Sustainable Public Media Infrastructure

White Paper. Sustainable Public Media Infrastructure. Successful non-profit technology organizations and what they can teach the foundation world. Nicholas Reville. July 2008

URL = http://getmiro.com/articles/Sustainable-Social-Media-Whitepaper.pdf

Summary

"A new type of non-profit organization is emerging, one that has never been possible in an offline world. These new organizations are creating permanent, sustainable public knowledge and communications infrastructure that is designed for public benefit.

The foundation world, largely absent from these success stories, should seize the opportunity to create new funding models for the next generation of long-term, public interest technology projects. Support for these types of organizations advances not only the public interest of an open and independent media, but also directly benefits many of the organizations and issues that foundations already fund. The potential social return on investment is enormous.

Two brief case studies are presented: the Mozilla Foundation (Firefox) and the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia). Both organizations have built powerful social infrastructure and vibrant volunteer communities that serve millions of people every day." (http://www.getmiro.com/blog/2008/07/whitepaper-sustainable-social-media-infrastructure/)