucially, when I go to buy or rent Midnight in Paris, it then is also available on all of my devices, because I’m renting via my identity rather than any one device. For the next 24 hours, say, I can stream the movie wherever is most convenient. If I buy a license for Microsoft Office, then it is licensed to my identity and I can use it on any of my devices.

This is literally a per-seat model for selling software. It makes buying and consuming simple, and will reduce piracy.

So here’s a follow-on question. It’s a dull-sounding one, but bear with me:

Wouldn’t this make enterprise provisioning dramatically easier?

Right now, system administrators in enterprise environments push software over their networks, and often refuse to allow non-approved hardware onto their infrastructure in order to make this easier. In an identity-centric model, though, where applications are delivered using Internet technologies:

1. Software would be provisioned to identities rather than machines.
2. The available identity domains and software on any given network could be locked down as appropriate (so, for example, I could bring in my smartphone but only use a sanctioned identity with it if I wanted to connect to the local network).

Wouldn’t this make consumer applications dramatically less annoying?

For me, the answer is “yes”. I don’t want to care about my devices and their capabilities, and I’m a CTO with a computer science degree. End users want their software to seamlessly “just work”, and they want to seamlessly be able to move content from one machine to another, or share to another person no matter what that thing happens to be, or where their data is stored. Right now, operating systems have become gatekeepers: bottlenecks that get in the way of users.

For me, this is the real application of a decentralized social web. It’s not just about sending messages around – it’s about using the Internet to create a fabric of interdependent applications where we retain control of our data (those identities and networked filesystems could be anywhere) while enjoying a simpler experience. Application providers and content owners sell more of their products, because they’re easier to consume, everyone loves their devices that little bit more, and every new product sold becomes a window onto a much bigger, connected ecosystem that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Photo by Troy Holden, released under a Creative Commons license.

Something to think about for anyone starting any online community:

High context cultures value personal relationships over process. You have to know someone before you can trust them and work with them. They also tend to be less explicit and rely more on tone of voice, gestures and even status to communicate. Typically Asian countries are more high context than Western countries. Think Korea and Japan.

[...] So if you start a project and send email to a bunch of folks and ask them to just jump in and contribute, which group do you think will get going more quickly? The low context culture folks.

Interesting comments, too.

I’m fed up of using the same PHP template pattern over and over in my web apps, so I decided to write it from scratch and iterate on some core ideas. And then open source it under an Apache 2.0 license.

The result is Bonita: a simple PHP templating engine. It’s definitely version 0.1, but I thought I’d put it out there now in the spirit of release early, release often. Future enhancements will include a static cache, simple functions to handle action tokens for XSS, and some stubs to do things like semi-automatically generate RSS and Activity Streams.

Isn’t PHP already a template language? Yes and no. Its origins are definitely as a template language, but these days it’s a perfectly good way to write fully-fledged web applications. After all, Drupal, WordPress, StatusNet and Elgg are all PHP-based. (Yes, the language is much-maligned, and certainly has its flaws, but it’s also much-used.)

Aren’t there already templating systems for PHP? Yes, but they’re typically designed for sites rather than apps. Bonita includes support for creating streams and automatically drawing PHP objects out of the box, as well as content post-processing and template plugins. Support for anti-XSS form action tokens is another example of a feature that really mostly makes sense for web app developers.

Why are you releasing this? By releasing this under an Apache 2.0 license, I get to continue using the ideas, but I also get to share it, and let the wider community help me build out the system. That seems like a more efficient model for development to me; it also sits better with me. (And, hey, if nobody uses it, the worst that’s happened is that I have a great backup of my code on GitHub.)

Are you releasing Bonita on behalf of anyone? No. This is my own code, and it’s not being released or endorsed by any other organization or entity.

Interested? Bonita’s GitHub project is over here.

This is a more technical post than I’ve been writing lately. I’m considering splitting out into two blog channels; let me know if you’d prefer this.

This is a request for comments and ideas. Please let me know what you think in the comments. Thanks!

One of the advantages of the decentralized social web, as opposed to a social network (federated or otherwise), is that identity can, theoretically, be shared with any web page, anywhere. That page doesn’t have to be running any particular software or provide any particular function; it should optionally be able to support identity-related features. That could then be used to tailor the page to the viewing user. (Of course, sharing identity should never be required, for security reasons.) This is part of three broad activities that I see as being part of the social web:

• Publishing web content in an identity-aware way
• Consuming web content in an identity-aware way
• Sharing socially

Much of the decentralized social web development activity to date has been focused on the third point, and on reading and writing as part of a social web application like StatusNet or Diaspora. However, I’d like to look at the first two points with a view to make them web infrastructure, rather than features of a web application.

To achieve this, I’d like to be able to report, as an option, the identity of the person making an HTTP request, as part of the headers to that request. This might come from the browser itself, eg via an identity plugin, or it might come from a web-based identity proxy.

HTTP supports basic authentication, which involves sending a username and password, potentially in the clear. Out of necessity, we’ve moved beyond this, eg for things like API authentication. Often tokens, hashes and encrypted requests are included as extra header values to authenticate a request.

I’d like to use the same general principle for identifying a user. Here’s how it might work:

1. The user visits a site for the first time. The browser sends a standard HTTP request. (Or, alternately, a HEAD request, if the site content isn’t required.)
2. The site responds as normal, but with an extra HTTP header indicating that it’s identity-aware, including the URL of a handshaking endpoint. This will be ignored by clients that aren’t looking for it.
3. If this is a standard browsing scenario, the user’s browser asks if he or she would like to share identity information with the site. For the purposes of this example, the user clicks “yes”. (This step can be left out if this isn’t a standard browsing scenario.)
4. Via the handshaking endpoint from step 2, the user’s browser gives the site a public and private key, and a URL, through which it can access the user’s identity information as an XRD file (as in Webfinger). This is exactly the same as the public and private key system used to retrieve social information in points 5 and 6, using the same method. The site simply makes a signed request to the user’s identity URL, which can be anywhere.
5. The browser receives public & private keys for use with this server only. These might be stored in the browser, or in some central identity store that all the user’s browsers access.
6. Whenever the browser makes a request to the server, it adds extra headers using these keys (and HMAC-SHA-1), signing each request with the user’s identity until he or she says otherwise. It also sends a header to indicate when the user’s identity information was last changed, in order to prompt the site into obtaining new information if it needs to.
7. If the site in point 4 is associated with a specific person (for example benwerd.com would be associated with Ben Werdmuller), he or she can use the public and private key generated in step 4 to browse the user’s site.

The publisher would get a list of users who have identified with the site, and, depending on their server or content management system, might add some of them to special access control groups that would allow access to different content. The next time the user visited the site, they’d see more privileged content. A notification would probably be sent to them to let them know this had happened, but this is out of scope for what I’m discussing here. (Perhaps notification methods could be shared as part of a user’s identity information?)

Conversely, the user’s XRD file containing their identity information can also change depending on who’s accessing it (as the requesting site always makes a signed request).

This system has a number of advantages:

• It’s server and system agnostic. It simply uses the building blocks of the web.
• It’s very easy to build for. Checking and setting HTTP headers are easy to do, and don’t require any front-end work like HTML parsing or JavaScript libraries. This makes it usable for APIs and feeds as well as web pages, and for clients that use web APIs as well as web browsers.
• The web isn’t just a platform for people to read these days. This method doesn’t depend on anything visual.
• You don’t need to control the root of a domain to make it work. If you install a script at http://yourdomain/~foobar/banana/hockeystick.php, the system will be happy there too.
• It’s passive. There are no blockers if you don’t supply identity information – you just see something different.
• It’s based on similar assumptions to WebID, but doesn’t require SSL certificates in the browser, and it’s as easy for a web app to implement as it is for browser software.

It incorporates the following assumptions:

• Relationships are assymetrical. (Here, there’s a set of keys for each side of a relationship. If one side stops participating, perhaps by removing the other from an access control group, the other side is still valid.)
• Privacy isn’t binary. (Everyone gets a different view on a given page or piece of data.)

Let’s call it httpID. I’m looking for feedback on the idea and process. Does it make sense? Have I missed something obvious? Let me know. If there are no major blockers, I’ll firm up the spec and create some libraries.

Friday night was sleepless for me. I couldn’t stop thinking about a simple idea I had, riffing off of Color and some of the technology I’d built for OutMap:

What if you could hook messages, photos, files and metadata to a particular location in space, and create an ad-hoc messageboard with this information based on where you were in the world?

I couldn’t put the idea down – so I built it.

To start, you set a location, either explicitly (by typing in the address) or implicitly (through your device’s location functionality). Onflood looks at the proximity of the messages around you, and sets an appropriate radius that it’ll draw messages from. For example, if there’s a lot of activity right near you, it’ll probably set a tight radius: if you’re on Edinburgh’s Princes St, you’ll only see messages within a mile of you. Meanwhile, more sporadic activity lends itself to a wider radius: at the time of writing, if you’re on Market St in San Francisco, messages are drawn from up to 606 miles away from you. This way no user is ever made to feel alone or like there’s no activity. You can, of course, manually widen or tighten the radius. You can also jump to other locations by entering a new address or clicking on messages around you.

My hope is that it’ll be useful for conference backchannels, neighborhood-specific information, and as a message-passing medium for local swarms like demonstration protests.

Onflood takes your location using the HTML5 geolocation API, which means that if you’re browsing on a GPS-capable device, it’ll use that, and otherwise it works out your location based on IP address and other ambient details. All compatible web browsers ask you for this information, so it’s never done behind your back, and you can always choose to manually enter a location instead.

Both geocoding latitudes and longitude coordinates from place names, and reverse-geocoding names from coordinates, are handled by OpenStreetMap’s awesome Nominatim API. I’d previously used Yahoo APIs for OutMap, but I found the OpenStreetMap endpoints easy to work with, largely accurate and developer-friendly. Plus, of course, you can run Nominatim from your own servers as well as OpenStreetMap’s hosted version. Open source wins out here.

So what’s to come? Right now, authentication is handled solely from Twitter. This is clearly something that I intend to change – OpenID and, yes, Facebook are to follow. I also have yet to implement photos and files (which will both be stored using Amazon S3). Finally, RSS and ActivityStreams feeds are also required.

You can think of this as a starting point. I’ll keep it up and running, and will continue iterating it. If there’s demand for it, I even have a solid business model in mind that will make it more than self-sufficient without annoying existing users.

Give it a try, and let me know what you think.

Yesterday, HP finally delivered an iPad competitor I can get excited about, not just by creating an elegant piece of hardware, but by taking a step back and outthinking their competition. Unlike the iPad, the TouchPad is part of a seamless technology ecosystem that also encompasses smartphones, PCs and printers, all running the same operating system and sharing through the same wireless infrastructure.

Printing, file-sharing, synchronization and even charging just work without cables or configuration. It’s clever stuff, and only a company like HP – with well-accepted products in virtually every technology market segment – could have pulled it off. Not only does the TouchPad run their recently-acquired WebOS; so do their Palm Pre phones, and so will their desktops and laptops.

Before the iPad, tablets were a jokey afterthought in the gamut of home devices, largely governed by Bill Gates’s pen-bound vision for how those devices should behave, and Apple’s previous failure with the Newton. With the iPad, Apple turned them into a must-have accessory that made most domestic computing tasks easier. The 3G version beat expectations by eschewing contracts, making mobile Internet use both more attractive and affordable. As soon as it launched, it seemed like a wonderful progression. I love mine: it’s been used to write code, fix servers, write and read articles, read entire novels, watch movies and kill time on the plane. It’s not that I couldn’t do without it. I wouldn’t want to – even despite the crashing applications, slow sync times and horrible iTunes user experience.

But competition in the market is healthy for consumers. It drives prices down, quality up, and gives us all choices. But for some reason, nobody’s managed to provide a satisfactory competitor to the iPad. This may relate to the app store model: because Apple takes 30% of all app store sales, it can sell its devices at a lower margin than its competitors. Android tablets, on the other hand, really need to use the Android Market, which is shared between them – and while cellphone carriers get a cut, tablet manufacturers don’t. That means, for example, that the Motorola Xoom will cost $799 – $300 more than the cheapest iPad. Because everyone expects the Apple device to be at the top end of the market, Android offerings need to be priced below it, particularly when they’re directly competing feature-for-feature. It’s beginning to seem like this might be impossible.

What’s cool about the HP offering is that it doesn’t just create competition: it actually makes the iPad look clunky, which is something nobody else has managed yet. What’s more, they have an Apple-like advantage in their homegrown App Catalog, and by including printers, they’ve brought ink cartridges into the pricing ecosystem, so the up-front cost should be low. The seamless wireless integration between devices makes it perfect for business as well as home use, and WebOS’s reliance on web technologies makes it attractive to developers like me.

That’s the key. It’s not just that I’m excited to use them; HP have made me excited about developing for WebOS devices. Taken in conjunction with Android’s growing dominance, not to mention the rumor of two new iPads before December, it’s going to be a very interesting year.

Photo: Jon Rubenstein introduces new HP TouchPad, by Robert Scoble. Shared under a CC license.

If you’re going to do something, do it well

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about open source business models. The project I’m most often associated with, Elgg, developed a business some two years after the project itself was founded. Now that I’m considering a new project, I’m exploring what it might mean to create an open source model that has a business model baked in from day one. Not as a loss leader or the engine for a consultancy company, but as the core of a scalable business that turns a profit proportionally to the popularity of its end-user product.

An image problem

Particularly on the web, open source isn’t cool anymore. For a while, in around 2004-2006, the success of projects like WordPress and Firefox meant that new, web-based open source projects were coming out fast and strong. The former arguably gained its market share after Movable Type, previously the market leader in blogging, imposed an ill-conceived commercial license. Five years later, although new projects like StatusNet and Diaspora are getting headlines, and WordPress is going strong as the basis of at least 12% of all websites, most new open source efforts are on behind-the-scenes technical infrastructure like CouchDB and node.js.

Perhaps due to this bias, open source in general faces an image problem. Only 1.5% of open source contributors are women, for example, compared to the already questionable 28% in mainstream software.

Yet off the web, end-user open source projects are growing, often in conjunction with a strong business model: think Ubuntu, Android, Boxee et al. However, on the web, WordPress’s parent company Automattic is the only company I can think of that’s significantly bringing in revenue (estimated to be $30-40 million annually, and breaking even).

I believe in open source, but I also believe that for open source projects to be sustainable, they need to be able to fund their developers and be emotionally rewarding. I think there’s a place for a friendly open source project that’s both accessible to new users, and to the kinds of people who would not ordinarily contribute, while both turning a profit and having a good time.

Routes to success

There are a bunch of different commercial open source models out there. Here are a few, in increasing order of commercial viability:

1. Donationware. Some projects solicit donations from their users, charity-style. Although this may result in a few hundred dollars here and there, it’s not going to make a significant contribution to payroll; people mostly won’t pay for something unless they absolutely have to. Asking for donations bases your business on goodwill alone.
2. Advertising. Think Firefox, which makes around a dollar per user per year from its integration with Google search. Products like Vuze also contain advertising. For stand-alone apps, products like OpenCandy can bring in real cash. Open source web apps, however, are very easy to edit and customize. While that’s a strength and a net positive, it means that adverts – perhaps embedded into an admin system, for example – are very easy to remove. Once again, you’re reliant on goodwill, unless the advertising is present on the open source project’s community site. Elgg has a page where users can find third-party hosting, and makes money from affiliate links. Meanwhile, many have forgotten Matt Mullenweg’s foray into search engine spam before WordPress settled on a business model, which speaks more to the difficulty of making money with open source than Matt’s ethics. (Automattic is a great company, and he’s proven himself to be a great guy.)
3. Consultancy services. Many projects provide tailored customization features to individual customers. This can be profitable, but isn’t particularly scalable: because each customization or advisory report is bespoke, your potential profit is capped by the number of human-hours your team can put in. Effectively, you become a digital agency, with your open source product acting as a way to draw attention to yourself. Think of your software as a fridge. If GE had to design a new fridge for each customer they had, they’d never make any money, and fridges would cost $100,000. Instead, they design a fridge once and sell hundreds of thousands of them for $500. Fridges scale; bespoke consultancy does not.
4. Freemium hosting. This is the model used by WordPress, StatusNet and others: allow anyone to create a free, hosted account, and charge for professional extras like analytics features and support. Determined, technically savvy users can still download and install the software themselves (this site runs WordPress on my own server), but using the commercial offering is often a simpler, more sustainable way to go. This is a slow burn, but WordPress has shown that if you create a product with enough critically reliant users, it can work.
5. Physical, commercial products. Boxee sells an actual set-top box in conjunction with D-Link, which is doing well. Android is a red herring here: while it certainly sells phones, with the exception of Google’s Nexus range, where the company presumably takes a cut, the operating system is provided for free to handset manufacturers. The real money comes through search advertising.

What’s the right path?

I’m not sure there is a correct solution for open source web projects – except to avoid #1 and, preferably, #3. Here’s what I’m thinking at the moment:

Open source projects are continually bombarded with feature requests. Fundry, the crowdfunding site for software projects, is very interesting to me as a platform for these, and as a contributory business model for open source development. The site allows users to add new feature requests and back them with money. The development team can then choose which ones to undertake. The core team would probably have to seed the Fundry page with a number of features to begin with, but with a little momentum I think it holds some promise. It’s also a great way for community members to practically contribute without creating code, documents or designs.

However, that alone is unlikely to allow anyone to eat (particularly looking at the current level of funding pledges – at the time of writing, Fundry itself has only managed to raise $128).

Another model might be to outsource the hosted freemium service, in a way that’s tightly integrated with the open source community site. A potential user might visit the project site and see a great big “create your site” button; on clicking that, they are led to a third party (or given a choice between third parties). An affiliate commission would be provided by the chosen service provider.

Commercial support services are a viable option, and can be deeply embedded both into the project site and the software itself (as a clear “get support” button). Commercially hosted value-added services, like Automattic’s Akismet anti-spam service, are another.

Most likely, a commercially successful open source project will use a combination of these. But what do you think? Is there a glaringly obvious open source business model that most projects have missed? And does profitability have a place in the open source movement to begin with? Let me know in the comments.

I’m a little late to the party for end-of-year wrapup / start-of-year prediction posts. Instead, I thought I’d write about some of the things I’m looking forward to playing with this year.

Vanquishing piracy through better business

First, though, I do have one prediction: this will be the year that traditional content producers finally get to grips with piracy. They won’t do it using restrictive DRM and other counter-productive tactics that have been shown not to work; instead, they’ll do it by allowing anyone to buy their content in a convenient way.

The BBC is already talking about broadcasting Doctor Who simultaneously in the US and the UK; they are also planning to release their iPlayer on-demand service internationally. Its US counterpart Hulu, meanwhile, is also planning an international release. All of this is a tacit acknowledgement that a great deal of piracy is the direct result of artificially enforced border restrictions, but it’s also a bigger, more general change: the realignment of incumbent media companies around the Internet, instead of treating it as just another conduit. Just in time to save their businesses – maybe.

The year of the tablet?

Last year, the iPad shook everyone up. It’s a great device, which somehow makes computing a more intimate, human experience – I bought one, and it gets far more use than any other computer I own. (This Christmas, it’s got at least a couple of hours every day from Celia playing Angry Birds.) It’s so good that everyone’s prediction posts for 2011 have been colored by it. Wired; Leonard Lin; Technorati; The Times of India; The New York Times; GigaOm; etc etc etc. I’ll be at CES in Las Vegas next week, and I fully expect tablets to dominate the talk of the town. (Most interesting tablet advice I’ve heard lately: buy a Nook Color and root it to turn it into a fully-featured Android tablet. Not bad for $250, if it works.)

After a rocky start with the operating system, I’m looking forward to developing Android apps. Although I’m still not sure what the platform’s developers were thinking in the early years, the 2.2 release was a major one, and the 3.x previews look pretty good. It’s got a very good chance of being as popular as Microsoft Windows for non-PC devices. Either way, the devices are now exciting enough for me to want to kick the tires and play with some new kinds of social interaction.

Here, my obsession with decentralized models continues. I believe that WikiLeaks represents the Internet beginning to fulfill its true potential, but the furor over it illustrates how dangerous building an information outlet or essential service around a single point of failure can be. The web is decentralized; social, content and information applications should follow the platform’s example.

The couch potato is dead; long live the couch potato

But it’s going to go beyond interaction. With the advent of consumer-friendly devices like the iPad, and living room web clients like Google TV, I think we’re going to see more web apps designed for the couch potato set: people who want to sit down and passively consume content after (for example) a hard day’s work. Right now, even products like the Roku require a fair amount of clicking around before you watch something. Nothing quite has the ease-of-use of television – but apps like Flipboard come close.

Just how do you filter the hundreds of millions of content streams the Internet has to offer so that I see just the right thing when I collapse into my armchair at the end of the day? Could channels, one day, be individually curated content streams, with the content itself sold directly from the producer to us? That would make companies like Apple the new Viacoms and Universals, and make our friends into our TV Guides, with the net result that we will have a much larger range of content available to us, and content producers will have a much easier route to market. I will certainly be playing with this in 2011, from a number of angles.

Getting paid

Ultimately, I think this is the year that analogue content producers – filmmakers, writers, musicians, artists, animators and so on – find a model that really pays for their work online. Once that’s happened, the decentralized, monetized web will be our mainstream source for all content. That means fewer gatekeepers, better content, and a much better information environment for consumers and democracy.

Photo by Hai Linh Truong, released under a Creative Commons license.

I’m in New York this week for a whirlwind series of meetings with Team Latakoo, but I wanted to draw a little attention to the introduction to open data in the arts I wrote over on the festivalslab blog before I got here:

Open data sounds like a much more techie concept than it really is. It’s really a way to let third parties plug into and spread your organization’s information, in a way that you control, and allows them to create publications, products and services that you don’t have the time, resources or inclination to develop or maintain. You become the centre of a creative ecosystem – something arts organizations, and especially festivals – are already brilliant at. It’s a perfect fit.

You can read the whole thing over here.