T2P FAQ

We're glad you asked. We want to be transparent about our funding sources, and how we keep them from undermining the community goals. T2P's revenue streams are:

1. Web-based banners, microsites, and sponsored links. This includes the sponsored links and banner ads you might see in the Cores or other site sections. In exchange for advertising revenue, sponsors get great visibility to T2P's visitors and members. And, if the sponsor content is interesting, we hope they get some clickthroughs, as well. But sponsors do not influence the content of the sections they appear in. Moreover, all sponsor content is clearly marked, so you'll never have to wonder who posted a link. We do not capture, correlate, or share individually identifiable data about our Web traffic or ad interactions.
2. White paper, Webcast, survey, and other research sponsorships. We pursue sponsor funding for significant pieces of research, so that we can fairly compensate the writers/presenters for their time and expertise. Sponsors fund research for the unique visibility opportunity it offers and, in some cases, in exchange for the contact data of members who downloaded a particular piece of research. We clearly mark and allow members to opt out of sharing their data for any content download (including Webcasts). Furthermore, we grant sponsors no authority or special influence over our research content, and we will never represent sponsor-generated content as our own.
3. Solution portals. Solution portals are similar in structure to Cores, but are reserved exclusively for vendor content. We clearly mark solution portals as vendor-operated and make no pretense of vetting their content...although we may offer portal owners high-level guidance on what members will and won't want to see from them.
4. Research charters. T2P offers some custom research services to vendors, as well as practitioners. Our rules of thumb regarding this research are very simple: A) If we can't control the content, we won't put our name on it; B) We won't publish bad work; and C) we won't use identifiable member information in any custom research, except with members' explicit permission.
5. Project charters. T2P may initiate community projects that are either directly sponsored or underwritten by one or more sponsors. These projects can have various formats or goals, such as a working group to draft model functional specs for e-discovery solutions or the development of more free applications and tools. Whatever the project format, we will zealously guard the integrity of the project process, participant
6. Education and research syndication fees. Most T2P resources are free; however, we may also syndicate or build catalogs of high-quality for-pay resources. In such cases, we may add or charge a fee to cover the technology and staff costs of managing that syndication. In general, we will initially attempt to build this fee into the supply side (to be covered by the resource issuer), but we might alternatively add it to the demand side. Either way, we will not knowingly syndicate or catalog substandard content, even if it makes us a buck.
7. Writing and speaking fees. T2P generates nominal income from a few publishing and speaking engagements of our core staff. These are "outbound" efforts that do not influence content published for the T2P membership.
8. contributions, and work products.
9. Training fees (future). If we ever develop our own training courses or certification, we'll charge registration fees. Currently it's not an issue, however, and we will never develop vendor-driven training content or agendas.
10. Subscriptions (future). Although all of our tools and resources are currently freely available to users, we can imagine a day when it'll be to everyone's advantage to offer more sophisticated Web-based functionality for some of our reasources. If this happens, we'll consider tiered subscription models to fund project development. Don't worry: we'll vet any such considerations with the community well before we try them.