Felipe Vaz is the coordinator of Instituto Overmundo, which promotes access to knowledge and cultural diversity in Brazil through innovative practices in communication, intellectual property, and technology. He shows an example of how informal digital media development is frequently taking place outside of government, educational, philanthropic, or civil society organizations. Those more formal organizations must then decide if they will co-opt, support, oppose, or stay away from the informal structures that have developed.

The Salzburg Trust for Independent Media is concept that was developed during the October 2008 meeting of the Strengthening Independent Media Initiative. The Trust, if realized, would be intended to enlarge and diversify the available funding for global media development by leveraging public, private, and commercial investment in independent media organizations and infrastructure.

Click here to read a post, and take a look at an attached document, by Lawrence Wilkinson and Sasa Vucinic, that calls for a greater range of financing for independent media, from micro-credit through start-up and mezzanine to sustaining—and much more of it.