Welcome to the DocAgora Webplex. DocAgora is an open space to consider new forms, new platforms, new tools, and new ways of financing creative and socially engaged documentary media - what we call docmedia.

We believe that documentary is the hot now media. Documentary makers are adapting to a rapidly changing mediascape shifting beneath their reality-based feet.

Since DocAgora’s launch in November, 2006 at IDFA, we've been talking about the profound changes transforming the creation and distribution of classic theatrical, educational and broadcast documentary.

We are also showcasing and celebrating trans-platform digital documentary in all of its incarnations : cyberdocs, netcasting, interactive docs. We have produced sessions on cross-platform documentary media, like the Confergence Lab in Aril, 2008, and have also taken on made-for-mobile docs, real-life docugames, and animated documations.

In this international zeitgeist, the very definition of documentary itself is morphing into something wider, more exciting and challenging. We believe this Webplex is the place to discuss what this all means to the Documentary world.

We welcome our whole community : new and established docmedia makers, producers, distributors, funders, broadcasters, niche-casters, webmakers, creatives, crews, festivals, markets, sales agents, foundations, institutions, educators, students, viewers, producers, NGO's, non-profits and marketeers - into one progressive place.

This Webplex welcomes your ideas, submissions, musings and links. It asks you to contribute. To build the Webplex with your own ideas, examples and critique.

Let's build this international docmedia community together.

We believe that NOW is time to share NEW ways of producing, funding and distributing the NEXT forms, and platforms for creative documentary. Whether long form or short form. Broadcast or hypercast.

This Webplex hopes to facilitate information interchange. It points to case studies, new models, and useful tools for sustainable documentary financing.

This Webplex offers opportunities for essential face to interface networking. It brings together a pervasive grid of emerging and technologically adept docmedia makers who are helping us all create our own visions with our own voices.

This Webplex will help forge new strategic alliances, enable practical plans and model working systems in order to sow the seeds for future ones.

In ancient Athens, the Agora was a meeting place, a market place, a public place. A site of spirit and commerce, community and renewal. The DocAgora initiative allows us all to migrate to the future. Because, as sci-fi novelist Philip K. Dick once wrote: "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

The DocAgora Webplex is a project of the non-profit DocAgora Association, an international array of partners, festivals and supporters throughout the documentary world. Headquartered in Canada, the DA is managed by a collective of international practitioners, thinkers and web-savvy documentary activists. The Webplex has been created by DocAgora and the D3 DocAgora Ontario initiative with the Documentary Organization of Canada's National and Toronto Divisions and funded through the Ontario Media Development Corporation's Entertainment and Creative Cluster Partnerships Fund.

DocAgora also co-organizes real world events that touch down as conferences, development labs, discussion circles, and funding opportunities at leading documentary film festivals and media markets throughout the year.

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Peter Wintonick