freeFormed After Graduation
freeFormed.org is already a formal organization, LLC actually. We were fortunate enough to get free legal services from someone that one of our members knew, which definitely facilitated and expedited the process. I actually just redesigned the company website, which is located at http://www.freeformed.org/company, with a slight hack of a wordpress install. I decided to use wordpress because, during these busy times, it would allow us to update our site and information frequently with little effort. It is by no means finished, but it is definitely a start.
None of the members of freeformed have really thought extensively about what we are going to do after graduation. We are all committed to advancing the freeformed.net site and the company as a whole but, especially since two of our members are international students, it is difficult to predict whether or not we will be able to sustain ourselves with freelance and consulting jobs that we are seeking to receive through marketing the site.
In the short term, we plan to apply for various awards and grants to sustain the site’s various expenses. We have already applied for Ars Electronica, Rhizome.org Digital Communities Grant and a monetary prize from NetSquared. We will not hear whether we have won any of these competitions until late April or May. We also plan to continue working with the New York to New Orleans project and have been offered the possibility to have the New Orleans number funded through a grant secured by ITP. We also plan to begin searching for freelance jobs as soon as thesis week is over, although we all are aware that we may have to work separately to sustain ourselves. Information about grants, freelance possibilities and how web start ups sustain themselves without selling out to larger corporations would definitely be helpful.