BIP Economic Conference

[Triple Zero]

basically with open source a company pays some guy to write software which will then be released as open source

the advantage of this is:
- company gets to use the program (first goal)
- open source community will test and debug for free (secondary goal)
- anybody can do security auditing and publish full disclosure sploits (terniary goal)

open source is not some programmer guy sitting in a basement writing brilliant software for free

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apart from that, so you agree we should go with the model that any profit made will just be pumped back into the next edition?

i dunno how that works in the US or globally but there are certain "structures" for this type of endeavours, like "foundation" or "association" i dunno, perhaps we could even get some tax exemption for being not-for-profit.
also we have the advantage of being international, so we can just pick the best deal globally?
if not the USA there must be some other country that gets us benefit for being a religious/spiritual organisation?

[LHX]

all of these elements are worthy of investigation

i guess thats another aspect of discussion


if we got this system off the ground - what if somebody tried to commission somebody here to do the same for them or their company?



an independent organization that takes contracts?

[Triple Zero]

if they wanna commission the entire group of "us", they're gonna have a problem (one way or another)

if they wanna commission just one of "us", they can work out the details any way they like together i think?

[LHX]

thats the way i see it

[Triple Zero]

so the benefit of joining the work would/could be some kind of networking* opportunity

i like that

(is that an english term? = getting to know the right people getting to know you)

[Cramulus]

A lot of these bridges will be crossed when we come to them.

we should go with the model that any profit made will just be pumped back into the next edition?

I think so. There are going to be some costs, like printing. As I recall from a cheapass magazine I used to work for, if we order a set of like 1000 glossy full color magazines we can get them printed for like three bucks a pop. (edit: that's probably a bit off - if we're interested, I can go dig up the real numbers) I think the people who throw down the benjamins for this should get reimbursed, then if there's any left, profit should be invested into further issues.. The trick here is to get advertisers.

(this is all assuming we're talking about something like a magazine, which is totally feasible)
hmmm but to whom do we sell it? How do we cover our costs?

[Triple Zero]

3 bucks per mag, is that with or without advertising?

getting advertisers will be very hard without being able to show any prior work, target audience etc etc

ok we have prior work, but who's gonna compose it into a shiny portfolio?

when i made an almanac for my students-association, which is a similar audience, bunch of crazy hippies, 300-500 books A5, we asked about e300,- ($393,60) for a fullpage ad. businesses seemed to think that a reasonable price, the question being mostly if they wanted to advertise at all. and we had the advantage of being a 100% student target audience, and not .. well what do we have? fruitcakes? who? we sort of want to target everybody with half a brain, right?
anyway my point is if it's $3k for 1000 mags, we need but 10 advertisers. ah yes and then we need to spread them and make sure the advertisers are happy, or they will not come back.

[LMNO]

No offence, but I don't know anyone who would pay $3 for a zine full of amateur* philosophy and/or political ranting.






*by "amateur",  I mean that monkeys seem to have more respect for things written by "EXPERTS".

[Cramulus]

Okay, just got off the phone with my old editor.

We paid $3/issue because we needed a quick printing, which essentially doubled the cost. If we don't mind it taking a while to print, we can get

1000 copies of a 20-page, 4-color magazine for between $1.40 and $1.60 per copy

[AFK]

Fuck, I wouldn't pay the $30-$50 they charge for peer-reviewed scholarly publications.  I'd always look for it free on the net first.  

[P3nT4gR4m]

*by "amateur",  I mean that monkeys seem to have more respect for things written by "EXPERTS".

The ability to pass oneself off as an expert is all that separates the expert from the layman.

- trust me on this.

[Triple Zero]

1) we would
2) maybe we can find 1000 other discordians somewhere all curled up in a pineal chao
3) we are experts! there's a whole bunch of reverends, popes, we have a professor (not a protected title, i remind you) and um .. i'm triple the zero i used to be?

(sorry i think my daily dose of helpfulness just ran out)

[AFK]

Okay, just got off the phone with my old editor.

We paid $3/issue because we needed a quick printing, which essentially doubled the cost. If we don't mind it taking a while to print, we can get

1000 copies of a 20-page, 4-color magazine for between $1.40 and $1.60 per copy

unnggg, where do we come up with that scratch?

[Triple Zero]

Okay, just got off the phone with my old editor.

We paid $3/issue because we needed a quick printing, which essentially doubled the cost. If we don't mind it taking a while to print, we can get

1000 copies of a 20-page, 4-color magazine for between $1.40 and $1.60 per copy

in that case, we only need about 5 full-page advertisements. that makes sense, about 25% ads is what i see in the free house-to-house newspapers dumped through my mail every week, which are only paid for by advertising (and paid good because they have a real good target audience, but that's besides the point here, as they also have to pay their editors)

[Cramulus]

If we were able to put together an attractive product I would have no objection to fronting one or two hundred bucks towards print. I'm sure if we put our hearts into it we can collectively scrape together enough cash to do it.