Economic sustainability & Business Model

A mix of possible models from Annex table

 Support contracts business model: "The levels of support can be generically divided into three levels:
 * Basic support (subscription, physical site, online resources)
 * Midrange support
 * Premium support (on-site and 24/7)

(Chang, Victor, Mills, Hugo and Newhouse, Steven (2007) From Open Source to long-term sustainability: Review of Business Models and Case studies. In, All Hands Meeting 2007, OMII-UK Workshop, Nottigham, UK, 10 - 13 Sep 2007).

Crowdsourcing / Getting users to create something of value for free and applying a business model to monetize it: "Crowdsourcing is a process that involves outsourcing tasks to a distributed group of people. This process can occur both online and offline, and the difference between crowdsourcing and ordinary outsourcing is that a task or problem is outsourced to an undefined public rather than a specific body, such as paid employees." ("How to Make Money Around Free Content: What does the "Media Business Model" mean?", HowTo wiki, Wired Magasine, This page was last modified 19:34, 28 February 2011 by neil80. Based on work by jeremytanks, mirgrl33b, michaelrush, mammique, webword, howto_admin, pamstatz, pstatz and amyatwire)
 * 1) Partnerships and exchanges: "Though perhaps not thought of as a funding or financing model, partnerships and exchanges nonetheless play an important role, or potential role, in the development of [ OER networks]. Partnerships depend not so much on exchanges of funding as on exchanges of resources, where the output of the exchange is an OER" ("Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources", 2006, Stephen Downes) + "For example, at a recent UNESCO conference an Open Source Congress was proposed, which "would be a voluntary, collaborative effort by interested higher education institutions to lend their expertise - both technical and functional - to begin the high-level design and planning for what will become the next-generation, open source, administrative systems." (UNESCO, 2002).
 * 2) Enlarging mission of organisations to include OER production and development: For instance, if a University decides that all research publications publicly funded should be released using a Creative Commons license, this would lower levels in order to produce OER within the organisation. Enlarging the mission of an organisation in order to include OER production can translate into long Term sustainability for OER. Or another example: "The most intriguing support possibility for open educational resource projects  is to reduce the cost of the open educational resource projects so drastically that there is little or nothing left to fund. This is the approach taken in joint work by the Sakai Project, an open source course management system, and eduCommons, an open source opencourseware management system. The two projects are working together to leverage all the effort that already goes into building and publishing online courses. Many universities, including the Michigan and Utah State Universities, already have funding, processes, and personnel in place to build online courses within their chosen course management tool. If a “one button” feature could be added to these systems that exports an open version of the official course into a university’s opencourseware collection, this would remove many of the major costs associated with running open educational resource projects" (Wiley, D. (2007). On the sustainability of Open Educational Resource Initiatives in Higher Education COSL/EDU).
 * 3) Endowment model: "The project obtains base funding. A fund administrator manages this base funding and the project is sustained from interest earned on that fund" ("Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources", 2006, Downes).
 * 4) Streaming audio/video advertising: "Like radio or video advertising delivered in the audio/video stream after a certain amount of audio/video content has been delivered" "How to Make Money Around Free Content: What does the "Media Business Model" mean?", HowTo wiki, Wired Magasine, This page was last modified 19:34, 28 February 2011 by neil80. Based on work by jeremytanks, mirgrl33b, michaelrush, mammique, webword, howto_admin, pamstatz, pstatz and amyatwired).
 * 5) Sponsorship model: "To sponsor something is to support an event, activity, person, or organization financially or through the provision of products or services. A sponsor is the individual or group that provides the support, similar to a benefactor" ).
 * 6) Institutional funding: "A variation, perhaps, on the sponsorship model is the case in which an institution will assume the responsibility itself for an OER initiative" ("Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources", 2006, Stephen Downes)
 * 7) Donations model: "On this model, a project deemed worthy of support by the wider community requests, and receives, donations. Donations are in turn managed by a non-profit foundation, which may apply them to operating expenses or, if amounts are sufficient, seek to establish an endowment" ("Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources", 2006, Stephen Downes)
 * 8) Governmental funding: "Similar to the institutional model, the governmental model represents direct funding for OER projects by government agencies, including the United Nations" ("Models for Sustainable Open Educational Resources", 2006, Stephen Downes).
 * 9) Macro R&D infrastructure: "Model where the funding initially comes from a government’s research grant, and sources of funding will come from research grants of local or international partner institutes" (Chang, Victor, Mills, Hugo and Newhouse, Steven (2007) From Open Source to long-term sustainability: Review of Business Models and Case studies. In, All Hands Meeting 2007, OMII-UK Workshop, Nottigham, UK, 10 - 13 Sep 2007).
 * 10) Community model: "Managed by a variety of governance procedures, a community of users and developers normally work together to either report bugs, investigate problems, fix errors, share knowledge or improve functionality of the software. Such a community-based organisation which does not have a specific funding body but instead relies on donations and enthusiasm, is known as Community model" (Chang, Victor, Mills, Hugo and Newhouse, Steven (2007) From Open Source to long-term sustainability: Review of Business Models and Case studies. In, All Hands Meeting 2007, OMII-UK Workshop, Nottigham, UK, 10 - 13 Sep 2007)
 * 11) Crowdfunding: "By enabling individual citizens and public or private business to contribute to a cultural enterprise with whatever amount of money they choose, these platforms have allowed society to become an important player and to have a voice in the production of specific cultural projects. There are currently several models of crowdfunding that should be explored and taken into account in order to understand the potential of these models" (How-To for Sustainable Creativity in the Digital Era - Free Culture Forum)

OTHER?