As you prepare to brave the roads, rails, and/or skies this holiday season, or just squirrel away under a pile of blankets, consider putting down the glowing screen and try some old school entertainment and enlightenment in the form of a book.

A Fractured Atlas Guide to Coffee Preparation Illustrations by Jason Tseng Do something once and you’ve got a celebration, but do it twice and now you’ve got a tradition.

Courtney Duffy, our Robert W. Deutsch Arts & Technology Policy fellow, has the lowdown on education legislation which includes several arts-related provisions and was signed into law by President Obama last week. If you have any thoughts or questions, feel free to drop her a line by email (Courtney Duffy@fracturedatlas.org), on Twitter @cduffy90, or in the post’s comment section.

What’s the most unusual place that you’ve seen a concert hosted within the last few months? We’ve had a lot of concerts in bedrooms. That’s kind of strange. There was one on that boat in San Francisco — on a house boat in San Francisco. That was cool. I wasn’t there, but I heard about it.

This gear guide series is a collaboration between Fractured Atlas and our partner KitSplit — check out their blog here! Shara is a public radio producer and podcaster based out of Los Angeles. Her work has appeared on Marketplace, NPR’s Latino USA, KCRW, and more. She is currently producing two podcasts:” What’s Wrong With Me” featuring Time columnist Joel Stein, and Slate/Panoply’s #GirlbossRadio hosted by Nasty Gal founder Sophia Amoruso. She also hosts a bi-monthly podcast called Homemade News.

Unsurprisingly, there aren’t a ton of grant deadlines in the month of December. In fact, you’re probably spending a lot of your efforts trying to gin up end-of-year giving from individual donors — and keep fighting that good fight. But now might also be the perfect opportunity to do a quick check-in on your arts practice or arts organization to evaluate your readiness for grant opportunities in the new year. For those of you who’ve never applied for a grant before (and even for many of you who have) here are five juicy tidbits to stew on about as you determine your preparedness for the upcoming grants season.

It’s no secret that entrepreneurs and CEOs suffer from higher than average rates of anxiety and depression. No doubt part of that stems from the stress and loneliness of the job. But there may be another factor at play, namely our relentless focus on the future.

Robert W. Deutsch Arts & Technology Policy Fellow Courtney Duffy is part of the Fractured Atlas team that is spearheading the 2016 Arts Entrepreneurship Awards. You can find her on Twitter @cduffy90. Join the conversation at #ArtsEntreAwards.

Our Robert W. Deutsch Arts & Technology Policy Fellow continues the #CopyrightwithCourtney blog series with a third filmmaking-centric post. Be sure to read the previous segments, parts one and two. You can find all the Copyright with Courtney posts here. Connect with her on Twitter @cduffy90 and join the conversation using #CopyrightwithCourtney.

Fractured Atlas’s free service SpaceFinder helps thousands of artists find space to rehearse and perform. Today, SpaceFinder launches a new custom directory, built for and with disabled dance artists in New York City, to highlight inclusive rehearsal and performance spaces.

VR is invading every industry, but the arts in particular present an excellent opportunity for communicating personal vision. Whether you want to put someone inside a painting, send them into space, or envelop them in a music video, the sensation of ‘presence’ afforded by VR means that your audience is certain to walk away with an unforgettable experience.

As we approach the end of the calendar year, there are several ways you can and should prepare for your end-of-year donor solicitations. A thoughtful end-of-year strategy can boost your donations while building a relationship with your donors — even through a busy fundraising time. I’m here to offer four simple ways to set yourself up for a successful end-of-year strategy.

by Tim Cynova, Deputy Director at Fractured Atlas Recently I estimated that with all of our hiring at Fractured Atlas more than 7,500 resumes have come across my desk since 2009. It’s certainly not Google or Facebook numbers by any stretch, but a significant number nonetheless.

[This article was originally published on the Fractured Atlas blog, January 6, 2015] This past holiday season I found myself increasingly asking the question — WWZD? What Would Zappos Do? Why is the venue usher being so unreasonable to that couple and ruining the concert for everyone? WWZD? Why does it seem like that ticket agent is auditioning for the role of The Grinch? WWZD? Why is that person yelling at customers to separate into multiple lines when there is no signage indicating that that’s what the store prefers? WWZD?

Our Arts and Technology Policy Fellow, Courtney Duffy, has the scoop on last week’s court decision that deems Google Books scanning of written works as fair use. You can follow Courtney on Twitter @cduffy90 and join the conversation with #CopyrightwithCourtney.

A Comic Response to Michael Kaiser A few days ago, Michael Kaiser’s DeVos Institute published a study of the top 30 Black and and top 30 Latino arts organizations and made recommendations for how to improve diversity in the Arts and Culture field. This study got the attention of several news organizations:

Courtney Duffy, our Robert W. Deutsch Arts & Technology Policy Fellow, details our recent advocacy in support of expanding the Lifeline Program to include broadband. Are you an artist who uses Lifeline and/or incorporates the Internet in your creative process? Drop Courtney a line on email at Courtney Duffy@fracturedatlas.org or Twitter @cduffy90.

With the lazy days of summer squarely in the rearview mirror, it’s time to get serious with some back-to-school reading. And while you could pick up Pride & Prejudice or, perish the thought, an arts business book to improve your practice, I’m here with some great recommendations for blogs that specialize on the cultural sector. Pro-tip on an excellent question to ask in your next job interview as a candidate for hiring: What blogs do your company’s employees subscribe to?

a conversation with inventor/maker Chap Ambrose and Executive Director Adam Huttler of Fractured Atlas It started as a simple idea in Chap Ambrose’s head: a device that encourages people to make time for their creative projects. After creating an early prototype, Chap submitted the idea to Fractured Atlas’s research and development pipeline. For the past few months, a small dedicated team has been working to make the Make Time Clock a reality. Last week, I sat down with Chap and Fractured Atlas founder Adam Huttler to talk about this unlikely and innovative project, and how it came to be:

Big news from this weekend: Kickstarter has decided to become a “public benefit corporation.”

by Courtney Duffy, Robert W. Deutsch Arts & Technology Policy Fellow at Fractured Atlas Last month our Arts & Technology Policy Fellow, Courtney Duffy, continued her series on copyright challenges within different artistic disciplines by publishing part one of a segment on filmmaking. Below you’ll find part two. Connect with Courtney on Twitter @cduffy90 and join the conversation using #CopyrightwithCourtney.

by Courtney Duffy, Robert W. Deutsch Arts & Technology Policy Fellow at Fractured Atlas This post is the second installment of #CopyrightwithCourtney, a series from Courtney Duffy on the copyright challenges faced by artists in various disciplines. Courtney, who is Fractured Atlas’ Robert W. Deutsch Arts & Technology Policy Fellow, focused on authorship in her first post. Today she begins a three-part post for the series on filmmaking. You’ll find her on Twitter @cduffy90.

This post is the first installment in a new blog series from Courtney Duffy, our Robert W. Deutsch Arts & Technology Policy Fellow. In each post, Courtney will look at copyright issues through the lens of a different art form. She begins with the world of authorship. As always, you can find her on Twitter @cduffy90.

by Nathan Zebedeo, Program Specialist at Fractured Atlas Educating yourself on fundraising — best practices, groundbreaking innovations, and the like — often involves reading books, blogs, and websites that travel a lot of the same ground. Which, on the one hand, can be somewhat tedious. But on the other, hearing the same things many times, from a variety of voices, can allow the wisdom of the ages to actually penetrate a thick skull like my own. All of this is to say that it’s rare that I pick up a book on fundraising and find something that I’ve never heard before. The Little Book of Gold: Fundraising for Small (and Very Small) Nonprofits by Erik Hanberg actually does shed some new light on old problems for me, and I hope that it can be a useful resource for you too.

Last week the World Intellectual Property Organization celebrated World Intellectual Property Day, an annual event that centers on the role IP can play in cultivating innovation and creativity. With this theme in mind, Courtney Duffy delves into what it means to protect copyright owners without discouraging new works, a balance which has been a struggle for YouTube.

Every grant application is different. Depending on the priorities of a given funder, they may ask you a wide variety of questions about the work that you’re making, but there are some questions you can expect to appear (in some way, shape, or form) on all grant applications. While grantmakers usually use pretty clear language for these questions and you should answer them straightforwardly, there are always ways to delve deep in your responses, addressing important aspects of your work and how it’s a good fit for the grantmaker’s funding priorities. I’ve put together 6 questions, below, that you’ll often see in grant applications, and provided some tips for how best to answer them:

by Jason Tseng, Community Engagement Specialist at Fractured Atlas On the Boards TV was recently named a 2015 Arts Entrepreneurship Awards honoree for their pioneering work in providing high definition video content to the contemporary performance world. On top of that their business model shares half of its profits directly with the artists. Project leads Lane Czaplinski and Monique Courcy sat down with us to talk about how they’re bringing contemporary performance into the Netflix age.

by Jason Tseng, Community Engagement Specialist at Fractured Atlas Fractured Atlas recently recognized The Laundromat Project as an honoree of the 2015 Arts Entrepreneurship Awards for their pioneering work in connecting communities to their creative potential. We interviewed Executive Director Kemi Ilesanmi to find out just how The Laundromat Project is able to use artists to engage people with art when they least expect it.

This blog post is sure to get a ton of hits because here’s where I’m talking about the world’s sexiest tax document of all time: Form 990!

How Two Documentary Filmmakers Became Their Own Independent Distributor

We are thrilled to honor these innovators and risk-takers who embody the spirit of entrepreneurship and bring the same extraordinary creativity to the office as they do to the studio. By experimenting and challenging conventional wisdom, these four winners have developed new approaches to age-old challenges in the arts field that can serve as models and inspiration for artists everywhere.

New Year. New You. New Mission. As the month of January reaches its blizzardy conclusion, let’s check in and see how those New Year’s resolutions are holding up. Well, maybe you haven’t exactly joined a gym or learned Spanish or finished reading Infinite Jest yet, but I’d like to slip in one more resolution for all you arts entrepreneurs out there to consider. Re-visit your mission statement. Or, you know, write one to begin with. Lots of artists and arts organizations seize the New Year as an opportunity to take stock of what’s working for them and what’s not. And so often, one thing that’s not working is their mission statement.