Words    Words    Words

So you have your unruly mass of contributors, and a pool of general donations, now what do you do? Any time you set up a system where the central creative committee is saying “one contribution is worth more than another contribution” in some form, you are likely to have problems with hurt feelings among your collaborators. For general sanity as well as long-term project success, it’s worth trying to avoid this problem. But how?

The more objective your measurement of contribution worth, the less room you leave open for hurt feelings among your creative team. However, when dealing with art, it’s often difficult to find a system of “objective” contribution measurement in such a subjective medium. If you are trying to compare and contrast works across artistic media, it’s even harder.

One option is to make it completely subjective; the choice of who is a contributor is decided by the people in charge of a particular project, through assessments of project worth that are not easily quantifiable. (”They feel like a right fit for the project” or “their prestige is something we want” or “they’ve significantly helped shape our art.”) This way has a fairly high chance of interpersonal drama unless roles for each person are clearly defined from the beginning of their inclusion in the project.

There are a few ways you can measure even artistic projects more objectively, at least from the creator viewpoint. The one least likely to appeal to most artists is tracking participation through number of hours spent working on the project. In addition to questions raised of abusing the system through idling “on the clock,” the similarity of this method to the timeclock-focused jobs that most artists want to avoid means that there are only limited circumstances where it is useful to certain projects.

Other more quantifiable tracking methods that might be marginally more palatable to a team of writers, for example, would be to track number of words contributed to the project in a given period of time. However, depending on which media your project use, even this could easily get difficult–is a picture really worth 1000 words? How do you quantify a hand-knitted shawl or a set of crafted dishware in wordcount numbers? If the project incorporates a group blog or multiple characters posting on a Twitter feed, how can you share profits when you aren’t even sure which contributor is who? How do you quantify hundreds of single-line message contributions per month? Again, there seem to be no hard rules, simply decisions that suit particular projects in answering these questions.

Another way to log participation would be to track the number of contributions (again based on an arbitrary decision of what determines a contribution). This gets prettily heavily into subjective territory again, though; does someone’s one-line Twitter post weigh the same as another person’s 100-hour oil painted masterpiece? Something else to consider is for what period of time does a contribution count? Someone who is posting daily blog and Wiki content for a world isn’t contributing on the same level as someone who contributes two pieces of art and never visits again.

Now that we’ve looked at some tracking options from the creator-determined side of things, there are also ways to measure project involvement as determined by the end users, the audience for your art. We can see a range of subjectivity assessments here as well. User-determined tracking could be things like monitoring the number of unique hits a specific page on a website receives; tracking the number of times someone downloads a story or picture; number of sales of crafted artifacts; or even a Digg-style social accounting system to measure the popularity of different project parts. One benefit of using such systems is that it eliminates much of the chance for hurt feelings toward the central creative team, since they aren’t the ones making the judgment calls on individual contributions. On the other hand, if you have a large project, tracking all the various parts can get quite complicated.

To summarize some options then, you could have non-specifically designated donation income distributed arbitrarily; distributed communistically; kept entirely for website maintenance and project growth; distributed through a percentage allocation system; or some combination of these. For example, you could have all the income up to a certain amount go toward growth and maintenance costs, but once an income goal per time period is reached, share the remaining income on an equal share basis or percentage basis. Now is the time to start making specific decisions on what are the needs of your particular project.

And what about the fans or contributors who can donate loyalty, love, and even time…but little to no art or money? Tune in tomorrow for an entry from Kit discussing Whuffie and how fans without money can contribute to the project.

Other posts:

• Part 0: Series Announcement
• Part 1: About the Series
• Part 2: The Five W’s
• Part 3: DMAIC
• Part 4: 4 Simple Steps
• Part 5: Time Vs. Money
• Part 6: Waves
• Part 7: Donations
• Part 8: Dividing Donations
  

The Artist Business Models series is based on a paper written by Reesa Brown and Kit O’Connell, with assistance from Steven Brust, Ken Brown, Deborah Ibarra, and many others. At the close of the series, the entire business model paper will be posted to Continuous Labs. The business model paper and blog posts are released under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3.0 license.