Gerry Flahive (Souvenir of Canada, This Beggar’s Description) is a documentary producer at the National Film Board in Toronto.

Documentary filmmakers are a resourceful lot. Working creatively with small budgets. Raising money for controversial films. Grappling with ethical and copyright issues. Ebbing and flowing with the changing needs and tastes of broadcasters. Changing the world for the better.

But can they make ‘snackable’ media – the quick, disposable and forgettable video downloads in vogue with the cellphone and online sets?

That was just one of the challenges presented at the first-ever DocAgora, a one-day conference about social-issue documentaries and the multi-platform universe.

Presented on Nov. 30 in conjunction with IDFA, the annual international documentary festival and conference in Amsterdam, the think tank was organized by a team including Montreal’s Peter Wintonick (Manufacturing Consent), long known as an innovator in documentary thinking, and Toronto-based filmmaker Amit Breuer (Checkpoint).

It plans to touch down at other film events such as Hot Docs and online at www.docagora.org in 2007.

DocAgora, in Breuer’s words, ‘aims to make sure the documentary makers won’t be left behind in the digital era. We are facing a period of transformation where we need first to introduce our global doc community to the new players, while continuing a dialogue with our traditional commissioning editors.’

Unlike many conferences, where one feels that core assumptions are shared and everyone belongs to the same tribe, DocAgora brought together a surprisingly eclectic group – from Gillian Caldwell of the human rights video documentation organization Witness (which is starting a video hub in 2007 – a YouTube to save lives) to the Italian snackable media outfit Buongiorno, to Patrick Crowe of Toronto’s Xenophile Media (www.regenesistv.com).

Filmmaker Kat Cizek and I were able to present some of the NFB’s online doc work, from our new ‘interventionist media’ site (www.nfb.ca/filmmakerinresidence) to the filmmaker-as-engaged-citizen CitizenShift (www.citizen.nfb.ca), an early example of user-generated media in the social-change realm.

Much of the day’s discussion revolved around infrastructure – trying to determine the best online venues to host documentary and other independent film productions, from the film community section created in the U.K. by MySpace.com, to the grassroots www.docutube.com, which will soon offer filmmakers a chance to sell their work through downloads and DVD sales. (First digitize, then monetize?) Another site (www.docsite.org) gives doc filmmakers (free!) tools to make their own websites.

There was a palpable sense that docmakers need to own their own tools of distribution.

As consultant Peter Broderick put it, ‘The Internet has given independents unprecedented access to global audiences,’ and allowed filmmakers to build core, personal audiences.

Some of the early models are proving wildly popular, providing their creators with useful unexpected benefits.

For example, Emily Renshaw-Smith of www.channel4.com/fourdocs explained her ‘open, democratic’ site’s value, first as a window on short independent films uploaded to the site by thousands, but also as a talent-spotting tool for the channel itself. Some contributors have been offered full documentary commissions by ITS parent broadcaster, Channel Four.

(Before we celebrate too wildly about the social-change value of such sites, let us point out that the most popular video searches on FourDocs include ‘strippers’ and ‘lesbians.’)

Producer Bart Simpson (The Corporation) of the Documentary Organization of Canada thinks that ‘DocAgora has a decent chance of going into territory that may actually have some resonance; the mix of people involved – from ‘radical’ techno-open-source types, to social activists, to the Googles and YouTubes of the world – it’s nice to have us all in one room to talk about what we’re doing in common, rather than focus on our differences.’

That sense of community-building was reinforced by Center For Social Media director Patricia Aufderheide.

‘Documentary filmmakers are becoming strategic designers of projects with many elements,’ she says. No documentary is an island anymore.

As the stale espresso lingered in the air, one could sense that at least some of the docu-dot.coms/.orgs/.nets were smelling blood, musing about the demise of the TV-driven model for documentary financing. Perhaps at next year’s Forum, one could imagine YouTube, Alliance Atlantis’ new Blogtv.ca or SeeMetv sitting around the commissioning editors’ table next to the BBC and Arte?