VisionOnTV Mission Statement - draft 6

VisionOnTV Mission Statement
VisionOnTV is a television station which promotes social and environmental justice. Broadcasting primarily on the internet, we aim to empower grassroots campaigning and direct action.
We will enhance dialogue and action for social change. We will widen mainstream coverage of events to inform viewers of a different world-view. We will preserve a record of UK and international counter-culture.
VisionOnTV also aims to inform, engage and inspire the wider public. Crucially, VisionOnTV is an outreach project, which aims to reach as many people as possible, to make social change via video a real possibility. In practice this means we will broadcast content with the widest possible definition of “alternative”. We believe that social change takes many different forms, and we aim to be a portal to them all.
VisionOnTV strongly favours the use of open source tools for video production and distribution. There is an on-going battle for the soul of the worldwide web, between client / server relationships (what people need they have to get from a corporation) and ‘people to people’ relationships (people freely sharing skills and knowledge with each other). The internet itself is based on peer-to-peer relationships, which we strongly defend.
We will not approach this dogmatically, however. At a given time we need the best tools available. For outreach to be successful, the tools need to be reliable and simple to use. We will help to develop these tools where they do not exist, but sometimes the best ones will be corporate and closed source.

Our aim is to make viewing VisionOnTV as easy as watching traditional TV. The whole range of options for knowledgable people will be there, but never in a way that confuses the first-time viewer.
Digital information is innately free, but corporations want to restrict that freedom. We defend that freedom via creative commons distribution, which represents the majority of our content. This means that anyone can re-edit and re-distribute our content under a non-commercial creative commons licence. We promote a view of media democracy which breaks down the social divide between those with broadband and those without. Viewers receive high-resolution copies of films downloaded into their computer. Because the content is creative commons, viewers can copy films and distribute them or project them in a cinema, festival or community hall. Therefore just one broadband connection can serve a whole community.
VisionOnTV has substantial costs for its maintenance. We will firmly grasp the nettle of trying to be sustainable by generating income, to give project workers and content producers funding into the future.
We include only ethical advertising on VisionOnTV, which means we will only accept non-aspirational info-verts from ethical companies.
Monies beyond the running costs of VisionOnTV will be transferred to a production fund, where producers of already-featured content can easily (and non-bureaucratically!) apply for production grants.
VisionOnTV puts the viewer first. For this reason content is editorially controlled at the centre. We are not an open publishing project, and we have a quality threshold for all films featured. To this end, we produce our own content, will work with a wide range of video producers, and provide tools for less experienced producers to enable their work to have maximum impact.
We see VisionOnTV as one of many interconnected alternative media projects around the world. VOTV supports the open standards that enable this to happen.