About us

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Think, do and share tank

OpenMute came about in 2004 as an offshoot of Mute Magazine, to develop Open Source Software for the cultural community. Since then we have carried out a mixture of development and startup work, consultancy and design work for clients as well as workshops and training.
 
OpenMute is supported by Arts Council England.
 
OpenMute is owned and operated by Mute Publishing Limited. A company registered in England. 46 Lexington Street, London, W1F 0LP, Great Britain.
 

Think

OpenMute works as a software development and design studio with a series of ongoing sister projects; Progressive Publishing Systems (PPS), MoreIsMore, and Cultural video distribution, all complementing one another to support independent media makers.
  • Progressive Publishing Systems (PPS) is a speculative system for moving publications into ePublishing sales and distribution systems.
  • MoreIsMore is a Web site for P2P media distribution to events, stores and adhoc venues.
  • Cultural video distribution - as part of the AoDL project we're experimenting with the distribution of cultural video
 

Do

ePublishing

OpenMute a place to make and manage a single print on demand (POD) book, make an eBook or a whole library online.
 

POD - Print on Demand Book

What's all this POD book malarkey? in short its a dream come true, digital book printing with international print centres and global distribution. Book print runs can be as low as one copy and you can print again and again, you only pay when you print. It works by having a PDF copy of your book stored securely with us, when you want a copy of the book printing you send us a web order and we post it to anywhere in the World.
Online/offline distribution your book can be available to all the big online distributors, so your readers can buy from Amazon, Barnes Noble and all the big name distributors. Copies of books are ordered from us by these distributors, the printing cost and distribution fees are deducted from the sales price and we send you a payment for remainder of the sales price. We also broker deals regional book store distributors and your title can be included in international bookstore catalogues.
 

eBooks

Currently there are three main platforms for eBooks, the eReader, mobile and the tablet.
 
OpenMute can carry out conversion processses for these different platforms and their sub platforms. For example with eReaders there is the open standard ePub and then the proprietary standards for Amazon's Kindle eReader.
 
Second we provide distribution services to plug your publications into the correct channels for your readers; Amazon, iTunes, Barnes Noble, Ingrams and the like. An important part of the distribution process is the formatting and distribution of metadata into the book informations services like Neilsens Book Data ISBN service.
 

Personal services

OpenMute is run by bibliophiles, if you want bespoke books made then your only going to make us even happier. If you want a fancy Web e-commerce, back catalogue inventory, XSLT transforms and EDI fulfilment service then the technologists side OpenMute's personality going to be doing cartwheels.
 

Not for much profit

Yes we're a commercial company, yes we want to make some money, but our main reason for being here is to support independent cultural producers. We borrowed the term 'Not for much profit' from Max of Seeds for Change, to describe our approach to creating an economic model of doing business.
 

How does this translate to our services?

Where we can easily provide semi-automated and standardised services or knowledge sharing facilities we aim to keep the prices as low as possible. We add mark up on printing and distribution fees, between 0-15% depending on the supplier and then modest project and service setup fees. If your are looking for specialised consulting, book production or technology provision, then the fees are much higher and reflect our long experience in print and web technologies fields. Have we made a profit yet? The answers yes, but if we blowing it on more technology R 'n' D.
 

Whats next

Reducing shipping costs
POD helps book producers reduce their shipping costs by having books printed in different regions around the World, closer to their reader. We are in an ongoing process of finding new POD printers and finding ways to network them together to aid this process.
 
The language barrier
Once we get our English language systems up and running smoothly we'll be looking to work with partners to provide OpenMute like services in a variety of other languages. Currently we are looking at German, Spanish, Dutch and Italian.
 

Web

We work as a small core team and then with partner technologists, designers and consultants.
Our approach to the web is to make sure your web presence is supporting your organisations artistic program and its long term goals and improving your day to day work efficiency.
We think about your web presence in the round, understanding that your audience are having contact with your information on many different platforms beyong your web site, like - search results, Flickr, Social Networking, other online communities. Second your organisation can make use of the suite of web 2.0 tool to help you with eCommerce, video distribution or cataloguing your media.
 
Graphic design – the designers we work with have experience in retail, cultural areas and large conference/event sites, understanding how to deliver client needs and branding, as well as addressing issues of accessibility and standards compliance designs.
Interactive design – we take an approach to interactive design to being about making sure your goals are better achieved via your web sites design, this can be ensuring your artistic program is fully available or that your core assets or goals are easy to access by your users.
In the age of social networking and sharing of content interactive design is about finding the right way to encourage your audience to become involved in your activities.
Drupal CMS – our website technology of choice. We have worked with Drupal for over five years and as a CMS (Content Management System) it now fully integrates into all the major Web 2.0 widgets and APIs (Application Program Interface). The main asset of a CMS is that it give you full control to update information on the site whenever you like, or easily add new features.
Web 2.0 and social networking – Web 2.0 now means that you can integrate professional services into your web site at low price. This means ticket sales, publication and media sales into iTunes and the like. Similarly with social networking, which currently (2010) is Twitter and FaceBook, but also can be more niche or appropriate networks like LibraryThing, where you can connect internationally with like minded organisations based on the collection of your library.
Services we offer within the Web 2.0 and social networking area can be as speedy integration of an Amazon store or as a fuller appraisal and implementation of a social networking strategy.
Consultancy – we can provide short reports to help setup your web strategy, suggesting an appropriate set of good practice steps for you to take or we can carry out more in-depth analysis. The web provides a way in which cultural organisations or micro-media-makers as we prefer to term them, to connect with audiences. Our approach is to look at your cultural assets and then see how the message about those assets are being distributed, involving your audience where appropriate and making sure there is a smooth path for the public, your community and stakeholders to engage with these assets.
 

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Art of Digital London

Art of the Digital London is a programme devised by the Arts Council England to facilitate the establishment and maintenance of a London RFO (Regularly Funded Organisations) network, designed with the purpose of developing and implementing ‘digital strategy’ for cultural organisations.
 

We deliver this program via two channels

  • Workshops - the workshops have run since October 2009 and finish November 2010, the location for the workshops is The Free Word Centre, current bookings for London RFOs are being taken on our Ning site. (Sept. 2010)
  • Knowledgebase - The Knowledgebase can be found here http://theknowledge.aodl.co.uk, the project is still in a pre-release form and looks to go live in November 2010.

    The Knowledgebase is designed to address the specific needs of cultural organisations and their digital strategies.

    The Knowledge base will comprise of two component, firstly a wiki with up-to-date reporting on digital developments and second a set of clear leaning guides based around key issues in a digital strategy.

OpenMute is owned and operated by Mute Publishing Limited. A company registered in England. 46 Lexington Street, London, W1F 0LP, Great Britain.