byDesign-eLab seeks Heritage support as it unveils new web site this spring

A groundbreaking academic-private sector public interest web site is hoping to win Canadian Heritage funding support for its non-commercial portal, set to be re-launched this spring after a massive overhaul. The new byDesign-eLab will be unveiled in Toronto at the end of April.The not-for-profit site has several goals, including the provision of public spaces on the Internet, networking, research and development, and partnership-forging. Founded in 1997 as an academic exercise by University of Toronto professor Liss Jeffrey, the site has been re-made to make more of its resources available to the public. Now, says Jeffrey, the lab is lobbying the federal government to work with it on its Canadian Gateway project, citing its non-commercial nature and extensive ties to the open source and public interest communities as incentive for the feds to come on board.Calling the site a "constellation" portal, Jeffrey says it fills a need online for space that is not sponsored by either the government or the private sector. "What we're specifically doing is building this huge resource in French and English that's a national, not-for-profit (entity), and it will allow you to come in as a citizen or community group and allow you to find any information that's relevant to what you're after," she tells Canadian NEW MEDIA. "We start with our e-commons re-launch and then we have a whole mechanism for people adding their own information. But it's not just a portal site - although it will be that - because we don't care if you stay with us. Our purpose is not to make it sticky so that we hang on and get into your pockets…What we have underway are ways in which the conversation that is Canada can continue…"We see this as the invention of a medium for citizens in civil society very much like the CBC's effort to reclaim public space. But the difference is that this is coming from the ground up. It's taking advantage of the properties of new media like the ability to network without centralization and without a top-down emphasis."Originally incubated by the U of T's McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, the byDesign-eLab is now a not-for-profit corporation run by about 50 volunteers with the bulk of funding from Human Resource Development Canada's Office of Learning Technologies.Although its limited resources won't allow the eLab to post the millions of pages of cultural content that Canadian Heritage is targeting with its Canadian Gateway initiative, Jeffrey says the group can lend significant open source software expertise to the proposed portal, as well as content that's in the public interest. Government support, she says, will also help the group move into more stable funding. "We've done all the experiments, but we want to move into sustainability. There's a non-profit corporation that's been set up. We're quite serious about making sure that this thing lasts."

byDesign-eLab seeks Heritage support as it unveils new web site this spring

News | 02/22/2002 5:00 am EST

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