Health insurance for artists

Speaking of butts - how about keeping them safe and healthy? Again, Joe at BiS has a great round-up of health resources for artists (including health insurance). The local theatre service org, Theatre Bay Area, tried for a long time to negotiate a decent health insurance rate for members, but eventually just teamed up with Fractured Atlas (mentioned in Joe's piece) who already had a decent plan.

[Minor Caveat: For what it's worth, the links to Joe's blog don't seem to render properly in Firefox. If you read this in the next week or so, the article may still be on the front page which works with Firefox. Otherwise, use I.E. or a blog aggregator?]

Touring resources

Here's a great community-building idea- have different touring performing artists from around the U.S. (and Canada?) give advice on touring, as well as resources and performance spaces in their own backyard.

As Joe points out on his "Butts in Seats" blog, the idea for the GoTour site is great - but the input isn't there yet. It's on my list to add some detail about SF, but since I've never toured, I can only comment about what's available here....

And if you want the non-grass-roots versions of touring resrouces, you can check out APAP and NPN.... (Membership typically required).

France meets citizen journalism

I didn't find this via GVO, but from the Del.icio.us list generated in the URL "hack" descrbed in the previous post.

The great thing about foreign language sites is the bosses can't really tell if the content is work-related.....

Or maybe they can?

(P.S. Despite my Del.icio.us list's content, no, I'm not preparing to move to France any time soon.....)

(Obligatory Tech for Arts Orgs relevance: uh... Website as community building? Hmm... uh, look, they have theatre reviews!....)

Good, or rather, "Delicious" resources (and a gratuitous France connection)

In case you're wondering what those links are to the right, I started using del.icio.us for work a few months ago. At its most basic, it's a way of organizing bookmarks using an online service (handy if you use computers at home as well as at work); and also allows you to add your own "categories." I say this now because in my previous discussion about it, I kinda glossed over this simplest application of it.

I'm using it frequently for work - and for home, so now I know I'm a convert.... For example, I'm going to France for a month, and I occasionally find websites at work that I want to access from home (... uh, I didn't just say that on a work blog, did I?.... Well, see ObFrance reference below). So now I just post those links to Del.icio.us, add the word "France" in the tags, and when I go home and check my Del.icio.us account - Voila, as they say.

(Or "wala" as Sean Daniels sez... ;-) )

You can stretch the Del.icio.us list above and find all links tagged "France" using the URL "hack."

Anyway, nptechxpert Brian Del Vecchio has compiled a list of Del.icio.us resources; unfortunately, although it starts with a list of "primers" for non-techies, it's listed in a format that may be confusing to non-techies (well, let's just say I was confused, but that may not be saying much...).

So I'll help cut to the chase by leaping the link to a great (and straightforward, non-techie) overall description of how Del.icio.us works (and "John" even translated the page into Spanish...)

OK - an obligatory France Work Link then: As part of this year's "Bresil en France" celebrations, the "Libre Software Meeting" (last month) hosted Sergio Amadeu of the National Institute of Information Technologies, the man responsible for pushing the Brazilian governement towards Open Source software (he equated Microsoft to drug-dealers, saying they distributed low-cost hardware, then jacked up the cost of maintaining the systems with expensive software licensing - French description here).

Hmm - Brazil and France. That's a goooood combo in my book.

Another one overdue - Cal Shakes blogs

So I had to find out about this one the hard way - by reading about it... on paper! (That "Victorian affectation," as NTK used to call it.) This month's Theatre Bay Area magazine has a brief mention of Cal Shakes' new associate artistic director's blog, for their (past) show Othello.

Evidently, something worked because now Sean Daniels (AAD in question) asked three actors (Domenique Lozano, Jim Carpenter, and Joan Mankin) to blog their experience for the new adaption of the Dicken's epic, Nicholas Nickelby.

Judging from the entries, I'm guessing the actor-bloggers got swallowed by the production sometime in the last few days of rehearsal - something probably unavoidable for people involved in a big show like that. But up until then, it's fascintating to read the ins and outs of rehearsals - as well as the ins and outs of performers' minds.

(And something else that seems unavoidable - not knowing who is going to give you feedback...)

Way overdue - the Walker Art Center

Beth covered the Walker Art Center over a month ago, and I read her two-part series at the time - but never followed up on it. So now I have to rectify that, because not only are they a good example of using blogs to do what Beth calls "demystifying the artistic process", but also because they have a great website that uses technology very smartly. Not to mention they have great art. ;-)

CC licenses - different for developing countries

I like the idea behind Creative Commons in general - picking and choosing which rights you allocate to any particular creation of yours (as opposed to the good-ole "all rights" or "no rights"). While this idea has been gathering momentum in Europe (and even Brazil), it's a hard sell in Africa, for good reason:

But many developing countries – especially those in Africa – have yet to fully embrace the open content concept. This is because of a number of factors – most importantly Africans’ general distrust of ‘giving away’ information when indigenous knowledge is being regularly ‘stolen’ by people outside of the community.

And now here's another reason I like Creative Commons - I can differentiate my licenses between "developing" and "developed" nations (as defined by the World Bank).

The Developing Nations license allows you to invite a wide range of royalty-free uses of your work in developing nations while retaining your full copyright in the developed world.

Arts funding source online - again

(Ahh! Joe beat me to the NYFA Source link by a week! Obviously I haven't been keeping up my reading nor my writing....)

So while I was at the Ensemble Theatre Fest, I not only met Bob Leonard, one of the key people behind the Community Arts Network (that I originally discovered via Butts in Seats) that is a great online resource for community-based arts work. There's a bit too much to describe here - I suggest you just check it out.

... But I also attended a funders' roundtable. When a funder points you to a searchable website listing national arts-funding sources, it's time to perk up and listen.