NAMACAdmin's blog

As Anne Pasternak, President and Artistic Director of Creative Time, accepted the NAMAC Award for Outstanding Organization, we were inspired by her words and asked her if we could share her notes with the broader NAMAC network since they really capture what we are doing as a field.

Reflecting on the varied initiatives unveiled at the conference, I realized that a common thread was the importance of government policies that support media, arts and culture. The projects that were inspiring to me need government policies to protect and promote media and the arts.

I'm here to report on what's happening in Washington. Washington is changing. It has been a different place. Even that swampy, muggy August weather hasn't seemed so disgusting this year. There's still optimism in the air. I'm here to tell you that if you care about media and the arts, it matters who is in the White House. It matters who controls Congress.

CommonWealth functioned like a primer on telecommunications policy challenges like net neutrality, broadband and arts stimulus while it also provided navigational systems and mappings of digital media, social media, and new ways to think about outcomes in media arts funding.

The commons describes a social practice that unleashes people’s capacity to create things together and take their lives and livelihood into their own hands. It is a social form that has long lived in the shadows of our market culture, but which is now on the rise.

I’m heading to Boston on Wednesday for an industry conference called Commonwealth. The conference, co-hosted by the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC) and the Center for Independent Documentary, is a place where community media centers, national media arts organizations, university educators, museum presenters, film festivals and archives, youth media programs, public access television stations, national arts policy think tanks, and related groups come together to assess the state of the field, share resources and best practices, inspire each other, build relationships to benefit local neighborhoods, national movements, and global communities.

Our Conference Producer, Yolanda Hippensteele, discusses the upcoming conference on Cambridge Community Television.

When I first read about this I was pretty skeptical, "of great another conference that purports to think about media and the future," yet as I look through the program I am genuinely curious. And for a bitter person like me, that is saying something.