In Defense of Income Models That Make Money

There’s been a notable hue and cry in the blogosphere over the licensing of The Gilbert Center’s and NTEN's new Journal of Information Technology in Social Change. The Journal is an online journal, under traditional copyright, and the Center is charging $18 for it.

A number of people are calling for the Journal released under an open licensing scheme, and available for free. Fair enough – we’d all like this. There’s no question that it would be preferable to get the Journal out to a wider audience than will be willing to pay, and the ability to distribute articles more widely – in workshops, to email lists, etc – would promote knowledge in this space.

It would be great to find ways to make content free – both as in speech and as in beer. But as it’s certainly not free to write or edit, just saying that it ought to be open, and taking the Gilbert Center and NTEN for task for inappropriate licensing, isn’t helpful. It doesn't helpput this important content into the world.

In fact, I find this “all content should be open” attitude irresponsible. It abdicates responsibility to find workable solutions by which we can all increase openness. Saying that the nebulous “gift economy” will provide isn’t a tactical solution – there’s some interesting mechanisms packed into this phrase but we need to unpack it for this problem rather than rely on it to provide in some tooth-fairy-esque fashion. Assuming that some foundation or company must be willing to foot the bill is also irresponsible in my mind – for what reason do we assume this would be easy? Because they've been so very forthcoming in funding nonprofit capacity building in the past?

I find the “solutions” offered to be rather pale, to say the least. They boil down to, in my mind:

• Getting foundations or corporate sponsors to foot the bill. I think this is the most workable possibility. But that’s unfortunate, as it’s exceedingly difficult to find foundation funding for cross-sector work, or capacity building work, or projects involving publishing content, or online projects, let alone something that is all four. And the few corporate sponsors interested in reaching a nonprofit tech audience tend to prefer tactical to strategic content. Regardless, there may be possibilities here – but I admit to being disappointed that the best solution we can come up to fund our new and innovative content licensing methods is to rely on the very traditional and fickle method of basic fundraising to get someone else to pay.
• Asking nonprofits to chip in what they can afford. This sounds good – so good that I tried it for Idealware. But unfortunately, it’s not a model in which I think you can effectively cover costs, at least at the types of volume that the Journal is looking at. Idealware is earning about $0.35 for each person who looks at our Online Donation and Blogging reports. And I understand that this is a remarkably high number for this kind of "tip jar" model.
• Consulting or Seminars. This is in fact how the Gilbert Center makes most of their money, but it’s hard to see how it applies to the Journal. The Center itself didn’t author the articles, so they’d have to get in the journal authors to conduct the events, and take a cut off the top. I don’t see a way to get a substantial income stream here, especially in a way that doesn’t feel exploitative of the authors. Fundamentally, I’m also confused that charging for training is valid under “everything should be open” while charging for content is not. Don’t small organizations have a right to training as much as they have a right to read articles? Is this dichotomy based solely on a feeling that the public should pay only for direct costs rather than the huge indirect ones required for research and content generation?

Don’t get me wrong. I’d love to hear workable solutions. I just don’t think I’m hearing them. Instead, I’m hearing people who really want open content to be viable blaming the Gilbert Center and NTEN for not figuring it out. And then daring to actually go ahead and publish something (footing the up-front costs themselves, mind you) to help gather data on what’s possible.

And I’m going to go further (I think I’m already over the top, so what’s the difference?). I think we as a community also need to consider possible negative impacts of advocating that all content ought to be open. It’s already very difficult to pay for the effort of creating great content. If in addition we promote in people’s mind the idea that all content ought to be free, it’s hard to escape promoting the idea that no content is worth paying for. Which puts us in danger of tipping an environment in which it’s very difficult to support good content into one in which it’s downright impossible.

I know it’s not a popular suggestion. It’s not what we want to believe. It sounds oh-so-capitalistic and anti-openness. But that doesn’t make it not true.

If we just yell a little louder about the Journal’s license model, maybe we can get someone to cough up some money to fund an open model. That would be a terrific result. But failing that, I can guarantee that it will give the Gilbert Center and other organization like them pause about writing new content and asking people to pay for it. It certainly gives me pause. And as these organizations need to pay the rent and their staff like the rest of us, that will likely mean not writing it at all. That would be a really bad result, as there’s already so little good content in the world for nonprofit technologists.

Obviously, this is a subject close to my own heart. If we want good nonprofit content in the world, we can’t just arbitrarily demand openness. We can't assume that someone else will foot the bill for us, because that just isn't a sustanable long term solution. We need to support the organizations that are writing it in figuring out how to cover their costs. Or these organizations will simply cease to exist.