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December 2, 2009
 

Arts Advocacy Update: Petition, Happy Hour and the D.C. Arts Budget

Rob Bettmann sent a message to the members of D.C. Advocates for the Arts.

Dear Artists and Arts Advocates:

Thank you all for joining the DC Advocates for the Arts. We’re aiming to send out updates once a month with relevant information. This months update includes a petition to protect artists, a budget update, and announcement for our happy hour next Wednesday at DCAC.

Protecting the Work of Artists:

The DC Advocates for the Arts are asking that the City Council pass a bill amending the Univeral Commercial Code to protect the rights of Artists, Collectors, and the Estates of Artists. We need your help to get the bill passed. To learn more and to sign the petition follow this link: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/protectartists/

DC Arts Budget Update:

Many of the members of our community have been impacted by the recent, sharp decline in local funding for the Arts. Arts funding from the D.C. government for local arts dropped from

$14,242,396     in FY 2009 to just
 $7,352,763      for FY 10

The FY 09 numbers included $5,764,000 in earmarks to fourteen local arts organizations, which you can see listed here: http://www.dcadvocatesforthearts.org/news_details.php?news_id=11. Over 1 million dollars in real funds for granting and programming were cut, in addition to the earmarks.

With the decline in funding the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities was forced to cut granting programs, and the amount granted within granting programs. Fortunately, DCCAH programming was not affected by the decline in local funding. Also thankfully, by switching funding for two staff positions from local monies to federal monies the DCCAH was able to avoid cutting staff for financial reasons. This year 9 of the DCCAH’s 15 full time staff are actually funded from the NEA’s appropriation for arts in the District. (The District's NEA appropriation is $710,000 this year.)

We hope you'll get involved now to protect funding local arts funding. Right now we need volunteers to help with research, event planning, organizing, and communications. Which brings us to our second item:

Artist/Arts Advocate Happy Hour @ DCAC Wed Dec. 9th

Come meet fellow artists and arts advocates at a Happy Hour Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 from 6-7:30pm at the DC Arts Center in Adams Morgan (2438 18th St. NW). Cash bar. No cover.

This event is sponsored by the DC Advocates for the Arts as a chance for artists and arts advocates to meet each other socially. We hope you’ll join us at this happy hour, and sign up to get involved while you’re there.

To learn more about our group, please visit our website: http://www.dcadvocatesforthearts.org.

Clipped from Facebook

Filed under  //   dc advocates for the arts   facebook announcements   messages that matter   petitions for greater good  

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December 1, 2009
 

An Open Letter from Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg

It has been a great year for making the world more open and connected. Thanks to your help, more than 350 million people around the world are using Facebook to share their lives online.

To make this possible, we have focused on giving you the tools you need to share and control your information. Starting with the very first version of Facebook five years ago, we've built tools that help you control what you share with which individuals and groups of people. Our work to improve privacy continues today.

Facebook's current privacy model revolves around "networks" — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.

Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China.

However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we've concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.

The plan we've come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

We're adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we'll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.

Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new settings, in the next couple of weeks we'll ask you to review and update your privacy settings. You'll see a message that will explain the changes and take you to a page where you can update your settings. When you're finished, we'll show you a confirmation page so you can make sure you chose the right settings for you. As always, once you're done you'll still be able to change your settings whenever you want.

We've worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you, but we also understand that everyone's needs are different. We'll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you're sharing with online.

Thanks for being a part of making Facebook what it is today, and for helping to make the world more open and connected.

Mark Zuckerberg

via blog.facebook.com

 

Filed under  //   facebook announcements   mark zuckerberg   social media  

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