Saturday, April 24, 2010

General Volunteer Call

You can respond to the original post here.

If you would like to work with the web development team, please contact either Tetshi for front-end or Esoterick for back-end.

If you would like to work in other areas such as those listed below, please contact Happybadger or Sundogdayze for the Americas. For Europe, please contact Afrael. More methods of communication can be found at the Contact Information.

Needs:
Seriously interested volunteers. Please have some way to contact you outside of reddit where I can reach you within a few hours like an email, facebook account, or screen name.
A formal structure for our website and scholarship fund.
Legal guidance regarding keeping copyrights in the hands of the artists and regarding maintaining non-profit status while taking in a percentage of sales for overhead and the scholarship fund. We also need guidance with setting up a scholarship fund and making it as scam-proof as possible with respect toward privacy.
Exposure.

If you are interested please remember to fill out this information for the moderators:

1.Reddit username and your meatspace first name
2.Your experience level with non-profit organisations (1-10, 1 being new to them and 10 being you're Bill Gates)
3.Times (in CST) and days available/online during which you can be called upon.
4.Any specific talents you have which could be of use.
5.Any specific traits you have which could be of use.
6.An email address where we can reach you. Feel free to use a throwaway if you'd like, so long as you check it :]
7.Any preferred tasks or roles you may have.
8.Y/N: Are you an artist of any kind as well?
9.Y/N: Are you open to meatspace events and programmes?
10.What country/timezone are you currently living in and a citizen of?

The Information So Far

Written by Afrael, discussion along with original post can be found here.

What is the RAF?
A place to share, critique, buy and otherwise further the cause of art by redditors.
A non-profit organization chaired by sundogdayze, that will work to support art by redditors in any way it can (for instance a scholarship).
A website (redditartsfoundation.org) that requires a lot more hands on to get it off the ground and running.

Who can participate? In what way can I participate?
Anyone can buy art or otherwise sponsor artists found on the website. You will probably need to sign up to buy stuff for security reasons.
Members of the site can critique art, guidelines for a proper critique will be given (as discussed here).
Artsy people can upload their art. There will be some reddit karma/membership length requirements (probably 300/three months) to keep the effort by and for redditors.
Art can be basically anything. Spam will be removed but otherwise the community will moderate itself, since no one person can decide what is art and what isn't.

What will be on the website?
Artists' profiles.
A way to upload art in different media formats: text, pictures, video, etc.
A way to browse, upvote, discuss, and/or critique art works.
A "playground" bit for stuff that still needs to grow, where artists can get critiques and submit revisions.
A "marketplace" to offer and buy art directly from artists, and maybe later on in the development a limited run of merchandise sold by the site itself (with the artist getting royalties but not having to deal with ten boxes of t-shirts in their living room). Also, maybe direct micro-donations to the artists would be nice to have.
A collaboration tool, some way to find resources/equipment or artists to collaborate with.
Possibly a place for art theory discussion (as suggested here).
Content-specific forms of critiquing (for instance, inline commenting for text, annotations for video etc). This would be something for version 2.0 of the site probably.
Rules and posting guidelines.

What needs to be done to get this thing off the ground?
Please refer to the Contact Information should you want to get involved.
Webteam > is in business, headed by Esoterick and Tetshi.
Promotion team (with all the artists on Reddit it won't be hard to get someone to make promotional material, and as soon as something takes more definite form we'll contact all the artsy subreddits).
Organization team (if happybadger and sundogdayze need help) and mission statement.
Legal Team
More information can be found here.

I worry a lot, what can you tell me?
Concerning money, the foundation will be as transparent as possible without compromising the privacy of the people involved.
The foundation will collect a small fee from every transaction, this will be used to cover expenses and do cool stuff for reddit artists. Also, maybe some very select topical advertising. No-one will get rich from running the organization.
The artists will keep full rights to their artworks as much as legally possible, see here.
There will be no downvotes, as beauty is in the eye of the beholder and obscurity is punishment enough.
Professionalism in your art will be encouraged, this is supposed to be for people who take art somewhat seriously. It's also not supposed to be some kind of circlejerk where people post only reddit alien art. It's not clear yet how this will be managed, hopefully it'll manage itself.

I want to help/discuss this project, where do I go?
To contact anyone involved, for instance to volunteer: pick someone to contact and send them a message.
To keep track of what's happening you can frontpage the subreddit, follow RAF on twitter or join the facebook group. The main site is located at redditartsfoundation.org.
To discuss and brainstorm, there's an irc channel on freenode: click here for the webchat. The channel name is #RedditArtsFoundation.