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Competitive Bidding For All!

July 28, 2010

by:

Joe Patti

With all the other services offered online, I have often wondered why no one is offering a procurement bidding system. Perhaps there are such an assortment of laws from state to state it is too expensive. But if Google can navigate China’s laws and politics to give away its service for free, there has to be some money to be made.

Since I am ultimately talking about a benefit for the arts community, I would be happy to a service specifically tailored to help the industry developed. Baumol’s cost disease may say technological advances can’t reduce the number of people needed to play Beethoven, but that doesn’t mean we can’t save on our purchases of gaffers tape!

The service I am referring to is something similar to what I use at work. As a state employee, I have to get competitive bids for any goods or services above a certain dollar threshold. We use an online solicitation system which runs the bidding process for us. Even if we know something is going to fall far below the mandatory use threshold, we will use the service if we think we can get a better price somewhere.

Vendors sign up to be alerted when bid requests in certain broad subject areas are posted and then if they are awarded the bid, they pay a percentage of the price and that is what keeps the system running. The percentage on our system is 1/2% which is very competitive with other states. There are some basic bells and whistles for vendors too in terms of tracking and historical reporting. What I like best is that it exports all the salient details of the winning bid to a purchase order.

The two big complicating factors for my department as part of a state entity is 1) Necessity to accept the lowest bid or fill out copious paperwork explaining why you hadn’t and 2) Being VERY specific with your bid details lest the lowest bidder not have a feature you assumed would be included.

Making the requesters stick to these conditions in an open market setting would be difficult. But it would also not be any different than how things work right now. Private citizens and companies throw business to their favorite vendors all the time even if they aren’t the cheapest option. There are also plenty of sales personnel who invest a lot of time and energy meeting someone’s specifications only to have customers go elsewhere or be lured away by a competitor who convinces them they really want a feature they offer.

One of the reasons I suggest this is because there are often times that the difference in bids is significant. Some times so significant that we wonder if the lowest bidder got the stuff off the back of a truck somewhere. Other times, the margin is much closer, but frequency of purchasing makes the savings add up. The benefit to us is that the reach of our bid requests are much further than had we called around locally for competing bids. Even though we have to wait about a week to allow everyone time to bid, we save all the time we would have spent searching catalogs or the internet or calling around to find the best price.

There is a chicken and egg element to this which is why if someone set this up to service the arts and culture industry, it would probably have to be on a national scale. Arts organizations won’t sign up and use it unless there are a lot of vendors on it and vendors won’t bother with it unless there is a big customer base. Its existence would have to be widely advertised outside the theatrical supply and services sector. There are probably a number of companies who don’t think of themselves as serving the arts and won’t sign up. But of our best deals have come from companies who don’t cater to theatres.

If anyone knows of a service like this that the general public can use, I would be interested in learning more about it. If there isn’t anything like this but there are a lot of people interested in some sort of service, maybe Drew McManus will take the project on after his Venture Project software is launched.

Arts in an Age of Technology

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Info You Can Use: Taking Your Marketing Mobile

July 28, 2010

by:

Joe Patti

A member of the Performing Arts Administrators group on LinkedIn suggested a link to two marketing guides by Kodak. One was on using social media and the other is about using mobile marketing. Both are free downloads.

I looked at the mobile media guide most closely because I have the least idea of how to use that as a technology much less as an effective marketing tool. My initial impression that parts of it wouldn’t be easy to set up were correct. Getting a short code –the four to five digit number to which people text a word or phrase is complicated to arrange.

“Use a short code on a service provider or get a service provider to work with the aggregators on obtaining carrier certification and provisioning according to your planned campaigns and needs. Since every new service requires a new certification, make sure you cover as many services as possible before submitting the campaign for approval, to avoid having to go through the certification process again.”

Both documents provide good background and glossary of terms for those who aren’t familiar with the technologies. They provide examples of campaigns they have conducted, many of which are on a scale and involve resources most arts organizations only dream of. That being said, Twitter allows people to follow your feed on their service by texting to a number. If you created a dedicated Twitter account for promotional efforts, you can have information and links to all sorts of specials sent to people’s mobile devices without dealing with the carrier certifications. It appears you just need to text “follow (feedname)” to 40404 in the US. The code is different in other countries.

Kodak encourages people to evaluate if the technology is the correct fit for their organization. They also offer Do’s and Don’ts for campaigns. The one they provide for mobile marketing seems obvious as a step for keeping spam off mobile devices.

“The rule for viral messages is that they can only be sent by non-commercial entities who manually select a recipient to receive it. Messages forwarded by automatic means, originating from a commercial source, or offering inducements to forward messages are definite “don’ts”.”

At first I just thought it was an ethical rule, but since the next section advises you to consult a lawyer about what is and is not permissible, I wondered if it might be a Federal law created to squelch spam before it started. As always, the best rule of thumb with most communication media remains true — be careful you aren’t annoying people.

Arts in an Age of Technology, Info You Can Use, Marketing/PR

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Do Androids Make Good Critics

July 26, 2010

by:

Joe Patti

Science fiction often has a motif of technology seeking to become human. Its a story as old as Pinocchio or even Pygmalion and Galatea. Star Trek: The Next Generation series had an android named Data who painted and played music as part of his quest to achieve humanity. His work was often praised for its technical proficiency but lacking that intangible quality of self that artists imbue in their work. There is often a sense of pity that for all the sophistication possessed by the entity, the gap can’t be bridged. Perhaps it is out of ego that we create these stories which suggest there are some things in which technology can’t surpass us.

But what happens when we abdicate our aesthetic judgment to technology? Via Tyler Cohen’s Marginal Revolution blog, is a link to a prototype camera that rates the aesthetics of the picture you are about to take. Move the camera around to different angles to improve the percentage to achieve a better picture. According to the Today and Tomorrow web page, right now the camera, Nadia, communicates via Bluetooth with a Mac that does all the evaluating. The camera was created as something of a statement about the artistic experience, but you know it won’t be long before someone develops this as a feature for digital cameras. I’ll bet they get it linked up with Google Maps to automatically create notes about the best place for tourists to stand in relation to monuments.

Also on the Today and Tomorrow page is a camera that actually inserts smiles on people’s faces regardless of their expression. So if you are standing in the ideal spot to take pictures in front of the Grand Canyon, but your moody teenage offspring are scowling, the picture and memories need not be ruined. Say the camera creators:

“To achieve this camera takes a picture but overlays it with a smiling mouth drawn from a pre-existing pool of pictures with smiling faces. To generate to maximum level of exaggeration the replaced smiling mouth impression is matched as realistically as possible to that of the initial portrait taken.”

Again, the camera was created by German art students and is not a commercial development for cameras. But as the creators point out, digital cameras can already automatically retouch pictures in real time.

I know a couple photographers who figure they are the only ones keeping the makers of camera film in business since everyone else is going to digital. I am not going to debate characteristics of film photographs which are lost in digital. I am sure they have been beaten to death in books, blogs and magazines ad infinitum.

The question I want to ask is the I asked earlier–what are the repercussions of abdicating judgments to a piece of technology? In our science fiction, we always assume we retain the characteristics we value into the future and some are envied by those who do not possess them. But what if we, as a whole, don’t really care about some thing enough to work at developing and retaining them?

For those of us in the arts and our long time patrons, we know that developing discernment takes time and experience. One of the primary instructions to formal students and interested others has always been–go see stuff and then see some more. But it is conceivable that an artificial intelligence fed the judgments of thousands could synthesize an authoritative one of its own. It may not be perfect, but it would be enough to get by, right? Oh wait, Pandora already does this for music and Amazon does it with…everything.

But you know you can’t trust those Amazon reviews. People can manipulate them! A computer algorithm is an objective source! For those who are intimidated by the arts it may provide a sense of confidence that gets them to attend events more often. There are no critics to agree or disagree with. You take your device (and I am imagining more widely than just photographs) to a performance or gallery, let it absorb what you are seeing and hearing and rate it.

Except what if you point it at the stuff you already know you like and it says it sucks? What does the device know? It was programmed by elitist arts lovers. It has no credibility with you! What if it is like Pandora and has a feature that suggests you might like x because you like y based on a computer program? That might be bad for the arts people because it just reinforces people’s consumption of experiences they pretty much already like. It can’t sneak in suggestions to encourage people to take chances too much because it will lose credibility.

Also in my experience with Pandora, technology can’t yet measure that intangible quality based on beats per minute. Some people are great because of so many other factors. I stopped using it very quickly when I hated nearly everything it suggested alongside my favorite groups.

Do people care about learning about quality or about what already appeals to them? Is there too much work and risk involved in experiencing the unknown even at a highly accurate computer’s recommendation?

The use of such technology doesn’t have to necessarily have such a stark dichotomy, of course. Devices that evaluate aesthetics can help Pro-Ams sharpen their skills at creating things. They may only enable people to advance to a certain level, but can bring great enjoyment in the process.

It is a complicated subject all around. About as complicated as the idea that being able to create high quality original works is exclusively a trait of humanity.

Arts in an Age of Technology

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Do You Fight For Your Rights?

July 21, 2010

by:

Joe Patti

Artsjournal is doing another one of their special week long conversations on a topic. This week it is the issue of artists and intellectual property rights. There are too many topics being bandied about to summarize them all, but as you might imagine one of the central themes is in regard to the whole tension between wanting to protect your creative rights and the ability and desire of the public at large to integrate or reimagine your great ideas into their own.

Bill Ivey does a good job of summing up the need for changing how rights are controlled.

“The notion that artists and companies share the same values when it comes to the character of our arts system is a crock. Companies worry about the theft of assets; artists worry about obscurity. These two concerns overlap at times, but often they don’t. What’s the real benefit to an artist of copyright protection that reaches beyond three-quarters of a century? What’s the real benefit to an artist if your publishing company or record company uses licensing fees to prevent your composition from being sampled. or prevents your film clip from being part of a documentary. We need to begin the organizational conversation Marty envisions by figuring out what an artist-oriented regime of laws and regulations would look like.”

There is also a discussion about whether artists are investing appropriate time and attention into protecting their rights. There was actually some pretty extensive discussion, tied together by Tim Quirk, refuting the idea that artists are/should be primarily focused on their art and can’t be bothered with mundane details of business and rights management. Quirk says:

“I had always assumed this ridiculous idea that artists are delicate otherworldly creatures who can’t and shouldn’t concern themselves with prosaic business or policy matters was being fed to them (along with other helpful notions, such as being a drunk or an addict is all part of being creative) by malicious middlemen and mendacious media.

But now I’ve read Vickie’s insightful analysis of how this dynamic is perpetuated by art schools and universities, and Bill’s observation that “things like intellectual property, media policy, unions, performance rights, and so on not show up in art schools or music conservatories, they have precious little traction in arts management programs.”

He goes on to acknowledge that intellectual property laws and the convoluted system of entities that administer them are really tough to comprehend and can be frustrating, but it is something that is worth mastering. It was interesting to me to read Bill Ivey’s thoughts on how this was an area that arts training programs fell short in. When I was pursuing my MFA, I had direct experience with different contracts, including negotiating music performance rights. Even still, the first thing I mentioned at my degree defense when asked what additional instruction would have been helpful during my studies was more contract and rights law. This was 15 years ago so I am surprised to learn that more isn’t taught given all the challenges technology presents in this area.

Though to be fair, as Brian Newman notes, there is a lot to be taught already. I was intrigued to learn in one of his posts that in film at least, the very people who are now clamoring for film makers to become involved in policy debates helped to dismantle the organizations which could have been instrumental in driving that discussion. I wonder if that is the case in other disciplines.

“In the world of film, we used to have a very strong network of media arts centers around the nation. As foundations shifted priorities (and the NEA’s support changed dramatically), however, many of these organizations have shut down or refocused energies to where the money is – social issue action, youth training or corporate support for large activities, like film festivals. When attending a Grantmakers in the Arts conference a couple of years ago, I was amazed that there was a group of funders upset that they couldn’t get filmmakers active in the policy debate – but they had helped disband the very network that could have served to rally filmmakers around these issues.”

Intellectual properties rights is likely to continue as an important topic for years to come so it is worth following the whole conversation. I have barely represented the breadth of it here. They are covering nuances between people who live or die by the strength of protections versus people who need loose protections to thrive and further develop their work. There is also the inevitable discussion of how money determines whose voices and interests are being heard and transformed into policy and law.

Arts in an Age of Technology, Government Relations, State of the Arts

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