First a disclaimer: I’ve been a Rhizome member for years (since ‘97), have personal friendships with all the main people who manage it (both past and present), and have recently done paid work for them. These suggestions are in the spirit of dialogue and openness and are not intended to demean or diminish the challenges the directors face in keeping Rhizome afloat and relevant.

Rhizome should adopt a shareware model as opposed to a publication model. With their new policy, Rhizome has adopted what we’ll call the NYTimes model: new content is free, older content is behind a fee firewall. This is a reasonable model for a publication that commissions original writing and art. For the most part, Rhizome doesn’t commission writing (except Net Art News). So the NYTimes model isn’t a reasonable model for Rhizome, below I’ll outline more of a shareware model that I think would make the constituency happy as well as bring some revenue into Rhizome.

This idea centers on giving people more and easier ways to access Rhizome content while always leaving a base level of free content outside of any firewall. We add value by applying filters and enhancements for a fee.

First, we need to define a reasonable free service. Access to all text and artbase entries should be free forever. I think the membership would agree with this as a base service. This would include access to the Rhizome_RAW email list, the RARE feed with excerpts, the art + text sections of the web site and newer Net Art News items. It would be free to submit text and art.

After a member becomes a paying member they receive a few enhancements and services:
1. Access to Rhizome_RARE mailing list.
2. A full RARE RSS Feed, this would allow one to read all of RARE without visiting Rhizome.org.
3. Advanced search capabilities: search by year, artist, region. Search only the artbase or search only text, etc.
4. Members are allowed to curate online exhibitions.
5. Enhanced text handling on the site. Currently there are some really funky text handling (since most text comes in via email), making this smarter for paying users would be a great enhancement.
6. Provide bare-bone discussion spaces (blogs).
7. Access to Net Art News archives.

This isn’t supposed to be an exhaustive list, it’s sort of off-the-top-of-my-head. But if the policy were “all content is free, but you pay to get the content in more convenient ways,” then I think it would serve the community better. permanent link to this post