SCA Blog

‘The Shape of the Future? Business Models and Sustainability in the Digital Age: A Peer-reviewing Workshop’ will take place on 10th April, 2008 at the Wellcome Trust with Ithaka and the Strategic Content Alliance.

Further details below but please note that numbers are strictly limited so make sure you sign up at your earliest opportunity. Please email e.beer@jisc.ac.uk for further details.

Outline

Many online academic and non-profit resources launched with grant or institutional funding struggle to develop strategies that will help financially sustain them for the longer term. This has placed a strain on public and philanthropic resources and can put the achievements of these projects at risk.

Through the Sustainability Study, funded in part by the Strategic Content Alliance, Ithaka is producing a paper which sets out an initial framework for online content projects to develop strategic plans to generate the resources they need over time. Ithaka’s analysis is based on their own experiences working with projects in these sectors and on a closer examination of the newspaper industry, which may offer some lessons for others operating in the online content arena.

Ithaka will release a draft of this paper at the end of March. At that juncture, we would value your feedback on the usefulness of this approach and where you could see a need for further investigation. This event on 10 April 2008 will draw together Strategic Content Alliance sponsors and experts in this field to discuss the report and next steps lead by Kevin Guthrie, President of Ithaka.

Meeting objectives:

• To share reactions to the Ithaka paper and consider implications for how Strategic Content Alliance sponsored initiatives are funded and managed
• To identify potential areas for future investigation that could strengthen the prospects for sustainability of academic or other non-profit online content initiatives

About the organizers

The Strategic Content Alliance is funded by the JISC, Becta, BBC, British Library, NHS, MLA and the National e-Science Centre. We are working to build consensus across the UK public sector through a framework of good principles and practices, for the benefit of all users of e-content.

Ithaka is an independent not-for-profit organization with a mission to accelerate the productive uses of information technologies for the benefit of higher education worldwide. We help promising not-for-profit projects develop sustainable organisational and business models. We also work with established institutions that are rethinking the way they serve their core constituents.