Hi Irishlostboy and others,

A few things:

1. Good idea about the action plan. We're in discussions right now about our next course of action, and we'll open up what we decide to the forums. Just so you know, I think it's appropriate now for me to mention what I personally (and not necessarily David, who I have to discuss with more before we take any course of action) like as an option:

-Create a 2-tier system. Only those on the higher tier get compensation. Those on the lower tier do not. Since the payments would be spread among a smaller group of people, we could pay much, much more.

-I feel that this group should be very exclusive, very high quality, and very committed members to our community (e.g., leave helpful comments, rate, etc.). The idea is to make it clear that if you want to get payment, you have to be very good, giving incentives to people to go for quality.

-The qualifications for entering the second tier would be (a) a high quality of work (b)  disclosure of enough personal information, somehow, to make it possible for us to get them in trouble for copyright material (c) participation in the community, and most importantly, (d) moderation duties--including deciding who else gets let in.

-Moderation will be spread among a large group of higher-tier users. They should be lenient about what gets to stay in the site, but not what higher-tier users get to keep on the site.

-Higher-tier users will get priority placement on the homepage and in each category.

-Users can only apply for the higher-tier a limited amount of times, say, once per month.

The idea, then, would be to set up a system that gives the incentives for producing high quality content, but also leave in place the ability for any user to upload anything (as long as it's legal). With two-tiers, I think we might be able to have quantity and quality.

2. About community--I look at this question differently. I don't think it necessarily means that the community has control over the website--although it might.  Nor do I think that community is the forums--if you recall, forums came later than the rest of the site.

I think the defining charecteristic of community is people leaving helpful comments on other people's work--the kind of feedback that will actually help them improve as artists. We're going to be rearranging the site, and perhaps also providing the two-tier system (with one of the qualifications as being an active community member) to make that a more prominent feature of our site.

Best,
Jake