Media Re:public

It’s time to forget the warnings of our childhood and start talking to stranger, says Doug McGill, whose new column is called “Talking with Strangers.” [Warning: Live Blogging from New England News Forum - accuracy went thataway] It’s based on the idea that xenia, which was apparently considered a civic duty in ancient Greece, is the best way to ensure our national security. He talks about his work teaching journalism workshops, about trying to make citizens think like journalists, understand what it means to be a journalist even if they don’t think they’re doing journalism.

In addition to teaching the food pyramid, we should create and teach a “media pyramid.” “Lost” and “Project Runway” will be the sugary tip, on down to healthy servings of coverage of the city council and so on. He also suggests that experienced journalists who took the buyout go to their schools and offer to teach media and journalism and that we start pushing the culture of reporting as a civic enterprise everywhere we can: in civics class, churches, and so on. Journalism should be like jury duty. His other new slogan for what we should be doing is “Superpoking power.” He’s taken this from David Mathison’s presentation, after admitting that he hadn’t heard the term “Superpoke” before today.

After him Wayne Sutton (left) gives us a tour of some social networks and other tools. Plurk (looks twitteresque) and Stickam (social video network) and Kyte.tv (mobile video) Flixwagon.com (more live video) are all new to me. Bill Densmore chimes in with a bit from a recent “webinar” on advertising, where it was said that button and banner ads are likely to drop in real numbers and video will zoom. So he encourages folks to get video into the sites now. Wayne mentions “location-based social networking” (see brightkite.com) as the up and coming thing, geo-tagged photos and video. Also mentions Viddler and Tubemogul. I want to ask him if he thinks editors and journalists need to know this stuff or whether the role of people like him is key. Will have to do it in coffee break. He and I agree that there has to be something in between journalists and community news site publishers trying to keep up with all the new technology and feeling overwhelmed and them ignoring it entirely. This is of course what he does for a living, as Community Content Manager at NBC-17 WNCN in Raleigh.

Now Len Witt, telling the story of representative journalism, (”rep-j” Bill Densmore calls it) which I’ve heard before. Really happy to hear that they finally found their first “fellow” to report from (and to) Northfield, MN. Misse

(We interrupt this blog post for a brief political plus: One more click on the health care counter! Someone asks whether community-supported journalists will get health care. Will everyone who thinks more people doing journalism in more and more flexible ways PLEASE spend a few minutes promoting universal single-payer health care?)

… and now back to our regularly scheduled debate about whether someone paid by the community can possibly stay independent.

Howard Schneider describes his news literacy course at Stony Brook University. It’s done by the Journalism School but open to all undergraduates. Verification, independence, accountability are the 3 things he says a journalist adds to the media we consume. He tells his students that if they can’t find all of those three things they’re not in the “news neighborhood.” Teaches them between news and commentary and then the difference between verification and assertion. Analyzing the NY Times coverage of the Sean Bell case, the reports of murders, rapes, bodies in the Convention Center freezer during early days of Katrina. See fascinating AJR article where the reporter who wrote the story explains how he made those mistakes.

He teaches them about 5 kinds of sources:
named/unnamed
authoritative/uninformed
independent/interested
sources who verify/sources who assert
multiple sources/single sources

Phase 3 of the course is understanding the difference between news media bias and audience bias. In survey at beginning of class: 79% believe the media has strong political bias. He says this is the biggest challenge of all - getting the audience to recognize their own preconceptions. Points us to Project Implicit, where you can test yourself for hidden bias. Stony Brook is committed to teaching this course to 10,000 undergrads. Their Center for News Literacy is now working to help share what they’ve learned with other institutions, including high schools. They’re even doing pre- and post-course survey of the students to see how their media consumption, voting and other civic engagement and attitudes change and comparing them to a sample of students who haven’t taken it. Sounds great. What will it take to get this kind of course into every school and college? Though I agree with Helen Smith, who teaches high school students to do journalism, adding even a small component of hands-on reporting would be invaluable.

Images: Doug McGill, borrowed from his site, Wayne Sutton and Howard Schneider snapped from my unsteady mobile

Dave Mathison, author of Be the Media is opening Sharing the news: Reaching students, training citizens New England News Forum ’s one-day event here at UMass Lowell (watch it live here, follow #nenf on Twitter) Warning: live blogging, expect mistakes. A small group with a mix of community news, students and education folks here, plus a couple folks from professional media outlets. Looking forward to meeting folks from well-known community news sites the Forum and New Haven Independent to hearing about what journalism educators are thinking about participatory media.

Dave is a “traditional” cyberutopian, anyone can do it, cut out the middleman, don’t let the artist be treated like slave labor, self-publish, get on facebook and twitter, etc. “What about credibility?” is heard muttered nearby during his presentation (can you guess that I’m sitting with the professional journalists?). In fact, when we get beyond the 1000 true fans who can support an independent rock musician to discussions of hard news (he reminds folks he did used to work at Reuters) Dave admits that he doesn’t actually think editors and editorial judgment will go away, in fact he predicts an “explosion of the need for editors and editorial judgment,” but it will exist in new structures.

Image: Photo of David Mathison taken on my phone

The FCC says they want to make it easy for someone to deliver wireless broadband for free. But, as we say here at Berkman, there is free as in beer, and free as in speech. And the FCC’s new idea is UNFREE as in speech. Why? Because the license for the spectrum they want to auction requires a mechanism that “filters or blocks images and text that constitute obscenity or pornography and…any images or text that otherwise would be harmful to teens and adolescents. For purposes of this rule, teens and adolescents are children 5 through 17 years of age.” As someone pointed out in a gathering here at Berkman just now, that puts the United States right up there with China. Further, the rule states, “should any commercially-available network filters installed not be capable of reviewing certain types of communications, such as peer-to-peer file sharing, the licensee may use other means, such as limiting access to those types of communications.”

The problem is the ruling makes the Internet like broadcast television or radio, where we still can’t use George Carlin’s seven words, when it really should be like the telephone, where it’s none of your @O#*$U# business what I want to talk about. I am neither a lawyer nor a technologist-philosopher (like David Weinberger who blogged it here), but I know this is BAD. I read the text (actually I just searched for the word “pornography” and read that bit) and then went here to tell the FCC how I felt. (The comments submission form is very tricky, the 2 relevant dockets are 07-195, and 04-356, but I found it rejected my attempts to put them in myself (got an error message after submitting) so I clicked on proceedings and search for them.

That’s the basic Internet freedom part.

There’s also the sleazy background part about the M2Z, the company that’s pushing this. Business Week points out that one of the two founders of M2Z is a former FCC official. The company’s site encourages visitors to send letters to Congress and the FCC tell them to support “free, family-friendly, nationwide broadband.” Wendy suggested they rename it the “free, family-friendly, FILTERband.”

See also Scott Bradner, David Weinberger, Wendy Seltzer

Tags: FCC, pornography, censorship

Continuing a provocative afternoon of discussion here at (warning as-live blogging, errors ahead)
Larry Irving: Please don’t sell out, I think there’s got to be a commercial space and a noncommercial space. Having worked in politics in Washington, I can tell you: there is no such thing as free money. Anyone who gives you money wants something, even more so if you happen to be producing media. I’m a lawyer, I live in an upscale zipcode, Look at the CPM for black radio stations vs. country and western; some people are valued differently. Let’s talk turkey about demographics. Public broadcasting does not reflect the demographic changes in the U.S. Media age of audience is 46, media age of country is 36, media age of Latinos is 26. Riff on Dean Wilson’s comment of yesterday: Actually pubcasting serves all people from ages 1-7 but if you’re black or brown they don’t even care about you when you hit 47.

Technology matters too. If you’re not on mobile platforms, you won’t reach the young and the non-white. Mentions slingbox, watching Tiger Woods on the Metro. Says it’s not “new” media, it’s just media. New survey says: 76% of kids would give up TV before the Internet. People of color use more media of all kinds than whites, even corrected for income. Simultaneous technology revolution in all countries.

Dennis Harsaager has given him hope that perhaps the stations are not going to (by booting CEO Ken Stern) stop NPR from dragging them kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

Also talks about trusted public sources for e.g., health information. He’s a former cancer patient (me too - it’s that weird club that you’re never really happy to find another member). Irving hopes that the president will bring smart people together to talk about technology and democracy and media and NOT about money. We need to get public institutions (is this being webcast? Are Obama advisors watching?) together with the best technological minds.

Question from Pat Aufderheide: What are the chances of getting legislative language changed to allow public media funding to be spent on digital stuff? Irving: You gotta make the case, but I think you can and should.

Question audience member: what about access issues? Pub’casting is so moribund in their approach to interactivity. Irving: Now that we’re in the age of abundance we have to talk to people in power, in congress and we need to explain to them what we could be doing with a little bit of vision. The system

Q: What about spending the income from the analog spectrum auction? A: The $19 billion we got from the last auction unfortunately went into general funds. We do need a way to fund public broadcasting. Even if we’d gone to a TV tax, we’d need to redo it anyway, how do we create an endowment that is politically insulated.

We have angry old white men (right-wing talk radio), angry young white men (left-wing blogosphere) - where are the black and brown men?

We need for the white space on the spectrum to be available for experimentation, Google and Microsoft have an interest in the white space too, why don’t we work with them?

Q: We see a talent drain of Hispanic producers to commercial media. I worry that the experiments that funders are interested are all about form, what about content? Diversity can’t be outsourced. But my question to you is about what I see young people being less siloed off by race, working towards multicultural content (and life). (applause) Irving: I agree 100%. Diversity needs to be in the organization’s DNA. We need to mainstream (though I hate the word) producers of color.

Huge applause - Irving was an inspired choice of speaker. I do worry that after a self-criticism session like this a reception that apparently will not include alcohol is ill-advised.

David Isenberg points out that we’re getting open fiber architecture experiments we need to get our act together there too because “fiber is the future.”

Quick demo of the uuorld interactive mapping site www.uuorld.com (it’s world spelled with 2 u’s in place of the ‘w’ get it?)

The Mapping Where’s the money? panel* here (warning error-prone as-live blogging ahead) at Beyond Broadcast - Diane Mermigas (Mediapost) totally gets it about the fact that the challenges to public and commercial media are the same. I’m not sure I agree with her on all the ideas for public broadcasters should make money in what she calls the “Consumer-Centric Public Media’s Interactive Sphere” see image at left, paper here), but they’re definitely smart.

Keith Hopper (Public Interactive): my advice to you: focus on getting more online users. User interaction is the new currency. The best stuff on the web is free. Follow the model of successful online sites: build user base first, monetize later. You need real interaction, people downloading stuff, remixing, discussing. No users means no money. Lastly, if you monetize first and build users later, you can corrupt your environment, people will get turned off.

Craig Reigel, (Nonprofit Finance Fund): “Bringing in revenue needs to be decriminalized.” He doesn’t care whether it’s donations or ads (hmm) he just wants us to get busy getting the important stuff we do funded.

Vince Stehle, (Surdna Foundation): Compares Radiohead model to public brodcasting (shortened by the folks here to “pubcasting” which sounds too much like pubcrawling to me). Commercial media are more challenged, but they may be adapting more quickly. What if you’re not a superstar, how does that work? Take Colby Calais she was working in a tanning salon. She got a recording contract after 10 million free downloads of her music on MySpace. Look to what we can do in public media to dramatically reexamine our business model(s). Where is our 99 cent Itunes model - how do we let folks do micropayments? (Doc Searls’ gang will fix this.) Too early to say we can’t raise money online. Look at the progression from Dean to Obama.

Ernest Wilson, (Annenberg): An interjection of pessimism: Let’s not forget what we’re talking about here is the BASIS of democracy. If people in this room don’t get it right soon, democracy will suffer and it will be our fault. (He bangs the table for effect!) We need to create dialogue, discussion, serve the underserved. Our beloved local stations especially, possibly the last local voices in many communities, are not doing it. If we don’t change that quickly, our democracy will be poorer for it. Get people out of our silos!! (GO, Dr. Wilson, GO!) He lists 4 silos: print, digital media folks, public broadcasting, and commercial. (I would add a 5th non-profit civil society silo, myself) He says public broadcasting is serving people well from birth to age 7, ignores folks till they’re 47, and then serves them from age 47 till shortly after their death. Big laugh line.

Mermigas leads an active discussion on how to light a fire under the asses of public broadcasting. Mentions VRM work on the funding question. She and Wilson are relentless about the need for the people in the room to get relevant fast. Stehle: you need to help each other, build up each other’s sites and networks. I tell my neighbor this panel should have been called not “Mapping the Money” but “Speaking Truth to Ostriches.”

self-promotional P.S. Gave a supershort (they are actually keeping to SCHEDULE here, what an idea) chat on the current versions of Media Re:public conclusions and recommendations. Sildes are here: http://www.slideshare.net/guest95ccec/me…
broadcast2008

*1:45pm - 3:00pm Roundtable Discussion: Mapping the Money
Conversation Leader:
Diane Mermigas, Editor-at-Large, Media Post
Discussants:
Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program, MIT
Keith Hopper, Product Manager, Public Interactive
Craig Reigel, Vice President, Western Region, Nonprofit Finance Fund
Vince Stehle, Program Officer for the Nonprofit Sector Initiative, Surdna Foundation
Ernest J. Wilson, Walter Annenberg Chair in Communication and dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California

Rick Borovoy from nTAG interactive is telling us about how we’ve been interacting with members of other groups. The groups are Knight Foundation staff (there are a lot of them here and they’ve been talking to each other 103% more than random chance would predict), MIT folks, 2007 Knight winners, 2008 Knight winners and staff/guests. Meanwhile, Ellen Hume and Gary Kebbel are at the top of the “Kevin Bacon” list of folks who interact most (I made number 5!)

Now Gary (the proud father) is going to emcee a review of the grantees. He first explains the genesis of the project: newspaper circulation falling, revenue falling, newspapers losing influence, do we have to sit and watch this happening, or are there tools that can help fill the vacuum that is being created? We think yes, we believe in the mission of the news and information industry. What we think newspapers do: unite a town, bring people together to discuss their problems, perhaps lead them to solutions. But it’s also about place. So when we started the News Challenge, people said what is this nonsense using digital media to serve geographic communities, this just shows you don’t understand the Internet, it’s about virtual communities. But we don’t elect virtual presidents, it’s not a virtual school board that cuts arts funding, this geography thing is still important.

Anyway, he’s now going to try to get ALL the new Knight grantees to describe their projects and have the 2007 grantees say something about the impact of their projects (turns out foundations don’t just give away money, they want to see impact from it - who knew?). Important to notice that many grants are using OLD technology in new ways to bridge the digital divide. He gives the 2008 grantees a couple minutes each, see if I can keep up:

Brenda Burrell (Kubatana.net) explains that dial-up radio in Zimbabwe is able to provide the information and community-building role of radio without expensive transmitters.

Brein Macnamara of SignCasts is working to find ways for deaf people to be able to do civic reporting using their primary language of American Sign Language (ASL), which means finding ways for them to get better access to video technologies. He’s also remarkably cheerful about the exhausting task of participating in a conference in a foreign language through an interpreter.

Aaditeshwar Seth from University of Waterloo describes his Community Radio in India project to provide radio in rural India, using telephone-based playback and also bringing the Internet to the radio stations who can interpret and contextualize the information for their audience.

Joel Selanikio, co-founder of Datadyne, an organization generally seeking sustainable projects to deliver needed services in the developing world. Knight grants funds a cell-phone project to deliver news. They will likely roll out in Kenya.

Guy Berger, South Africa, project is “The News is Coming,” working with journalism students to connect citizens of black township with white urban residents.

Jessica Mayberry is in India, where her project Video Volunteers is making videos in rural India that are shown on mobile video screens. They promote these screenings widely, sometimes to people who’ve never seen a movie or TV in their lives.

Alexander Zolatarev ’s Sochi Olympics Project is going to track the attitudes of the people of Sochi, Russia as the town is prepared for the Olympics in 6 years. He’s been studying citizen journalism at CUNY for the year, goes home to Sochi later this summer. Gary Kebbel points out that the accumulation of 5 years of data on citizen reactions will be useful to international journalists who arrive to cover the Olympics.

Transparent Journalism, the project of Tim Berners-Lee and Martin Moore, is presented by Gary K. The idea is you will be able to know more about the journalism that ends up on your screen, things that will let you decide something about its quality. Partnering with Reuters and BBC. I like and respect Martin, but I still find the idea that metadata will solve the credibility problem dubious. Looking forward to being proven wrong.

Printcasting - presented by Dan Pacheco of the Bakersfield Californian, making tools to allow people to produce high-quality printed products.

Tools for Public Access TV presented by Tony Shawcross, is exactly what it sounds like - helping public access stations link to each other and share expertise and content.

RadioDrupal is a really interesting model for a grant-funded project! Local NPR station wanted to hire Margaret Rosas and her company Quiddities to build their site, but had no money. So they applied for the Knight grant to make it happen. And of course be available to other stations. Gary explains why they like funding tools and why they insist that everything developed be openly available, something that to their sadness has led to fewer newspapers applying for these grants (will they ever learn? no, they’ll never learn) because they don’t want to give technology away to their competitors.

Student editors from the UCLA student paper did apply though, to come up with a system that would replace the whiteboards most college newspapers are using now (helloo digital natives - aren’t all people their age know instinctively how to collaborate online??) Project is Community News Network, difficult from their description to get how it’s different from any number of other things, but I’m sure there’s some secret sauce I don’t get. Warning to professors - student says the system will let kids “work on the paper while they’re in class,” stealing away those last few who haven’t succumbed to supplementing your lectures with Facebook, etc.

Ryan Sholin has a small grant to help him develop “Reporting On” in his spare time (his day job is interesting too, helping really small papers across the country get wired). It’s a resource for journalists working on stories of any kind to share and find expertise. So if you’re reporting on an earthquake and building codes, you find out what sources others used, etc.

Our buddy David Cohn explains SpotUs, which I’ve mentioned before. Freelancers pitch stories to communities, communities/individuals can make microdonations to fund reporting on the issues they care about. I think this could be an incredibly tool and if anyone can get it up and running with only $300,000, it’s Dave.

That’s all the 2008 winners, now progress reports from 2007 winners:

Our City, Our Voices project for digital inclusion of immmigrant workers in Philadaelphia also presented through an interpreter. They’re training people in video and online tools and using the free wireless from the city. Originally started with one English-language and one Spanish-language class, used the video to bring people together. Distributed via DVD, public screenings and web.

Geoff Dougherty of Chi-Town Daily News. We have 50 volunteer citizen journalists we train them pair them with professional editors and task them with covering their neighborhoods. Results have exceeded their own optimistic expectations. Now at 18,000 visitors per month. 75% of readers are 18-40, which is exactly who the Tribune is losing. (Gary: Geoff has 2 Pulitzer Prize winners on his board, the original goal was one reporter in each neighborhood: how do you find them, train them, and retain them. Now Geoff knows that 3-4 reporters is what you really need. Also they have synergy with 2 other Chicago Knight grantees: Everyblock and the project at Northwestern. We hope this is what will happen with this year’s 16 projects, that they will help each other do more than they originally planned.)

What is the project at Northwestern? We have 2 students here with us - it’s a scholarship program to give Masters degrees at the Medill School of Journalism to Computer Science students. Ryan Mark says it was surprising that it’s difficult to learn this writing and other stuff that journalists do. He’s getting an A though. Thinking about how to use technology to connect to source or improve data collection. His buddy Brian Boyer says his friends thought he was crazy to do this. Until he read post about this project on Boing Boing it had never occurred to him to consider that journalists have a mission. But the commercialization of the media is weird. He reiterates the broccoli theory (people eat their newspaper for the horoscopes not the news) though he calls the news “medicine.” So although technology has ruined the newspaper, perhaps it will save it. Near-zero cost of production and distribution. Make the news portion of the Tribune part of a foundation and then sell it back to people who want to print it?? He’s out to fix the business model. Rich Gordon is their professor, he’s pleased that Knight would take this risk. All they’ve promised is that 9 folks with CS backgrounds will learn journalism just as we’ve always taught it (well our curriculum is updated, but you get it). I’m confident that they’ll all go off to do something interesting. They still have 5-6 slots - apply now!!

Well that was exhausting, but fun (the liveblogging part). Additional coverage by prolific Tweeter Amy Gahran and others here and by Mark Glaser here.

“Thus we seek to bestir the people into an awareness of their own condition, provide inspiration for their thoughts and rouse them to pursue their true interests.” John S. Knight, 1969

Chris Csikszentmihalyi opens session on “civic action” [warning amateur live-blogging ahead] with this quote which he claims to have used more than 13,000 times. He goes on to tell stories of the Media Lab’s most political projects (he says their maxim is “All technology is political.”) TXTmobs at the RNC. Complaining about Total Information Awareness, losing NSA sponsorship to the Media Lab, etc.

Now extrACT, his current project (not yet online, perhaps for good reason), mapping gas wells in Colorado. There are literally 80,000, less than half now active. Takes 1-3 acres of land, pump fracturing fluid into the ground to get the gas out, these chemicals are unregulated (since 2004), millions of these chemicals going into the ground (and ground water), 93% of them turn out to be health hazards. Terrifying stuff. Frightening shot of cemetery next to industrial operations, to emphasize the ubiquity of these poisonous industries, I can’t keep track of the names of the chemicals. Tap water so chemically tainted it catches fire. Asthma, cancer, etc. (Honestly friendly suggestion to team - get a sound recording lesson before you do more video so we can hear the testimony of the folks you’re interviewing as well as we hear your questions, the BBC clip Chris showed is what you’re aiming for.)

Describes how they went back and forth between feeling that it’s hopeless that “there is so much we can do.” Great quote: “The companies have satellite uplinks from each well telling exactly how much each one is producing every minute but the people living literally next to them have no information on what they’re being exposed to. So we decided we’ll start being objective once the information access is in better balance.” Web penetration is only 20% so using paper forms as well, phone systems soon.

Buy It Like You Mean It Clay Ward presents a project to help socially responsible consumers. The idea is so clearly needed, he’s met 6 others working on the same thing, he’s collaborating with some of them. The idea is to build a centralized database with input from everyone and accessible in many ways, including SMS and voice.

Hero Reports Alyssa Wright shows project that encourages people to report small acts of heroism, kindness, etc. Inspired as a response to the anti-terrorism “If you see something, say something” campaign. Online template for reporting or self-reporting. Various input (postcards!) and browsable in many ways, to allow not only “Facebook people” to use.

Sourcemap Leonardo Bonanni says he started doing visualizations for their own sakes now mapping how things get into a product as it’s made, you see where the cadmium in your computer is mined, where the oysters on your plate were grown and so on. Also calculates the energy of people travelling to meetings and so on. All open for you to use!

About Us Annina Rüst Disparities of perception and reality in the “gender-configuration” of technology culture and how to intervene.

Freedom Fone / Kubatana Brenda Burrell representing one of the international (bravo, Knight!) new winners of the Knight award. They are working in Zimbabwe - she shows a graphic of “freedom of speech” with the quotation marks barbed and bloody. She shares a poem to remind us that even in the worst situation, people need hope:

Dance your anger and your joys,
Dance the military guns to silence,
Dance oppression and injustice to death,
Dance my people.

Meanwhile, 80% unemployment and 2 million % inflation. So we have to use new technologies but we can’t limit ourselves to the web, or email or texting. But mobile phones are ubiquitous in Zimbabwe, which as she notes is a sophisticated society despite its current tragic political situation. So they are creating radio for telephones.

— Everyblock Adrian Holovaty shows us his “hypermicrolocal news” site, which grew out of earlier project to map crime in Chicago. Provides data on crime, restaurant health inspections, yelp restaurant reviews, etc. Says the site is simple “not getting in your way with a lot of content like newspapers do.” This “news” (I would call it “information,” but that’s me). Refers apologetically to the site serving “I guess it’s the cliche of the long tail.” “Anyway,” he concludes, “it’s a geographic filter for stuff around your house. Thanks.”

Questions: JD Lasica asks Adrian about social aspects, how do they get people to contribute content? Answer: only indirectly, people have to go to Yelp (restaurants), Flickr (photos) and tag things in ways to get on everyblock. Dedicated staff person gets the government info.

Person I don’t know (yet) says he works in developing countries where often no addresses (but they do have blocks) why not mobile phone based input? Adrian: some of it aleady is GPS. Follow up: People in Kibera don’t have GPS but their cellphone triangulates. Adrian: yes.

Amy Gahran who is live-tweeting asks where are the links to these projects. (Thanks Amy, I can’t find some of them either.) Extracts promise to get links onto Center for Future Civic Media blog.
Jeremy Liu: why not mash Hero Reports with Everyblock? Alyssa: YES! I’m dying to.

Lunch!

Photo: borrowed from MIT Media Lab website

Zero tolerance for hand-wringing here at the conference of Knight Digital Media Challenge winners, gathered today at MIT’s (in)famous Stata Center (aka the Gehry building). People here are doing stuff they love and excited to share it and learn about others. (warning - overcaffeinated amateur live blogging)

Just now we’re doing “speed-dating” 4 minutes each from folks who will then be available for small group continuation of the conversations (interesting format!):

The appropriately silverhaired Jack Driscoll of Silver Stringers on community publishing efforts by youth and others, hosting offered by enlightened Italian newspaper now carries the papers of 7,400 schools. More info including community publishing how-to info here.

Anna Van Someren (MIT comparative media studies) talking about New Media Literacies, MacArthur Foundation-funded project on participatory culture and learning, working with kids on writing, technology use, and the ethical and cultural issues involved.

Ingeborg Endter on the Computer Clubhouse project, community centers in over 100 locations around the world. Serving underserved communities, overcoming generational barriers. Hoping to link Civic Media work to these communities.

Leo Burd, recent Media Lab grad, was working in his home country of Brazil with kids in poor communities, struck by their communications challenges: easier to learn what’s happening across the world (on the Internet) than in the next block. Now has created a phone-based system What’s Up that allows kids to use phones, including landlines, to post and receive news and messages, whether about the new time for soccer practice or a demonstration. You get a free voicemail account, and can create groups for different reasons (family, friends, teams, schools, etc.). Test bed in Lawrence, MA is going well.

Say What? project present by Karen Brennan is based on the belief that you need empathy in order to get to civic engagement. Uses MIT’s Scratch programming tools for interactive storytelling. Worked with multi-cultural group of 6th graders for 3 month workshops. Kids came up with more personal stories than they expected (they were hoping for news), but the effect on parental engagement was a pleasant surprise - parents came into the school for the first time. Next testbeds: Rwanda, Burma, Haiti and Birmingham, AL.

Noah Blumenson-Cook on Webcomix - web tool (CMS) for people to create their own web comics. Started with student newspaper and cartoons about crappy cafeteria food, eventually led to investigation and removal of food service provider who were related to school administrators. So this is web application to make it easy for folks even if they can’t draw to use comics to do journalism, using CC-licensed materials or your own art.

Speakyeasy - Jeremy Liu from Asian Community Development Corp in Boston presents project that uses a phones-based system to provide services to non-English speaking people in Asian communities. Translators are able to help people remotely, leverage volunteer translators who may have moved to suburbs. Want to use in both community/volunteer model and enterprise/public sector model. City of Boston may use in order to make use of its employees who speak foreign languages (they get higher salaries just for being bilingual, why not use it?)

Wrapping up, Berkman’s own hyper-prolific Ethan Zuckerman, here to represent Knight grantee (and mind-blowing project) Rising Voices, which grew out of citizen media aggregator Global Voices. David Sasaki is in rural Bolivia, he and Georgie Popplewell are the real stars, Ethan just the messenger. Rising Voices finds and support (sometimes with funding, more often connections) citizen journalism in developing world outside the wired big-city based elite. Teaching journalism to the children of prostitutes in Calcutta. Getting the work of videobloggers in Iran to the word. Environmental journalists in Madagascar. Points out that “social hack” is now more important than “technical hack.” Ethan is asked about aggregating such disparate content he says they translate (in and out of 20 languages) and add context, but their first goal with Rising Voices is to affect the local media.

Question for all from the floor: isn’t there a danger of sliding into advocacy? how to stay away from that? Ethan disagrees - Rising Voices is an advocacy project, in some parts of the world, journalism HAS to come from advocacy orgs. Jeremy Liu asks if what they’re doing is “civic social editing” that the key is providing context, and cultural translation. Leo Burd - making media is different than actions and projects in the real world. Thinks it’s important not just to teach kids how media works but how society works, teach them to take action in the real world.

Question - why all about marginalized communities and identity? Ethan - the panel is about that, but to your question about why do this, the goal is to find out what happens when these unheard voices become part of the discourse. It’s definitely not because it’s easier to work in these communities. Ingeborg - we work with youth in marginalized communities to help them expand their view of their own potential, help them get out of the limited tracks they may be funneled into. Mitch - it’s about seeing new media skills as part of basic education.

Photo: Our host, Ellen Hume, Research Director of the Center for Future Civic Media from Chrysaora’s photostream
Some rights reserved

Adding my voice in the gleeful posts celebrating Jonathan Zittrain’s decision to come back to Harvard. Was it all that cajoling at Berkman@10? We may never know. But Jonathan is so smart, funny and NICE on top of that, I don’t care what made it happen. It’s just great.

I continue to ponder the interesting discussions at a 2.5 day conference put together by the World Bank’s CommGap (that’s COMMunication for Governance and Accountability Program, not “communication gap”) and the Shorenstein Center at Harvard Kennedy School. Definitely read Charlie Beckett’s thoughtful 5-part summary for a real roundup, I’m only highlighting a few things that struck me.

The focus was on international development, specifically on how to convince the good people who fund international development that media is important to good governance* which in turn drives human development. To this end, the organizers had gathered a great group of folks (present company excluded, I begged to come when I learned who would be there). There were three tribes: academics, World Bank people and then a motley group of “practitioners” that included people working in media, media development, and media for development.**

Highlights:
Finally meeting the terrific Sheila Coronel, whose presentation (do read the real thing) on the role of investigative journalism was thoughtful, historical, passionate and practical all at once. Conclusion: watchdog journalism is not always heroic or perfect, it can even be counterproductive sometimes and its effectiveness depends on many factors but we need watchdog journalism no matter what, in fragile states and stable, to remind us how democracy could and should work.

Learning (in the lunch breaks) about Media Tenor, a fascinating international media analysis group that’s been around for 15 years monitoring high-profile mainstream media, with all the data freely available. Only 30% of their work is done for paying clients; those fees support the other 70%, which is all available for free. CEO Roland Schatz explained that they do not hide this fact from their clients; everyone accepts it. (speaking of business models, Ethan!) Moreover, they are careful not to let any one client dominate their revenue so they can remain independent of any political or business agenda. Can’t wait to dig through their stuff.

Cheering on Warren Feek, head of the Communication Initiative Network, as he called on us to correct some of the limitations he saw in the papers and discussions. I hope he will post the slides he showed, meanwhile, my takeaways:

– remember that media is part of society: we need to understand its place in each country, which requires close collaboration with local experts in research, program design,
–get beyond traditional media either in the sense of delivery mechanisms or in the narrow paradigm of “objective” journalism. New media is playing a growing role, advocacy media is vital.
– rephrase our work more positively: we are promoting enhanced political participation, dammit, we are not the poor cousin

Listening to the presentation by Ibrahim al Marashi and (my long-time pal) Monroe Price of their work together with Nicole A. Stremlau on media in conflict societies. Their paper-in-progress, examining media in Iraq, Uganda and Ethiopia, is well worth your time. No simple soundbites here; as the conclusion says of the three cases: “Each is a messy, nonlinear project.” (I hope Ibrahim will post the riveting images from Iraqi TV he shared at the conference somewhere.)

Being reminded by the Open Society Foundation’s Marius Dragomir about the importance of broadcasting through his research on the many incarnations of “public broadcasting.”

The more I learn about what’s happening in new media in the “developed” world, the more eager I am to integrate it with the work in other countries, to the benefit of both.

Image: Glowing Globe,
originally uploaded by Trooper3d

* The term “democratic governance” turned out not to be popular with all the World Bank’s partner-states.

** “Media Development” is when people support the creation or improvement of local media as a good in its own right. “Media for Development” is  when media is used as a vehicle to promote other aspects of human development, through ads promoting condom use or radio dramas about the free market. In recent years, the two tribes have forged an uneasy peace.

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