As a resource to our readers, I have decided to create a new category here covering social media whitepapers. I will be adding a good number of resources over the next month, so keep an eye out for more.

Nicholas Reville and Holmes Wilson, co-founders of the Participatory Culture Foundation, wrote the whitepaper Sustainable Public Media Infrastructure. The basic description is best said in the introduction of the paper “A new type of non-profit organization is emerging, one that has never been possible in an offline world. These new organizations are creating permanent, sustainable public knowledge and communications infrastructure that is designed for public benefit.”

It has some excellent bullet points about participatory media on Mozilla/Firefox and Wikipedia:

Mozilla Key Takeaways

• Online, a small amount of resources can serve millions of people.
• Web-based organizations can become self-sustaining in a way that has never been possible offline. When creating a website or building software, costs do not rise linearly with the number of people served.
• Successful social tech projects can quickly transition from being grant recipients to granting organizations.

Wikipedia Key Takeaways

• Non-profit projects online can build vibrant collaborative communities of volunteers and evangelists that would have been extremely difficult and very expensive to organize offline.
• Tiny amounts of money can let smart projects reach enormous audiences.
• Avoiding some types of revenue can help protect the credibility and therefore success of certain non-profit tech projects. Revenue requirements relative to people served may be so small that perpetual grant support is the best long-term strategy.