Re: bounties

[Joseph Wakeling]

On 06/19/2010 07:50 PM, Valentin Villenave wrote:
> Ditto here. I have contacted dozens of French universities, music
> schools, government-funded music structures and whatnot. Everytime I
> got an answer, the answer was: "Fuck off, we already have Finale".
> 
> Or something like that.

What were the nature of the proposals or enquiries you made?

I'm asking because of my own experience, now, working for an
organization where the leadership is quite
traditional-business-oriented, and trying to steer their thinking in
more open ways.

What's clear is that their attitude is very much along the lines of,
'There are lots of different models/tools you could adopt, but these
ones have clear and proven track record of success.  So you have to
prove to us that your alternative is viable and sustainable.'

Returning to the music institutions, Finale/Sibelius work for them, _and
the issue is not the money_, even on a student level.  Music students
will pay tens of thousands of euros for instruments -- €500 for a
software licence, and €100 a year for an upgrade (if you really want to)
is a piss in the park by comparison.

The issue is also not the freedom, because it's not such a big deal in
most cases to be able to read past files or hack the software.  Once
you've got a PDF of a composition your work is done, and it's common for
music to be re-engraved from scratch.

It's not even the beauty of results, because -- we see this on a regular
basis -- the Finale- or Sibelius-produced editions are _good enough for
purpose_.  With publishers at least, the norm seems to be to use the
music engraving software to produce the basic framework and then further
edit the output postscript in some vector graphics tool where necessary.
 It really is about producing final graphical output.

They won't even care if Lilypond offers them something they don't get
from Finale/Sibelius, because -- well -- you guys are doing this anyway
and give it away for free. :-P

What they _will_ care about is if you can give them a concrete plan
along the lines of, 'This is something that you care about that you
don't have now, or don't have easily, and here is how we can provide it,
and this is how much money it will cost.'

You have to make it very clear to them, because although the people
concerned may be very nice and talented and able in the general scheme
of things, where software is concerned they generally have the level of
understanding of the pointy-haired boss.  Or else they have a
pointy-haired technology boss to tell them what to think. :-)

(Mind you: that's European and US colleges.  I'd be curious to see if
you might have more luck going to South American or Asian or African
institutions, who might appreciate the budgetary implications of being
able to secure a long-term reliably supported notation solution for a
fraction of the cost of Finale/Sibelius licenses.  To say nothing of the
fact that it fits with the more communally-inclined cultural innovations
that are taking place in these countries.  Try taking the message to
Brazil with their increasing enthusiasm for copyleft [Gilberto Gil as
culture minister], try taking it to Venezuela with reference to Il
Sistiema, try wedding it to projects built on top of the 'One Laptop Per
Child' scheme.)

Examples of things that could get people's attention:

    -- Lilypond as a tool for disabled (notably, blind) access to music
       notation software.  Not just blind music students like our own
       Hui Haipeng -- as a tool for disabled outreach projects.  You'd
       have to take account of the fact that while Finale and Sibelius
       aren't so helpful to a blind person from a visual point of view,
       they DO offer valuable support in their ease of entering music
       by playing on the keyboard.

    -- Lilypond as a tool for 3rd-world or poor country outreach,
       prison outreach (it happens!), educational outreach to deprived
       regions of their own country.

    -- Support for community outreach projects (bearing in mind that
       music students and even schools can probably deal with the costs
       of software licenses, but it lowers the point of entry and long-
       term sustainability of wider community participation; think of
       the way that community and church choirs already use Lilypond...)

    -- Support for niche notational needs not well supported by Finale
       or Sibelius, such as early music or extreme contemporary music,
       algorithmically-created music, etc.

    -- Support for non-Western musics.

Bear in mind that one GREAT way to unlock the coffers of institutions is
to provide them with something where, by spending this money, they can
do something that makes them look good in terms of the public arts
spending aims of the day. :-)

Example of these priorities in terms of questions a friend of mine was
asked to address when applying to have her work displayed in a music
technology exhibition:

   'How can new technology build local communities, create new
   identities, new narratives, new forms of public interaction? How can
   creative projects foster cultural development?'

You can see that this has little to do with the aesthetic value of a
work, but a _lot_ to do with the current political narratives of trying
to overcome 'cultural clashes' and build 'inclusiveness'.  Hence some of
the suggestions above -- it's something that, described in the right
way, Lilypond could fit in well with ...

Last, I would try a more fine-grained approach, not going to the
institutions on an 'institutional level' but seeking out e.g. the
leaders of particular projects that have particular needs that aren't
quite being met right now.  Be pro-active in seeking out niche needs of
people who have (even small) budgets to spend, and connecting those
people where their needs overlap -- if you can charge a relatively small
fee of €500 per group involved in return for providing for their need,
and you have 10 projects with that niche need ...

I'm sure you will tell me that you have done at least some and maybe all
of the above.  Maybe one useful exercise could be to try and document in
detail those efforts to see if there are reasons that can be identified
for their failure.

Best wishes,

    -- Joe