Raising more money for Nowhere

Before I launch into my next post, I wanted to remind everyone that these are my personal opinions. These opinions have been distilled from countless conversations about Nowhere over the past year. Also, please be aware that I have a former board member and a current meta-lead review my posts before I post them. I want these posts to prompt discussion — if you disagree with me, I’d love to hear why!

In my previous post I suggested that Nowhere needs to find more money to put on the event. Money will be needed for staff costs and other improvements, such as for more infrastructure or more art. This means that Nowhere needs to find other sources of income. Sadly, additional staff costs represent some of the greatest expenses that Nowhere needs to cover and covering those will not be easy.

Other festivals resort to raising ticket prices, which many of us agree is a bad idea, since it excludes many people. As it stands tickets are already prohibitively expensive for residents of less wealthy countries such as Spain. Selling more tickets is even trickier, since it opens the whole growth discussion, which is one I would like to leave for later. Plus our current permit simply won’t allow us to grow. For now, let’s leave income from tickets out of this discussion.

Before I delve into suggestions for bringing in more money, I would like to examine the current state of affairs. The perfect starting point for this is the third core principle of Nowhere:

No commerce

What actually happens, is quite different. We all know there is a massive amount of commerce that happens before the event. People mass buying supplies, costumes, food, renting vehicles, buying petrol — by not buying these things during the week of Nowhere, we’re only shifting the commerce, but the commerce still happens on behalf of Nowhere and its attendees.

And during the event Nobodies can purchase ice and barrios purchase water for cash. People sell other goods, especially black market goods, to each other — for cash. People leave Nowhere to purchase food and other supplies in nearby towns. Many of us pay barrio fees to feed us. While is it well reasoned, very useful and for some parts necessary for safety, it is all commerce!

I think we could describe our current behaviour as No overt commerce.

Principle #3 is not strictly being adhered to, so I think it is worth breaking down the various areas of commerce and examining how we feel about them. We should step back and decide what aspects of commerce we really don’t want at our event. We probably all agree that:

1. We should not charge attendees anything more than a ticket. For instance, other events charge for vehicle passes — we should not do that.
2. We should not make attendees the product. When you use GMail, Google places ads into the web page and thus earns money off you — you are the product.
3. We should not market to attendees. No advertising at Nowhere, the Nowhere web site or Nowhere materials.

These things are not happening at Nowhere now, but as we examine ways to bring money into Nowhere, we need to have a finer grained idea of what commerce in our context means. What activities should we not allow? Please leave a comment below if you have suggestions!

Next, I want to share a story from 2015 that still bothers me. There was a filmmaker who said they were making a TV documentary and asked my crew if we wanted to participate. Assuming good intentions and oversight of Nowhere we agreed. Later in the year the filmmaker contacted us and told us the documentary was complete and that it was picked up by a prominent pay TV production company, for a pay TV channel. This filmmaker shared the documentary with a handful of people on the promise to not share with anyone, otherwise they would get into trouble. No one else was allowed to view the film.

While I know no details of this deal, something seems fishy to me. I doubt the filmmaker worked for free on this film and I assume that the maker was paid for the work. If the maker no longer has the rights to show the work, that suggests the film was sold for profit. Was that shared with Nowhere? I don’t think so. Was this ok? What do you think?

Then to top it off, the filmmaker started an IndieGogo campaign to raise funds for make a new edit of the film for public consumption! This filmmaker wants to make money off Nowhere not once, but twice! Is that ok?

You can see that this is a tricky and nuanced discussion that needs to happen. But simply stating No commerce and shutting out all other forms of commerce aside from the ones already happening right now, will not allow us to significantly improve the event.

Suggestions for improvements

Today’s suggestions for improvements are actually your homework:

1. Think about the situation with the filmmaker. What if the filmmaker were to split the money that was received with Nowhere? Going forward, if a piece of film or music is made at Nowhere, for profit, the artist then needs to split the proceeds with Nowhere? How do you feel about that?
2. What if Nowhere made a larger art grant with the goal to produce a significant piece of art for the event, but with the goal of selling the art afterwards? Seems like a win-win to me!
3. Given these examples, can you think of other ways in which we can bring money into Nowhere while respecting our core principles?

If you have any thoughts, please leave a comment!