Open Letter to the Canadian TV Fund, RE: New Media Funding Consultations Has a Slanted Provincial Bias Against Edmonton

It came to my attention today that the Canadian TV Fund is going to hold a session September 28th on New Media fund consultation. Normally I would be really glad to hear about such news and the possibilities of more funding for New Media developers I was disheartened to see that this meeting is to be held only once and only in Calgary. Which once means that Calgary based developers will get an opportunity once again over their provincial rivals when it comes to making their voices heard.

As an Edmonton based developer I have to say that I am sick of various Calgary centered organizations, who claim to be the voice of the provincial New Media developers, having the ear of Federal and Provincial Government programs and using these programs to unfairly gain advantages only for Calgary based companies. It is apparent to me that these groups have no desire to properly represent the province's New Media development needs as a whole. So instead of wishing for a change that I know will never happen I have decided to take steps to do what I can to ensure that these programs in the future are no longer biased solely towards our southern neighbors. Part of this is through the formation of a new group that will only focus on Edmonton developers (more information on this later) and the other part is by taking time out of my day to write blogs and open letters to the administrators of these programs/funds to let them know that they are blatently ignoring and omitting Edmonton based develpers. My first letter is as follows to the Canadian Television Fund and the aforementioned New Media consultations process:

Ms Coley,

I am curious as to why have you chosen Calgary as the only city that you will visit for your consultation process on New Media Funding? As you are probably well aware Alberta is a diverse province with its population and business clearly and evenly spread throughout province and this is no different when it comes to New Media development. This is why I am confused as to why your group would choose to only hold a consultation process in one of the two major cities in the province and in essence ensuring that only one set of voices are heard while another set are overlooked and ignored.

My concern is that Calgary is not Edmonton and Edmonton is not Calgary, while each city is on par with the amount of new media development and each city have a vast set of very capable and experianced developers the specific work that is done in these two centers is not always the same. As such our needs between these two locations do not always sync up and my concern is that by holding a Calgary only session you will get a biased set of results that do not and will not properly assess the needs of New Media funding across the province as a whole and will continue to slat an unecessary biased favor towards New Media developent in Calgary at the cost of growing New Media development in other locations in the province.

So please, add a second New Media Fund consultation session in Edmonton so that the Canadian TV Fund can get a proper assessment of the needs of developers across the entire province and not a selected and limited slice of the work that is going on here.


Logan Foster
New Media Developer

I will post a follow-up if anything significant occurs.