It seems this database is to be accessible to "people, curators, etc." That's a pretty unfortunate formula! Call me a nit-picker, but in the light of the rest of the Statement and considerations on usage I am concerned it is not just an oversight but may betray an unstated bias that I am uncomfortable with. I am willing to put a LOT of effort and time into getting this platform to a higher plane, but I have some significantly different thoughts on where that is and how to get there.
Firstly, I am wary of what I see as the excessively technophilic bent n.e.w.s. is taking: as I have already said in a recent comment, in my mind all the formal gadgetry in the world will not replace a relative lack of content. Why has everyone stopped posting content?
Secondly, I do not think that waxing on about "artistic research projects" is the way to produce content -- it's just a way of cloaking the kind of epistemological tomfoolery we do in the mantle of respectability. But what's wrong with tomfoolery? Who are we trying to jockey with who are we trying to kid? Why pretend we're industrious when in fact we're slackers -- if not to mislead the powers-that-pay into forking over? But it's not really very interesting, nor in the long run very amusing, to simulate curatorial orgasms when we could just tell it how it is.
Thirdly, to put the second point differently, isn't that why it is foregrounded in the first sentence of the Statement that we are producing "cultural capital"? Fan as I am of Bourdieu, it is inconsistent with the spirit of n.e.w.s. to describe what we're doing as accumulating cultural capital. I think we should stand opposed to the cultural-capitalist class, not self-describe as its vanguard. It will not do to tack on the true-by-definition rider that use-value is determined by users, when we glibly identify with the more-and-more logic of capital accumulation.
I could go on, but to summarize, I smell an élist bias behind the democratic talk. Élitist bias is okay, but it needs to be unapologetic. Or it needs to go. The will to challenge the web2.0 swindle with a pay-per-contribution model is good start, but is contradicted by the idea that users should somehow pay for use! I think we should pay the users. Or at least not set things up such that our usership is comprised of that oddly cumulative group of "people, curators, etc." buying into our expert capital.
As Santana says, Give me your heart, make it real, or let's forget about it.

When I first said yes to be part of N.E.W.S I some how thought it would be a perfect platform to get feedback from colleagues on two curatorial projects I’m currently fulfilling, Troca-trocas which researches artistic and cultural practices that address sexuality as an experience where subject formation isn’t culturally fixed, and Pelurinho; on crime and punishment in .... Part of what I meant by getting feedback was the usual outcome you get with any colleague: artists to take a look at, texts, films, any data which maybe useful for the outcome of any project. The difference here between an ordinary e-mail or meeting up at a cafe or bumping into each other at biennial, is that the “curatorial knowledge is published on-line” and therefore it becomes a curatorial bank, rendered by the participant’s judgment.

For that matter, since the beginning, I find a bit useless to write so much on the technical aspect of n.e.w.s., or the system, rather than the potentiality for knowledge construction. As in the XIX century, it is through writing and its publication (mechanical or digital) that an “imagined community” * (B.Anderson), such as this one, finds its visibility and agency.

* Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson

Inti Guerrero