Do you intend to provide the “look and feel” of the site, or should a responder to the RFP do so?

We have left that somewhat open. Ideally we would like a respondent to create a “look and feel” for the site — even perhaps coming up with a better name! — but we will work with the proposals submitted to choose the best option within what’s possible.

Can you explain more of what you mean by the use case in 3.3 of the RFP?

Part of what we’re trying to describe here is a reviewing system in which anyone can see how other people have reviewed specific pieces of content. This question also elicited the clarification that we intend to use folksonomies for tagging, so that people can use the tags they find most useful. In this use case we imagine someone searching by age category, by language, and by reviewer rating.

What kind of governance model do you have available for this project, or do you intend to use?

The closest example we can point to is something like the Wikipedia project. Currently we have a governance structure described on our site that consists of a coordinating group, a set of working groups, and an assembly. We want this project to be as open and collaborative as we can make it!

What facility will we have for contacting copyright holders for commercial use?

We do not anticipate having much facility for this at all. Basically all we intend is for it to be very clear who has posted specific content, with viable contact information present. We DO state that we need a clear mechanism so that if anyone believes there is content on the site that has been posted by someone who does NOT own clear copyright, they can contact the site’s administrators so that we can remove the content.

I’m going to try and summarize our conference call a bit by noting the questions that were asked, and trying to repeat our answers here. The first main question had to do with the notion of “channels” and what we mean by them.

The idea of “channels” was developed to create a space in which a specific group could sanction certain content. Content that is part of a “channel” will be available to everyone else the same way any content on the site is available, but content can only be posted to a specific channel by the channel’s administrators.