The Digital Distribution Consortium: Charter and Principles

As the Digital Distribution Consortium convenes in Washington to begin six weeks of intensive research and development, I think it’s appropriate to open with a key statement of our intentions. Here’s the DDC Charter and Principles, as written by members of the consortium:

Our Charter

The Digital Distribution Consortium Working Group is charged, broadly speaking, with recreating public radio on the Internet.

The group recognizes that the formats, business models, and working relationships that have given public radio its broad reach and effectiveness on-air have not translated as effectively, or reach the same scale, in new media. Our goal is to look critically at all the system’s assets, investments and practices and think expansively about how the individual system entities can, through a deeper and more formalized collaborative structure, materially improve our audience service while maintaining the core mission and values that define public radio in all of its forms.

Our charge:

1. To identify how public radio online is not meeting our shared goals, and address those issues by creating a new, scalable framework for public media
2. To develop an architecture and tools that enable any station or network the ability to offer a seamless integration of content from disparate public media sources
3. To create, or sanction the creation of, a range of technologies that will support a new infrastructure – from federated search and standards to metrics and interoperability
4. To develop the sustainable business models that reward content producers in a way that is proportionate to the value they create for the audience
5. To develop a unified marketing strategy to support the new infrastructure, building on a vision of public service that creates unique value
6. To create a consistent, flexible digital rights and licensing process, so we can offer our listeners new ways to enjoy our content while maintaining the rights of the creators of that content
7. To create trusted governance to manage the entities and processes we create, exercise leadership to recognize and invest in new technologies that extend our reach, and to ensure that all participants have a voice

Ultimately, we sense something bigger still – the opportunity to create new models for how networks, big stations, small stations and independent producers can relate to each other. That one piece alone could change everything.

Our Operating Principles

Our greatest concern is creating a compelling service for our audience. We won’t ignore the assets we’ve already built, but we won’t reverse engineer our new concepts to fit them, either. It’s one thing to have bold, revolutionary ideas; it’s another thing to be comfortable with the potentially disturbing implications of those ideas. We understand this process will create “winners” and “losers.” The litmus test of success won’t be universal acceptance. We’ll be comfortable in this uncomfortable situation.

Our operating base is Washington, DC, but we’ll reach out to our system and beyond for expertise.

We’ll leave our institutional allegiances at the door. This helps ensure we focus on conversation and not negotiation while we’re working together.

Many roads lead to Rome: there are a number of projects underway in this space already; we’ll support them when we can, and not try to control or co-opt them.

Most of the work will take place among a small group of players. We pledge to create a process that is as open and transparent as possible, and we’ll use traditional and new methods of communication to speak to the stakeholders – from letters to A-REPS and meetings with key constituencies, to wikis and blogs. Openness is the web’s great strength; it will be our ally, too.