Ártica
The twenty-four case studies in Made with CC were chosen from hundreds of nominations received from Kickstarter backers, Creative Commons staff, and the global Creative Commons community.
We did background research and conducted interviews for each case study, based on the same set of basic questions about the endeavor. The idea for each case study is to tell the story about the endeavor and the role sharing plays within it, largely the way in which it was told to us by those we interviewed.
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Ártica provides online courses and consulting services focused on how to use digital technology to share knowledge and enable collaboration in arts and culture. Founded in 2011 in Uruguay.
Revenue model: charging for custom services
Interview date: March 9, 2016
Interviewees: Mariana Fossatti and Jorge Gemetto, cofounders
Profile written by Sarah Hinchliff Pearson
The story of Mariana Fossatti and Jorge Gemetto’s business, Ártica, is the ultimate example of DIY. Not only are they successful entrepreneurs, the niche in which their small business operates is essentially one they built themselves.
Their dream jobs didn’t exist, so they created them.
In 2011, Mariana was a sociologist working for an international organization to develop research and online education about rural-development issues. Jorge was a psychologist, also working in online education. Both were bloggers and heavy users of social media, and both had a passion for arts and culture. They decided to take their skills in digital technology and online learning and apply them to a topic area they loved. They launched Ártica, an online business that provides education and consulting for people and institutions creating artistic and cultural projects on the Internet.
Ártica feels like a uniquely twenty-first century business. The small company has a global online presence with no physical offices. Jorge and Mariana live in Uruguay, and the other two full-time employees, who Jorge and Mariana have never actually met in person, live in Spain. They started by creating a MOOC (massive open online course) about remix culture and collaboration in the arts, which gave them a direct way to reach an international audience, attracting students from across Latin America and Spain. In other words, it is the classic Internet story of being able to directly tap into an audience without relying upon gatekeepers or intermediaries.
Ártica offers personalized education and consulting services, and helps clients implement projects. All of these services are customized. They call it an “artisan” process because of the time and effort it takes to adapt their work for the particular needs of students and clients. “Each student or client is paying for a specific solution to his or her problems and questions,” Mariana said. Rather than sell access to their content, they provide it for free and charge for the personalized services.
When they started, they offered a smaller number of courses designed to attract large audiences. “Over the years, we realized that online communities are more specific than we thought,” Mariana said. Ártica now provides more options for classes and has lower enrollment in each course. This means they can provide more attention to individual students and offer classes on more specialized topics.
Online courses are their biggest revenue stream, but they also do more than a dozen consulting projects each year, ranging from digitization to event planning to marketing campaigns. Some are significant in scope, particularly when they work with cultural institutions, and some are smaller projects commissioned by individual artists.
Ártica also seeks out public and private funding for specific projects. Sometimes, even if they are unsuccessful in subsidizing a project like a new course or e-book, they will go ahead because they believe in it. They take the stance that every new project leads them to something new, every new resource they create opens new doors.
Ártica relies heavily on their free Creative Commons–licensed content to attract new students and clients. Everything they create — online education, blog posts, videos — is published under an Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC BY-SA). “We use a ShareAlike license because we want to give the greatest freedom to our students and readers, and we also want that freedom to be viral,” Jorge said. For them, giving others the right to reuse and remix their content is a fundamental value. “How can you offer an online educational service without giving permission to download, make and keep copies, or print the educational resources?” Jorge said. “If we want to do the best for our students — those who trust in us to the point that they are willing to pay online without face-to-face contact — we have to offer them a fair and ethical agreement.”
They also believe sharing their ideas and expertise openly helps them build their reputation and visibility. People often share and cite their work. A few years ago, a publisher even picked up one of their e-books and distributed printed copies. Ártica views reuse of their work as a way to open up new opportunities for their business.
This belief that openness creates new opportunities reflects another belief — in serendipity. When describing their process for creating content, they spoke of all of the spontaneous and organic ways they find inspiration. “Sometimes, the collaborative process starts with a conversation between us, or with friends from other projects,” Jorge said. “That can be the first step for a new blog post or another simple piece of content, which can evolve to a more complex product in the future, like a course or a book.”
Rather than planning their work in advance, they let their creative process be dynamic. “This doesn’t mean that we don’t need to work hard in order to get good professional results, but the design process is more flexible,” Jorge said. They share early and often, and they adjust based on what they learn, always exploring and testing new ideas and ways of operating. In many ways, for them, the process is just as important as the final product.
People and relationships are also just as important, sometimes more.
In the educational and cultural business, it is more important to pay attention to people and process, rather than content or specific formats or materials,
Mariana said. “Materials and content are fluid. The important thing is the relationships.”
Ártica believes in the power of the network. They seek to make connections with people and institutions across the globe so they can learn from them and share their knowledge.
At the core of everything Ártica does is a set of values. “Good content is not enough,” Jorge said. “We also think that it is very important to take a stand for some things in the cultural sector.” Mariana and Jorge are activists. They defend free culture (the movement promoting the freedom to modify and distribute creative work) and work to demonstrate the intersection between free culture and other social-justice movements. Their efforts to involve people in their work and enable artists and cultural institutions to better use technology are all tied closely to their belief system. Ultimately, what drives their work is a mission to democratize art and culture.
Of course, Ártica also has to make enough money to cover its expenses. Human resources are, by far, their biggest expense. They tap a network of collaborators on a case-by-case basis and hire contractors for specific projects. Whenever possible, they draw from artistic and cultural resources in the commons, and they rely on free software. Their operation is small, efficient, and sustainable, and because of that, it is a success.
“There are lots of people offering online courses,” Jorge said. “But it is easy to differentiate us. We have an approach that is very specific and personal.” Ártica’s model is rooted in the personal at every level. For Mariana and Jorge, success means doing what brings them personal meaning and purpose, and doing it sustainably and collaboratively.
In their work with younger artists, Mariana and Jorge try to emphasize that this model of success is just as valuable as the picture of success we get from the media. “If they seek only the traditional type of success, they will get frustrated,” Mariana said. “We try to show them another image of what it looks like.”
