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Participating filmakers: Helen DeMichiel Fred Johnson Sergei Linkov	Media Working Group’s Filmmaker Portal is an experimental media arts incubator designed to create a technical and social environment where media artists are able to concentrate and focus development of new media art and adapt their existing practices to digital space. Ultimately to become creative aesthetic and economic actors in the emerging media culture and economy. The incubator will foster partnerships and resource sharing as well as provide connectivity, server space, interactive tools and applications [email, collaborative development software and listservs for example] to support distributed learning and collaborative development among participants. The Filmmaker Portal has four key functions: distribution, promotion, publishing and education. Emphasis is on distribution since the World Wide Web holds strategic potential for the region’s independent producers, including experimental film and video, documentary, and dramatic films. Media Streaming via the World Wide Web creates a public space where audiences can research and access artist information and text, previews clips or entire works, and reduce artist expenses related to these activities. The critical underpinning of the project is the creation of an infrastructure and skill set that allows media artists to take control of distribution and promotion of their own work and to have a truly meaningful presence on the World Wide Web. The Filmmaker Portal is supported by the Ohio Arts Council and the Kentucky Arts Council.	The Internet’s World Wide Web is a convergence of media forms that foreshadows a major shift in media culture and the work of media artists. The digitization of media is providing both opportunities and challenges for the non-commercial media arts community. MWG’s Fred Johnson states in his introduction to “Digital Directions,” a National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture national planning project, funded by the Ford Foundation, that: “ Media art centers, independent media and film artists, independent distributors, libraries, museums, arts and cultural groups in general, are under increasing pressure to understand and act strategically in the emerging media environment… these shifts open significant opportunities to those who thread their way through the economic and cultural changes now taking place.”