Grants/Romanian Artist Survey 2010
Describe the project you are proposing as clearly as possible in just five sentences.
The aim of this project is to measure the impact of Creative Commons licenses in Romania, by running an artist survey, targeting especially musicians, writers and filmmakers, and we will try to find out if they know about Creative Commons, if they use CC licenses or if they are willing to use them and also tell us their motivations. We want to run this survey on a large number of artists (our goal is to have at least 300 responses, from 100 musicians, 100 writers and 100 filmmakers, photographers and other categories of artists from fields affected by copyright law). Also, we want to find out through this survey how are their relations with the editors, the publishers and the royalty-collecting institutions. Issues like the increasing length of copyright protection will be also addressed (informal discussions with authors make us believe that most of them are not very interested in what will happen with their works after their death). We will conduct the survey in September 2010, collect results between October and December 2010 and present the final results to the public in February 2011.
Detail the tangible project output (e.g., paper, blog post, written materials, video/film, etc.; this would be in addition to the final written report that successful grant recipients will be expected to deliver to CC at the conclusion of the project).
At the end of the project, we will publish a paper with the results of the survey (in Romanian and English). Also, all the information that we will collect during the project will be made available to the public, with a CC-BY license (the Romanian law doesn’t offer the possibility to offer any work directly to the public domain) on a special section on the ORDU website. A press release with the result will be offer to the local and international press and also to websites and blogs. We will organize a press conference in order to present the results and we will also print a booklet for this event.
Describe the community you are targeting. How would the project benefit the community?
The main target of the project is the developing Romanian artistic community. We will try to reach artists from all fields and categories, from novices to top authors. Asking them about Creative Commons licenses will also have a promotional role – in the questionnaire we will explain the options and benefits of using such licenses. Because we know their beliefs about copyright and open licenses, we will know how and where to promote them, in the future, in order to create a more open and collaborative artistic community. We will also target the online community. In Romania, bloggers are the most active part of the civil society and they are very interested in issues regarding copyright.br />
ORDU is one of the few non-governmental organization interested in copyright laws. We have a very good relationship with APTI, the Creative Commons affiliate institution in Romania. Actually, they encouraged us to create this organization. We are journalists and also have very good connections in Romanian music, film and literature. We will work with a sociologic institute that has previous experience in surveys and all the necessary technical platforms: Exact Cercetare şi Consultanţă – www.exactcc.ro. ORDU was created following the success of a series of articles about copyright published last year on our music blog, www.freshgoodminimal.ro, in the copy++ section. FreshGoodMinimal is the lead electronic music blog in Romania, with over 13000 visitors a month. It is one of the main voices of the Romanian artistic blogosphere.
How will you measure and evaluate your project’s impact - on your main participants? Other contributors? On the larger community?
We will measure the response rate of the survey. We hope to obtain a 60-70 percent response rate, considering the difficulty of working with artists and their unpredictable schedules. Then, we will measure the impact in the main community by monitoring mass-media and Internet feedback of the press conference and of the results paper we will subsequently publish.
How many participants do you expect to be involved in your project? How will you seek and sustain their involvement?
We will have three persons that will run the survey, focusing on musicians, writers, film makers and photographers. The sociological institute will conceive the survey, create the online questionnaires and interpret the results. We will try to reach a number of 150 artists in each category (we expect around 80 to 100 responses). The persons that will collect the responses are connected with the artist’s field of work, making it easier for them to relate and find out answers. We will make sure that, if is the case, the anonymity of the responses will be respected (some of the artists may not want to affect their relation with their publishers). We will reach them on e-mail and/or on phone.
Describe how your project will benefit Creative Commons' mission to increase the amount of creativity (cultural, educational, and scientific content) in "the commons".
By publishing this paper, we will put “the commons” on the public agenda. Also, we will promote Creative Commons in the artist community by sending the survey (in which we will explain the basic concepts of the open licenses). For the press conference we will make a connection between the use of Creative Commons licenses and the problems of the access to the culture and information in Romania. Around 60% percent of Romanians live in small cities or in the country side – they don’t have libraries or if they do, their books are very old. The Internet is the main source of information and Creative Commons could be one of the best instruments to make culture available to the masses.
Describe what technologies and tools your project will use. What kinds of technical skills and expertise do you bring to the project? What are your technical needs?
We will use mostly the Internet and the phone for contacting the artists. The survey will be answered online, on a platform created by the sociologic institute we will work with. We will use computers and online tools in order to work as a team (Google provides us a lot of useful applications – Groups, Docs etc.).
What challenges do you expect to face, and how do you plan to overcome them?
The main challenge could be a low response rate. We will try to collect the data during three months, but we will ask for responses in a month, in order to have time to persuade the artists. Also, we will have a backup list, if the response rate is lower than expected.
How do you plan to sustain your project after the Creative Commons funding has ended? Detail specific plans. How do you plan to raise revenue to continue your efforts in the future?
We will use the results of the artist survey to create other projects that raise awareness on Creative Commons licenses. The result of this project is an important first step for all the future projects we will try to obtain funding for. One project we are doing in this period is a local CC net-label for Romanian electronic musicians. We started it with funding from the Romanian Cultural Institute. Also, in the near future, we plan to organize an open culture conference and an open culture festival (we have a good relationship with Netaudio Berlin and we want to organize a Netaudio festival in Bucharest). We want to raise funds from the government (Romanian Cultural Institute and The National Cultural Fund have periodic calls for projects), from the European Union (there are some programs that target the cultural and youth area), and from cultural institutes and embassies.
How can this project be scalable, or have a scalable impact?
We could conduct another survey a year after in order to compare data and to measure the impact of our projects. Also, we could run a larger survey, targeting not only the artist, but the public.
What resources and support do you expect Creative Commons to provide to your project to ensure its success (if any)?
If possible, we will be glad to have any suggestions regarding the questions we will ask in the survey, based on the Creative Commons experience in this area. Also, we will need help from Creative Commons to disseminate the results of the survey outside Romania, mostly in the open culture related areas.
Describe how your organization currently communicates with its community members and network partners. (100 words)
The Internet is our main communication platform. We started with www.freshgoodminimal.ro, in the copy++ section, and now we moving the copyright part to our new organization website (www.ordu.com). Also, we use Facebook in order to communicate to the public. Because of the netlabel project we just started (www.localrec.ro), we now have partners in London, Berlin, Vienna and Barcelona. Our main method of communication is, of course, e-mail.
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