Today, I am launching my new pen spinning organization named The Collective.
One of my all-time favorite independent music labels is http://diverse.jp/, and part of this is the branding and image that it carries throughout its work. This bar for quality shows up in every part their album releases: from promo websites, PV trailers, to the submission registrations to participate in the albums.
I've been thinking of replicating something like this for pen spinning, a sort of publishing label group that would help bring folks who wanted to work on cool things but did not have the supporting resources/knowledge to bring those projects to completion. I'm very pleased to be able to announce my long-term project: [The Collective].
At the start, it's a small change. All of my future projects will go under the management of [The Collective], this includes spin-archive and the UPSB archives. This doesn't mean that the focus of the group will be around archival + history, in fact, it's simply a place where I can work on PS-related projects while creating an interesting and compelling PS brand for the future.
So starting today, [The Collective] begins a new life as a small private discord community where it will act as a shared office-space of PS creators. Public projects will remain open, there will be public discord channels, and visitors are welcome. I'd like to gather other PS creators with different skill backgrounds to help complement each other and give a structure for asking/receiving advice in a safe space. It's a place to share ideas, and grow experimental projects before releasing them to the greater community. If you have a project that you've been wanting to work on or a particular topic you'd like to research, then we'd like to hear how we can help out!
Questions
What will happen to spin-archive and other archives?
Nothing! They will continue to operate as a public resource and with the same support as usual.
What sort of projects will [The Collective] work on?
Anything the members want to work on, which is a bit hard to say. There are no other set departments at the moment, except for the history department which will continue to maintain spin-archive and the extensions of that effort. Eventually, I would want to set up a production department to work on multimedia works.
For my personal projects, I'm interested in a few topics:
- Developing spin-archive.org even further beyond a beta version.
- Machine Learning PS (Let's teach a computer to recognize the fundamentals!)
- PS Content Creation (not tutorial-based videos)
- PS Hardware/Software tools (tracking? better recording software? assisted breakdown?)
What sort of support do I get as part of joining [The Collective]?
A big portion of this relies on having a nice core team of knowledgeable members to give and receive feedback from. Ideally, I'd like to be able to support members who want advice around blog posts, video creation, and CV management. Apart from that, you can expect full technical support from myself.
To The Future
The immediate goal is to surround myself and others with the similar mind-set of developing PS projects to build a long lasting legacy that we are proud to bring to the greater community and beyond.
The ultimate end-goal is to build a strong organization that is able to take over the management of public projects when the original owners can no longer continue them. Thus, [The Collective] makes itself a public resource when necessary with the adequate management experience needed to continue or archive these projects.
In the end, I would like the organization to be a fairly-structured public group capable of training spinners in secondary skills: management & production, so that the culture and traditions of PS can live on to the next generation, and so on. Of course, to ensure this would require a somewhat stable financial backing, and I hope to perhaps work towards setting a structure for sustaining such an organization in the later years.
But, those lofty goals are future ideals. I don't plan to reach them this year or anytime soon, and I already have so many other fun ideas on my list that I'd like to tackle first before moving to the more serious stuff. At the very least, I'm happy to set up a base of operations to spend the rest of my time working in. I hope you might enjoy our works in the future.
Thank you for reading.
- iColor