Our proposal is that the service should use a mobile network data aggregator. The provision of a live service for artists will require a contractual commitment to this aggregator and to each of the networks from whom data is to be requested. This contract is for a minimum of a year and will entail a monthly financial commitment. Of course, an ongoing monthly financial commitment is onerous and doesn’t fit conventional models of artistic process or exhibition. This makes it all the more important that a funded arts organisation such as MITES undertakes the contractural commitment and to re-sell location requests to other organisations and individual artists. Such a commitment would cost around £9000 in payments to the aggregator for connections to O2, Orange, Vodaphone and T-Mobile.

A range of business process models have been assessed and it appears that the most promising is an artist commission model. Such a model enables the system administrator to assess the project’s compliance to the relevant legal and commercial obligations, as well as enabling a degree of customisation and support for the individual project. More importantly, this model fits conventional art funding and exhibition practice. Mobile digital technologies challenge notions of art existing in a discrete time and place but we need to be realistic about the expectations of audiences and, more importantly, the individuals and organisation that fund art projects. Art is expected to have a beginning and an end – an exhibiton, festival or performance - if not a fixed locale.

The service would be hosted on a dedicated server, with the option to separate the location web service from both service admin and individual project media. Artists would apply to run a project on the system. They would be provided with account details and given access to configuration tools to set their project parameters. The host organisation could undertake customisation for individual artist’s projects, or the artist could link to elements of the piece on their own or 3rd party servers (a graphical output application for instance); this would have to cleared for security and so forth.

Once the project was configured and approved, the system administrator could determine the project’s length and maximum cost, and then switch it on. The technical part of the report has described different billing methods. Billing will be flexible to accommodate different funding models: some projects charge the audience/participants for location information; others will be funded by the artist or art funding body.