After five years of doing community media in India, we've come to understand what Video Volunteers is good at. We're great at training -- the people we work with keep doing this for a long time after they're trained. And we're great at getting impact in the villages. We know how to produce the content that people in rural India want to see; the evidence for this is that people turn up in large numbers for the screenings and actually take action.

The Indian government has several major programs to bring Internet and information to rural areas -- one is the Common Service Centers, a program to bring fiber optic cables to every 10th village; another amazing one is the $35 video-enabled tablet computer.

We think these new government programs can give a huge boost to community media in India, and they can help us scale, provided we create the right partnerships. We're thinking about things like web channels for content aimed at rural audiences for the tablets, and citizen journalism reporting apps. The public screenings on projectors that the people in our Community Video Units do are immensely powerful, but in time, a similar effect will emerge as people are able to share videos in villages over their cell phones and watch them on computers.

So far, these programs are conceived as a way to push information out to the rural areas, so the poor get information on government programs and plans. We come in, because we can reverse the system -- we can bring the knowledge and ideas of the poor to the government. We can enable people to produce content for these new distribution pipelines. No one will use them if there is no locally available content.

So when we meet government officials, our message is this: Enabling the poor to produce content, to be heard, and to share their own knowledge is crucial for democracy.

Why funding matters

In Part 1 of this series, I focused on Video Volunteers' work with IndiaUnheard, our flagship rural feature service. But many other projects have kept us busy this year: We did a series of trainings for tribals in Gujarat, India on documenting local culture for a local museum; we provided support to a community radio station called Sramik Bharti; and we launched a very exciting program with UNDP in Eastern UP where 20 rural women are trained to use video to monitor their self-help groups and the use of funds that are earmarked for their investment.

We received visits from Semester at Sea, the University of Nebraska Journalism school, and several Indian NGOs (non-governmental organizations). We spoke about our work and showed our videos in numerous places: the WSSCC international water conference; the Dalit Solidarity Network Conference in Kathmandu; TEDx Mumbai; the India government's Ministry of Information and Broadcasting conference; and the University of Nebraska where I was an "Innovator in Residence."

Funding has continued to be hard, and we haven't been able to take on as many new community correspondents as we would like, because for the last year we've relied a lot on smaller donations that are harder to come by. We find that the obsession with "something new" is making it hard for us to fund projects that we've been running for more than a year, such as our Community Video Units program, which is 5 years old.

However, I've recently met with several foundations that seem to really see the value in creating a model to bring content out of all rural areas, and so I hope we'll be able to make the leap from a $300,000-a-year organization (where we've been for the last five years) to an organization with twice that budget. As I've said in the past, the costs of maintaining rural stringers for all of India are relatively low (around $400,000 a year), and we hope that someone will see the value in being able to make information flow from remote areas in a rational manner.

Watch a few of our best videos from the year:

In August, the Video Volunteers staff attended an amazing program called the Global Social Business Incubator at Santa Clara University, where we developed a new business plan focused on income from the mainstream media. Our idea is to have one rural reporter in each of India's 645 districts, set up like a rural stringers network, to deliver a pipeline of high-quality, low-cost human interest content to television stations. The maintenance costs of such a network, once it's set up, would be relatively low -- about $300,000 a year for 645 rural correspondents, or about the cost of 20-30 television producers in Delhi. 

Ultimately, we feel that the recruitment, training and generation of impact will need to be supported by philanthropy, but that production and distribution should be taken care of by the market.

We made significant progress in 2011. In May, NewsX, the Indian network, broadcast our 13-part series called "Speak Out India." We sold them eight stories a week, and they produced a show around it. It was the first time we know of where a mainstream news company has paid for content produced by people living at the so-called base of the pyramid, and the successful run of that show has given us a successful track record with the media. The problem was, they only paid us the stringer rate for the stories, so about 1,500 rupees ($30) when our costs of production are more like 8,000 rupees ($160).

Our next goal was to see if an Indian TV channel would sign a contract with us for a similar amount of content each week (about 30 minutes) at our fully loaded cost of production for a 3-minute story. Hence, Video Volunteers' earned income goal for the end of this year was $100,000, or about 40% of our total budget. This would still be significantly lower than the costs of a TV station doing these stories themselves.

In the last three months, we've made two trips to Delhi and Mumbai to meet the TV channels, and the response has been very enlightening. So far, we've met about half of the top 20 English or Hindi news channels. They all like the content. They find our community correspondents full of energy, and feel that our flip cams are generating adequate quality.

The fact that India is in the throes of an anti-corruption movement is a really good thing for us, because we have lots of great corruption stories that they want. So far so good, in that they clearly are saying, "We'll run this content." This is a big step from a few years ago, where everyone we spoke to said we were crazy to think TV stations would run stuff produced by poor villagers. 

The Rural Newswire

As for the idea of a "rural newswire," they also get the concept. One senior person at CNN IBN said, "It's a well-known secret in Indian media that abysmal stringers are a huge problem." The chief executive of CNN IBN has talked in media interviews (including when he's been interviewed about Video Volunteers) about the "tyranny of distance," and how the remote areas of the country are often prohibitively expensive to cover. Someone at a government channel even told us that our idea couldn't work with the government channel "because all our stringers are political appointees!"

But despite all this, we're not sure they're ready to pay for quality. One producer at a news channel here who was really championing us internally said, "I'm pitching this as a high-quality stringers network. Everyone knows our stringers are awful, but the problem is they are OK with bad quality."

Bottom line at the end of our first 10 TV station meetings: Stations will take our stuff for free. They would probably also pay us the stringer rate -- but not necessarily the fully loaded cost. So now we're working with one station that's going to try to find a corporate sponsor, and will probably be the first mainstream media contract to materialize for us next year.

Online Distribution Helps

Thankfully, the Internet is a space where we can produce and publicize our content without depending on a broadcaster. We are currently publishing one video a day on our site, which is searchable by issue, region and community correspondent. The good news is that we've doubled our viewers over the last six months. The less good news is that the numbers are still low. We're going to start tweaking our format to show the back story and the trials and tribulations of the community producers more.

We've set aside one day a week, Wednesday, to publish impact videos -- this will have an impact on us in terms of fundraising! And we hope to start producing our own podcasts where we club together videos on a particular theme and have someone in our office as an anchor. We now have more than 450 edited 3-minute videos on every conceivable issue of human rights, poverty alleviation, and local culture. We're sitting on a gold mine of content, and now the fun starts of repackaging it and seeing what themes emerge and getting others to comment on the content.

We're confident this will work, because when our content is on other platforms that get traffic, it does very well. We're now partnered with several online companies, namely MSN, Rediff, Viewspaper and ViewChange.org. The partnership with Rediff is particularly promising; our first video with it got 100,000 views and loads of comments.

We also reach greater numbers of people through commissioned film projects. We've been hired this year by several organizations to gather stories or footage, such as: the one day on Earth project; YouTube's Day in a Life project; and the Red Cross, for whom we produced 12 videos on hunger in rural India that they're using in campaign events around the world. We've also gathered stories of climate change for our partner organization Laya; stories of development-induced displacement for Witness; stories on domestic violence for Breakthrough; and on local farming for the Gene Campaign.

Our correspondents gathered "recce" footage on caste for one of India's major production companies, and got answers from dozens of people to the question, "Are You Happy?" for a film project replicating Jean Rouch's seminal 1961 movie "Chronicle of Summer."

Are you happy? - from Jharkhand from Video Volunteers on Vimeo.

Stay tuned for our fourth and last post of the blog series, in which we'll discuss our other activities and programs and our vision for the future.

Localore is a new $2 million national competition produced by the Boston-based Association of Independents in Radio (AIR), with $1 million in funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to catalyze producer-led innovation teams at local stations. Here at Zeega, this is particularly exciting because we'll be teaming up with several of the winners as creative technology partners. (For more info about Zeega, an open-source platform for creating interactive projects and documentaries, see this and this.)

To be paired with producers, stations had to produce a video to describe what made them the perfect hub for innovation. In a pretty amazing showing, 61 stations across the nation -- from Native American reservations to statewide networks to major market radio and television outlets -- added their profile to the Localore Station Runway. More than 130 producers applied with their ideas for Localore projects. The winners will be announced on February 1.

For us, these projects will play a leading role in defining much of what Zeega becomes during this early stage. Our partnership with Localore matches the strategy we've envisaged for ourselves from the beginning -- we believe firmly that great storytelling and storytellers should drive the design and development process. As opposed to traditional software development that begins with generic specs, we're committed to building out Zeega's core features through real projects tied to real producers, communities and users. And importantly, as opposed to just ending up with a bespoke mix of technology experiments after Localore ends, these projects will make a lasting contribution to the tools for public media. There will be a set of content-driven features in Zeega that will be made available for other producers and a set of rigorously documented open-source code that can be further expanded.

The Localore initiative is an outgrowth of MQ2, the AIR-driven effort that first funded Mapping Main Street, thus planting the seeds for Zeega. The Localore teams are tasked with bringing their ingenuity to blend digital and broadcast technology, and invent new forms of journalism that will appeal beyond public broadcasting's traditional core audience.

To complement this technological innovation, the initiative is based in specific geographic communities in order to deeply enrich local reporting and community engagement. This push for localism comes at a time when commercial station owners in the U.S. continue to divest their investment in local talent and stations.

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan said, "It is the artist's job to try to dislocate older media into postures that permit attention to the new. To this end, the artist must ever play and experiment with new means of arranging experience." For us, it's about searching for means to create new possibilities with what currently exists, making it, and in the process, often subverting the intentions imagined by a technology's original creators.

We'll be back with more at the beginning of February when we can share the winners!

A man charged with selling drugs inside the courthouse. A woman said to have shoplifted $5 worth of barbeque chicken wings. A man charged with multiple counts of raping a child with force. A longtime Drug Court participant booted from the program for taking a non-narcotic pill (still against the rules). Everyone brought back to court owing fees or victim restitution in previously dismissed cases. A man on psychotropic medication charged with shoplifting a Stop and Shop cart full of meat and pulling a knife when confronted in the parking lot. A naked hiker in the Blue Hills whose defense to lewd behavior is being raised as a naturist. OUIs. Restraining order hearings. A wife sectioning her husband for alcoholism.

OpenCourt has been streaming public court hearings from the First Session courtroom in the Quincy District Court in Massachusetts since May of 2011. We've received feedback about how our viewers use and value the footage, and we realize it would be useful to show more of the court's daily business -- not just the cross-section that comes through the First Session.

While holding to our goal to carve a plausible model for other courthouses, we've often asked ourselves how we and other journalists around the country could do a better job shedding light on a bigger portion of the iceberg's tip, and not necessarily using as much expensive technology.

In other words, just how much business does all of Quincy District Court do in a single day? How can we more fully capture the breadth of cases heard, day in and day out?

Cooperative Coverage

To help answer these questions, last month we hosted a cooperative coverage event at the court, an open invitation to citizen and traditional journalists alike to help us gather notes about everything that transpires in the building's six public courtrooms.

Our combined notes, which you can read here on our blog -- gathered between myself, our producer Val Wang, two Patriot Ledger reporters, two Harvard Berkman interns, one State House News reporter, and three citizen journalists -- are inevitably incomplete. But we hope this coming together shows more fully the wide array of hearings before the court, the sheer volume of cases, and the fact that this is all happening every day, outside of normal public view.

We realized it's easier than you might think for loosely affiliated citizens to collaborate on a one-off project (read: Twitter + Google Docs).

There were unsurprisingly a wide variety of cases. Some rough tallies: Assault & Battery (15, of which 3 were labeled as domestic violence), disorderly conduct (4), trespassing (3), resisting arrest (1), uninsured and/or unlicensed motor vehicle operation (5), speeding (3), shoplifting (5), larceny over $250 (1), receiving stolen property (2), distribution of an illegal substance (3), section 35 (1), sealed record request (3), interpreter needed (1).

This day was exceptional not by any standard of caseload or substance, only that more of us were there to see it and relay stories. For me and Val, the longer we're in court streaming, the clearer it is that we're sitting on a relatively unchecked sociological goldmine.

Opening Court Data

These notes from last month's experiment are, at the least, a compelling glance at the river of data flowing through our local courts every single day.

At best they offer a new angle on approaching larger questions: How do we get to a place where public court data is more accessible? Why aren't the stats being tracked more extensively and automatically in the name of scientifically diagnosing societal ills?

The Boston Globe recently published an extensive three-part series on Massachusetts drunken driving prosecutions, which undoubtedly required massive reporting energy. While that energy will always be required for strong narrative journalism, shouldn't reporters and the public at large alike have easier access to court proceedings to begin with? Wouldn't the state be better off if tracking the operation of its courts didn't require the Herculean effort of a crack, paid investigative team?

Thanks again to everyone who helped make this possible. Our aim at this point, as always, is to provide a window into the everyday landscape of our legal system. Beyond that, we hope efforts like this lead to smarter methods to inform and awaken the public -- to be a better radar for a community's prevalent crimes.

What do you think? What do you see? What should we do differently if we host another event like this?

The latter is an import from Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, courtesy of Ethan Zuckerman, our director/Berkman researcher. They're informal and free, and full of food.

The former -- the Civic Media Sessions -- are remarkable evening talks. Held at the MIT Media Lab, they bring together civic media practitioners, writers, academics, technologists, and more. The irony, of course, is that "civic media" is still a field we're defining both in terms of our leadership and internal intellectual debates. These debates are most plainly put on display during our Civic Media Sessions.

By way of example, I'd like to share a video (below) of our latest session, Civic Maps. We're already years past initial experimentations with, say, Google Maps, to the point that civic mapping now includes high-resolution grassroots efforts, non-profit partnerships with communities, and even provocative work to visualize waste, income disparities, and correlations between incarceration rates and specific neighborhoods. It's this last example that you'll take away from our video below.

We hope you'll join us here in Cambridge, Mass., for lunches and sessions, and know that even if you can't, we always post videos of our great events soon after.

Recently, I was asked by Jason Nazar, founder of Docstoc and a big supporter of the L.A. entrepreneurial community, what lessons from my entertainment background have been helpful as I've transitioned into the digital space. A link to that video can be found at the bottom of this post, but I thought I'd share the three key takeaways with you here:

CONDENSE YOUR BUSINESS TO A 'LOGLINE'
As you hatch your idea and begin growing it into an actual business, a lot of people will want to hear your story. And when they ask, you're going to want to tell it quickly and succinctly. And here's the kicker: It's best if it's communicated in a sentence. Yes, that's right-- a single sentence.

In the entertainment business, it's called a "logline," and it's composed of three parts: a beginning, a middle, and an end. Think of it as Act I, Act II, and Act III.

In the first part of your logline, you need to state the problem. What is it that people need? Not that they want-- what is it that they need? There's a difference, and you should always be addressing a need, not a want.

In the second part of your logline, identify the obstacles that need to be overcome. Preferably those obstacles will be solved by the service you are offering or the product you are building. After all, that's why you threw caution to the wind and got into this racket, isn't it? Because you have the answer to the problem that needs to be solved?

By the time you've reached the end of your logline, you need to articulate how you plan to overcome those obstacles and ultimately solve that problem.

Beginning, middle, end. Quick, succinct, and to the point.

So the next time someone asks why you are so feverishly committed to doing what it is you're doing, don't fall into the trap of responding with an elaborate description of your business. Tell them a story. Because at the end of the day, you're mapping out a journey, and you want whomever will listen to take that journey with you -- or at least you want them to understand why you have just boarded the occupational equivalent of "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride."

EXECUTION IS EVERYTHING
There's an old adage in Hollywood that "ideas are a dime a dozen." To a large extent, I think that applies to entrepreneurship as well.

People invest in people. Whether you're talking to venture capitalists you want to invest in your company; trying to bring on a critical team member you want to help you realize your vision; or recruiting new customers to buy your service or product, people are buying you first and your idea second.

I think that's why so many actors tend to work with the same directors again and again. There's a comfort level there. They don't just think the other person can pull it off; they know they can. And it's probably why a serial entrepreneur who's had past success but who may have stumbled on his most recent endeavor will almost always get funded before an unproven entrepreneur with a "great" idea.

Simply put, ideas are only as good as the people behind them. So sell yourself first and foremost. And make sure when you're doing that, you sell them on the fact that you are are the only person who can pull it off. Execution is everything.

'NO' IS JUST ONE STEP CLOSER TO 'YES'
While it can be wildly rewarding, make no mistake -- heading out on your own is tough. A large percentage of the "no's" you're going to get as an entrepreneur likely will come from the people you're trying to get to fund your business. And in my experience, VCs and studio execs are cut from the same cloth. Both are in the business to say, "no."

When I was reading scripts at DreamWorks, HBO and VH1, I had to pour through 100 before I found one that I would even consider taking to my boss. Similarly, most VCs look at 100 deals a week before they find one they take up with their colleagues. With that kind of volume, you can understand why saying "no" is the answer you're most likely going to get when approaching a VC or angel investor.

My advice? Don't take "no" personally. In fact, think of it as one step closer to "yes," because now you know the numbers. So go out there and get in front of as many people as fast as possible. The faster you rack up the "no's," the faster you'll get to "yes."

A FINAL THOUGHT
All entrepreneurs bring an array of diverse experiences to their current endeavor. And if there's a key takeaway here, it's this: Those experiences -- as disparate as they may seem -- are actually some of your best assets.

So don't discount your past experiences. Instead, you should embrace them. Because at the end of the day, it's those unique experiences that are going to be the biggest contributor to your future success.

This article is the first of 10 video segments in which digital entrepreneur, Tom Grasty, talks about his experience building an internet startup, and is part of a larger initiative sponsored by docstoc.videos, which features advice from small business owners who offer their views on how to launch a new business or grow your existing one.

The opening night of the WFMU Radiovision Festival, featuring radio legend Joe Frank, sold out in a matter of days, but there's still room during the bulk of the festival on Saturday and Sunday. Participants will hear from a day of talks featuring radio host Tom Scharpling, comedian Marc Maron, Ira Glass of "This American Life," poet Kenneth Goldsmith, anthropologist Gabriella Coleman, DJ /rupture, journalist and media analyst Brooke Gladstone, and more. The festival runs concurrently with the WFMU Record Fair.

During day three of the festival, digital storytellers, creative developers and free-form thinkers will come together for a day of hacking and coding called "Re-Inventing Radio." This isn't a typical hack day, because there are no prerequisites for participation; you don't even need to know how to code. Re-Inventing Radio is a forum for creative people of all stripes to collaborate with each other using open-source digital tools. We will share an ultra-early alpha version of the Zeega editor and three projects for people to experiment with at RadioVision. Here's a preview of what we're imagining:

The personal music history

We all have the music that we listened to over our lives -- the songs that were forced upon us by our parents; the albums, cassette tapes and CDs that we listened to obsessively over and over again; the album (or probably more realistically, the song) that we lost our virginity to. Using music archives across the web, we'll use the freshly created Zeega Alpha editor to create a mash-up that traces our personal music histories. We'll also invent ways to visualize and move through our combined playlists (like does someone born in the same year as you have a lot of the same songs at age 10, 14, 20?) If we pull it off, we'll perform some of them publicly at the end of the day and create a space for them online.

Hacking physical spaces

With the starting point of thinking that most audio tours suck, we'll distort the typical audio tour model by creating experiences that involve stickers, text messages, phone calls, and short sound and music messages. Participants will be able to use Zeega to excerpt songs or tell stories of things that happened in a place, write a text message-length detail about the sound, and we'll build the beginnings of a WFMU Sound Tour of basements, bars, kitchens and other music-filled places in the city. We'll also be carting down sticker printers from Boston so that people can leave with markers to stick around town to alert people to the places where they can experience the tour.

What can music look like on the open web?

In this project, we'll generate new forms of mash-up music videos. We'll start with music from the Free Music Archive and add visual soundtracks by remixing visuals pulled from the APIs of YouTube, Google Street view and Flickr.

The Hack Day is free with WFMU Record Fair admission but priority will go to folks who've purchased tickets to the Saturday Symposium.

A version of this post first appeared on Zeega's site. Image of DJ /rupture courtesy of WFMU.

TRAC FM was the focus of a larger case study we did for the Mobile Media Toolkit. The Mobile Media Toolkit is a project of MobileActive.org. The Toolkit provides how-to guides, wireless tools, and case studies on how mobile phones can (and are) being used for reporting, news broadcasting, and citizen media.

The TRAC FM software plots SMS responses to questions poised during radio programs. The responses are condensed in data visualizations, including bar graphs, time graphs, and maps, so that radio presenters can get an overview of where reports are coming from and what the issues are.

But, in Uganda, radio stations generally do not have websites, so sharing the visualizations with their audience requires a little more creativity. What stations do often have is an Internet connection to download audio files they use for advertisements from companies like MTN.

How data visualizations help

So radio presenters log into the TRAC FM system through their Internet connection in the studio and share the poll results with listeners during their talk show. The data visualization overviews may offer more substance, as they are the aggregation of an entire audience and not just an individual opinion. The data visualization for the public service delivery question, for example, showed that 65 percent of respondents thought health care was the top priority.

To learn more about how they did this, read the full case study at the Mobile Media Toolkit.

The Mobile Media Toolkit is a collection of resources, guides, case studies, and mobile tool reviews to help you make sense of mobile media. From creating and editing audio and video content on your handset, to delivering content to mobile audiences, to engaging with listeners and readers via mobile, it's a one-stop shop on Making Media Mobile. We launched this summer and have been adding great new content and case studies, in English, Spanish, and Arabic. We now have a few pages available in Russian, too, with more to come.

Stop on by to see what we're up to. Find us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, or reach out to us here to submit your own stories from the field or alert us to great new mobile media tools.

Public Radio Exchange just announced the launch of KCRW Music Mine, an iPad app that gives you a unique, exciting way to discover new music.

Music Mine is the product of a close partnership between PRX and KCRW, with design by Roundarch and music intelligence powered by The Echo Nest. Nearly a year in the making, the app developed from lengthy brainstorming sessions about what a next-generation station experience on the iPad should -- and could -- be.

KCRW excels at a lot of things -- music, news, local Los Angeles culture, food, arts, film. But rather than attempt to recreate the KCRW.com website, or duplicate the station's existing iPhone app on the iPad, we went further. We chose a focused concept that spotlights KCRW's expertise in music discovery and pushes the limits of the iPad user experience.

PRX and KCRW certainly weren't the first to come up with an app that lets you listen to music or even radio programs about music. So we pushed further, drawing upon the formidable design talents of digital agency Roundarch to wield user experience and graphic design to truly set this app apart. The Echo Nest was also brought in for their "music intelligence platform" which gathers music news and multimedia content from across the web.

The result is stunning. This video gives you an idea:

The app is beautiful and appealing. But we weren't just going for beauty. We wanted to transform the music discovery experience from simply tapping a Play button and getting what you're given (though that's plenty great, too) into something much more active. With KCRW Music Mine, you want to pay attention. You want to explore, with the knowledge that KCRW DJs will make sure you only find good stuff. You can use the app simply to discover new music to like, or you can choose to go deeper to learn more about the artist and their work.

Or, you can just tap a Play button and get what KCRW's Eclectic24 gives you.

Not only do we think Music Mine reshapes the music discovery experience, we think it exemplifies the kind of mobile/tablet presence public media should aspire to. At PRX, we believe that new platforms are opening up great possibility for fresh new expressions -- not just reflections -- of stations and programs.

KCRW Music Mine is a perfect incarnation of PRX's mobile goals: to partner with innovative entities to create cutting-edge mobile experiences for public media.

A version of this story also appears on the PRX Blog.

Knowing where things come from is a fundamental part of humanity. Things are very different when they come from different places. The provenance of a work tells us the importance of not only where something has come from, but when it was created and who it was that fashioned it. Ancient vessels in Pompeii bear the eternal mark of Vesuvinum, and shelves of China are still identified by their geographic namesake.

With supply chains we talk about traceability, or being able to follow the source through every link on the chain. Environmental impact, climate change, conflict minerals and human rights abuses -- these are problems underpinning global trade. Defining our relationships with things as relationships with places and with people brings a renewed sense of humanity to our purchasing practices.

Sourcemap is an initiative to make information on the source of products and their supply chains public, so that we can make informed choices about their social and environmental impact. Developed by the MIT Center for Civic Media and the MIT Media Lab's Tangible Media Group, Sourcemap has grown over the past few years.

SOURCEMAP: WHERE WE'VE COME FROM

Each day, the site features new items contributed by entrepreneurs, brand enthusiasts, students and researchers. Some are carefully researched case studies of unique and unfamiliar products. Some are personal explorations of where someone is traveling, or an investigation into what he or she bought at the store that day. Each of them is a testament to the curiosity about the things that occupy our lives and where they came from before they got to us.

There are sourcemaps of everything from an electric car to a detonator for blasting oil wells, from supplier networks of airplanes to carbon accounting for teleconferencing, from the industrial food on your plate to the small supply chains of local cuisine.

Bringing consumers and producers into the same dialogue has become a cornerstone of the work. We not only have the "right to know" where something comes from, we want producers to have the "freedom to say." These two groups -- those who consume and those who produce -- have been separate too long. They have grown apart not only in our minds, but in their placement in the world. To bring them together is to tie together communities from opposite sides of the world, to untangle the knots that have bound our understanding of global production and global supply chains.

PROVENANCE

Housed in the MIT Media Lab, Sourcemap began its life surrounded by people in the midst of making things -- things with blinking lights and beeping sounds. We began to ask questions about these things. What is the impact of a modern product? If we wanted to make it more sustainable, what material would we use? Should it be local, renewable or recycled?

We built something to answer these questions for product designers at the Media Lab, but we soon realized that everyone makes design choices: planning a trip, stocking a shelf, or putting a meal together. All of these decisions bring together disparate components from around the globe. And if we're all designers, then we should all be informed about our choices and the impact they can have on the world.

The growth of the local food movement brought together individuals deeply concerned with the sourcing of ingredients in their own communities. Our earliest collaboration involved a local food chef and caterer, Robert Harris, who was interested in sharing his sourcing practices with his customers. Sourcemap allowed him to create a menu that showed customers exactly where their food comes came from. In the summer months, when the majority of Robert's food is sourced locally, this practice connects customers with not only the ingredients in their food, but with the local community of New England farmers who grow it.

Through early fieldwork in the remote Highlands and islands of Scotland, we met people sensitive to the beauty of the land around them and the fragile community it supports. It's a community in search of a place in the larger world -- looking to continue a specific way of life and sustain the people who practice it. We met a hotel owner who wanted to offset her guests' carbon footprint, reinvesting it in the preservation of the forests they had come to see. We met a local butcher who wanted to understand the carbon footprint of his business. He discovered that the transportation of his native cattle, sheep and pork is only a minor part of the life cycle impact compared to the practices his suppliers adopt in raising the animals.

Sam Faircliff, who runs the Cairngorn Brewery, saw that her local industry relies on a bottling plant in central England. Building a plant at her facility drops the distance a bottle of beer travels by two-thirds, and improves competitiveness, creates jobs, and strengthens the region. There is more than one kind of sustainability, and this experience in the Highlands revealed that it was just as much about people as it was about things.

USING SOURCEMAP TO TELL NEW STORIES

Sourcemap provides information about where things come from, and in doing so, it presents a particular narrative of the trip products make before they get to us. Educators and journalists can use this information to develop research, synthesize it with other perspectives, and tell new stories that situate a product's place in our world.

Leo Bonanni, CEO of Sourcemap, held a "Futurecraft" class at MIT, which was an important developmental force for Sourcemap, and its role has continued with classes at NYU and Parsons. Parsons master's student Jennifer Sharpe mapped and filmed a video documentary revealing the supply chain behind a line of organic clothing. At the show, "Organic by John Patrick," clothing was shown alongside maps and videos detailing the larger process of manufacture and sourcing. One side of the gallery was filled with the flash of cameras as the clothing was modeled. On the other side, a film showed the sheep farm were the wool comes and the shops and craftspeople responsible for making it into finished garments. In cases like this one, food and clothing connect us to not only each other, but to the natural world that provides the possibility for their production.

Less close to home, we've seen instructors use Sourcemap with their students in numerous locations including Boston, New York, California, Montana, France, Slovakia, New Zealand and Australia. We've traveled to see the social impact of cotton farming in India and gotten a firsthand perspective on fair trade.

A collaboration with the University of Montana helped students understand food production issues that are a critical factor in Montana's future sustainability. These journalism students were able to map the fragile state of their food economy, as the raw materials necessary to produce beef and grain products must leave the state to be processed into finished foods. In each of these classrooms, Sourcemap is mobilized by communities that are displaced by the disjunctures of global supply chains and local economic, cultural and social forces.

FOOTPRINTS

This project comes from an appreciation for the role of the material world in our daily lives. It has, from the beginning, been about understanding how we can have more respect and appreciation for material culture. Things cannot speak, but if they could, what would they say? There's no easy answer for the role of objects in our lives. It's not about passing universal judgment on which things are "local," "organic," "green" or "good." As we saw in the Highlands, communities have unique needs, and they need to understand the supply chains that involve them to make choices that are sustainable over the long-term.

Things mean different things to different people, and the solution is to let the things do the talking.

As part of this evolution, we recently announced a complete new release of Sourcemap, built with the efforts of our growing team and Chief Architect Reed Underwood. There are also a few changes in the way we do things. Sourcemap is now Sourcemap.com, the "crowd-sourced directory of product supply chains and carbon footprints." Under Bonanni's guidance, and through work with companies, non-profit organizations, experts, and everyday people, we hope that one day Sourcemap.com will allow us to make sustainable choices about the products and services we encounter.

At the same time, I will focus on Sourcemap Foundation, a non-profit research organization dedicated to understanding the fundamental issues at stake in global logistics.

The Brundtland commissioned defined sustainability as "meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations." Nothing is sustainable universally -- some things will be sustainable for some communities, and some will be for others. For us, sustainability gives us a connection with the past as we look to the future. It's the opportunity to learn from our mistakes while appreciating the legacy that has been handed down to us.

To understand our community and culture we must act like archaeologists, but what we practice is an archaeology of the present. It is possible to know where things come from. Instead of waiting to position the everyday objects of our lives from a future a hundred years from now, we must begin to unravel the origins of their people and places today.

For many of us living comfortably on the other side of the planet, a famine is impossible to relate to. Putting the crisis on a map brings a sense of place to it, and shows the exact areas where the most need is urgently needed.

The map we created lets people drill down into the data to see where the World Food Programme's food distribution centers are in relation to the current food security conditions, including the declared famine zones in Somalia. Rather than oversimplifying the crisis, the map helps us share some of its most complex challenges -- such as showing the rebel-controlled parts of Somalia that have limited or no access to relief aid because humanitarian groups can't access them.

Understanding a Devastating Situation

Mapping the famine helps people understand the situation in the Horn of Africa and see where donations and food are being distributed. We also wanted to make it easy for people to share this information.

This interactive map can be embedded into any other website by just copying and pasting the embed code -- it's as easy as adding a YouTube video. Our idea is that if we make the map as easy to share as a YouTube video, maybe we can make it go viral, too -- and really spread word of the famine and how people can help.

While a famine may be hard to relate to for most of us in the Western world, we can help stop it. It costs 50 cents for the World Food Programme to feed one person for one day.

Here is what the embedded map looks like:

You can embed this map into your own website by going to horn.wfp.org, clicking "embed this map," copying the code provided, and pasting it into your own site.

All of these maps were made using the open-source map design studio TileMill, a project initially funded with help from the Knight Foundation. The maps are all hosted by TileStream on MapBox's cloud infrastructure.

Best known for the remarkable film "Man with a Movie Camera," Vertov also created the first newsreel program in Russia, each episode a new experiment. This was a time when people were thinking about displaying news and telling stories in totally new forms, like rolling out a camera on a horse and buggy in the town center and throwing up a sheet over some wires to create a projection screen.

Dziga Vertov: Excerpt from "Kino Pravda 10" from Zeega on Vimeo.

Similar to that time, today is a moment of dramatic media transformation. We see this as an opportunity for journalists, artists and the public to invent new ways to tell and gather stories.

Mapping Main Street
But before we get into what Zeega is, I wanted to share a little background. James Burns, Jesse Shapins and I started working together a couple of years ago on an interactive documentary called Mapping Main Street. We built it from scratch with the help of public radio producer Ann Heppermann and grants from the Association of Independents in Radio and the Berkman Center. Meanwhile, we were also producing stories for NPR.

Mapping Main Street from Mapping Main Street on Vimeo.

To jump start the project, we drove 15,000 miles across the United States, stopping at more than 100 Main Streets to take photos and gather material for the NPR stories. These stories covered streets as diverse as Main Street in Chattanooga, Tenn., where a large portion of the street is a prostitution strip, and San Luis, Ariz., the only Main Street in the United States that is a port of entry. We also commissioned four bands (High Places, Chain and the Gang, Calvin Johnson and Jason Cady) to create songs that used field recordings gathered on specific Main Streets.

In order to allow others to document Main Streets across the country, we built and designed www.mappingmainstreet.org, an online platform that displays these broadcast stories and photographs, and enables anyone to contribute photos, videos and stories of their own. To participate, people simply put a photo on Flickr or a video on Vimeo, tag it with the city and state, and it automatically appears on our site.

We see Mapping Main Street as a new form of documentary that combines all the different elements -- the broadcast stories, online interface design and citizen media contributions.

When we launched Mapping Main Street, people started using it in ways we never would have imagined. One of our most prolific contributors is Amy Fichter, who uses her iPhone and an antique twin lens reflex camera to capture images of often-overlooked details on Main Streets throughout Wisconsin. Her Main Street photos were later exhibited in a solo gallery show. The platform has also been widely adopted by journalism teachers at the high school and college level and youth media programs like WNYC's Radio Rookies.

A COMMUNITY AND PLATFORM FOR EXPERIMENTATION
Zeega will enable anyone to create participatory projects that combine original content with photos, videos, text, audio, data feeds and maps from across the web. But what makes Zeega different is that it's not just an online documentary toolkit. We've long had an interest in making digital projects physical, and integral to Zeega is the ability to bridge physical and digital worlds through tangible media such as signs, stickers or even networked receipt printers.

"Yellow Arrow: Capitol of Punk," a 2006 interactive documentary bridging physical and digital worlds.

Zeega will be a community and framework for creative invention, making it possible for people to pioneer new forms of storytelling that we have not yet imagined.

In the design world, Processing has been transformative in allowing people to experiment with interaction and visualization, ranging from working with physical objects to large-scale installations. However, Processing still requires a level of technical expertise. We're making Zeega into a flexible framework for people without programming knowledge. (Of course, as an open-source project there will be many ways for programmers to be involved, too).

This culture of experimentation is supported in large part through metaLAB (at) Harvard, a research unit housed at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. So far, we're collaborating with librarians, journalists, artists and community groups. We're creating tools for people to create their own digital public libraries by bringing together collections of related materials from libraries and websites across the world.

We're also working with artists and reporters to create a platform for people living near any superfund site in the country to tell their stories. In Brooklyn, N.Y., we're working with the non-profit UnionDocs on a multi-year project called "Looking at Los Sures," which combines radio, film, interactive media and performance to expand upon a 1984 documentary film about what was once one of New York's poorest neighborhoods. And we're using Zeega to construct a living archive of the Japan earthquake and its aftermath that captures stories of people who have been affected.

AN ARCHIVE FOR TODAY AND TOMORROW
The archive also collects and interrelates documents, images, video, communications through social media and other data -- creating something useful for today as well as something that can be referenced 20 years from now.

Work-in-progress version of extraMUROS, a multimedia library without walls.

Zeega has also been supporting coursework at Harvard in new media documentary classes such as Media Archaeology of Place and the Mixed-Reality City, both collaborations with the Sensory Ethnography Lab.

One student, Kat Tang, wanted to create a project where people could stand outside of a building and hear the interior or inaccessible sounds of that particular space. She designed a system where people would see a sticker on a building with an invitation to text a unique code to a telephone number. When someone texts the code to the number, he or she gets a phone call back with an audio recording that Kat made inside that building. When one hangs up, he or she gets a text message that explains the audio recording. (While the project is meant to be experienced on location, you can test it from anywhere by following these instructions).

For us, this is a great example of how Zeega is open to experimenting with new approaches to documentary. Kat used the web-based Zeega interface to create this project by simply defining the sequence of interactions and adding her audio recordings and texts. She didn't do any programming. And now anyone can create similar projects combining stickers, audio and text via mobile phones to tell stories on location.

We want Zeega to make invention possible for anyone -- regardless of budget or technical knowledge. Shortly, we'll be announcing a call for journalists, news organizations, artists, community groups, filmmakers, librarians, scholars and others to create Zeega pilot projects. To sign up to get updates and become a beta tester, visit our website: zeega.org.

User flow has now been streamlined, and the embedded community and collaborative elements make the process a lot more fun: Clips can be added to a bin using a quick click on any footage; new groups are offered through the recommendation engine; videos can be shared more easily across the web or friends can now be invited to remix together.

This is our third iteration of the site, and while most quick definitions call an "iteration" the act of repeating, that hasn't been the Stroome experience. Instead, the process has more in common with a chrysalis where, within that code container, grand changes actually take place.

Here's the history of Stroome's metamorphosis in three takes over two and a half years:

Iteration One: 10K to Spend

An awkward affair. We had to learn when to fire a developer, how to hire another quickly, and where to eke out as much functionality as we could with our very limited resources. We had a vision, after all, and we tried to twist Drupal modules into playing happily with each other to create a low-cost realization of that ideal. When a New School class dedicated to remixes discovered the site and produced some nice pieces, we knew we'd turned on some right lights. Yet the site had a very long way to go.

Iteration Two: Bootstrapping with Friends and Family Funds

Our second iteration was also built entirely in Drupal, but this time we had skilled Drupal hackers rebuilding the jaws of Stroome with brand-new implants. In the middle of the process, however, our designer disappeared. My partner, Tom Grasty, who has an excellent eye and is deft at design, tried to step in. I worked through the flow on every page with him, and we put together some initial mockups.

Coding began to be structured on those pages, but at a certain moment, we realized it just wasn't right. While we had moved the site forward on many levels, it became clear we needed a fresh eye, and it had to be from someone who was willing to take on the tough challenge of window-dressing the code instead of starting the other way around. Plus, all of this had to be done on that bootstrapped budget. Tempers sometimes flared under the pressure of little time and thin wallets as we tried to get up and running by the time we were heading to Boston to receive our Knight News Challenge award. Yet when this iteration launched, to our delight and astonishment, we started to attract users from around the globe.

Iteration Three: Knight Foundation Winners

Winning a Knight News Challenge grant comes with that apocryphal Spiderman moment: great responsibility. We decided to take a deep breath and really consider what our users liked and hated about the site. We also wanted to deeply review and remedy all of the broken functionality and flow. We hired a top L.A. house specializing in design and user experience to partner with us, and we held focus groups, came up with SWOT documentation, decided on a new logo, argued over the steps to collaboration, and ultimately found short cuts to make participation and sharing more intuitive.

Crucially we also recognized that Drupal was not the ideal choice for Stroome. There were too many complex moving pieces for Drupal's independent modules to connect elegantly. We agreed to start from scratch using Ruby on Rails.

Next, we turned to the Singapore-based Favorite Medium to do the coding. With the unexpected opportunity to relaunch at TEDxUSC, Favorite Medium had to agree to get a basic version of the site up in less than a month. Just a few weeks ago, the final version went up, and bugs have been minimal. In fact, our analytics now show we have users from 80 different countries -- without a marketing budget.

Continued Tweaks

Yet the maintenance and the tweaks continue. A power outage in Fremont, Calif., this past week very briefly took Stroome down with it. It was painful but informative -- a tiny bit of code, that little missing jigsaw piece, had sucked Stroome into a 404 black hole. It won't happen again, but something else will, no doubt.

As we consider where to go now, we have a new vision, one to make Stroome a robust member of the web's video future. While the coding may be the most ambitious challenge yet, it in fact pales in audaciousness compared with the first iteration. Who would be crazy enough to think that something as complicated as Stroome could be launched on 10K? Let it be an inspiration ... then iterate, iterate, iterate.

Somewhere along the way, however, the concept got washed over by a sea of organizations simply distributing Flip Video cameras and expecting amazing content. Who needed a journalism degree?

Promoting local voices is important, and it's easier than ever to have those views be heard. However, "community journalism" has another important word in the phrase -- journalism.

The Tiziano Project provides community members in conflict, post-conflict, and underreported regions with the equipment, training and affiliations necessary to report their stories and improve their lives. We knew early on that we wanted to focus as much on the journalism component as the tools and have since developed an online Classroom filled with openly available training curricula and lesson plans to help easily infuse journalism into any project.

For each of our in-field training programs, we send professional journalists to instruct on everything from ethics, to interviewing techniques, to how to write an article before we even pick up a camera. By the time our students get their hands on the gear, they already have a solid understanding of exactly what it means to be a journalist.

The Tiziano Project 360 Platform

But obviously, it's not just about training. Running a community journalism program is also about promotion and distribution.

Last summer, we conducted our second program in Iraqi Kurdistan and worked with 12 students of Kurdish, Arab and Assyrian decent. The workshop culminated in the launch of The Tiziano Project | 360º Kurdistan -- an immersive, nonlinear platform for exploring the culture of the region from the perspectives of both local and professional journalists.

We like to think of the website as a "Documentary 2.0" model -- a choose-your-own-adventure way to explore the stories produced during our program.

An award from the Knight Foundation is going to allow us to further develop the 360 technology into a scalable platform that other organizations can use around the world. We will then curate these future 360s on an interactive map and develop a communication layer that will sit on top, allowing visitors to participate in a universal dialog with our students.

Our goal with this platform is to provide other organizations like ours with quality tools for disseminating locally produced content, while at a global level, we seek to foster direct lines of communication and information sharing to help change perceptions of conflict and post-conflict regions.

From Online to Offline

One of our best moments came just after we launched, when an American student emailed us saying he planned to volunteer in Iraqi Kurdistan during the upcoming summer. His parents were understandably upset and more than a little concerned about his decision.

He sent them a link to the 360 Kurdistan.

His parents explored the site for more than an hour and, in the end, were not only excited for him to go, but actually wanted to visit. The community voices in the 360 Kurdistan had actually shifted his parent's perception of Iraq.

We love the idea that our work can actually influence the way people perceive these regions, and one of our goals is to further this effect by bringing what we do online into a real-world exhibition space.

Our first multimedia exhibit is currently at the Iraqi Cultural Center in Washington, D.C.'s Dupont Circle. The exhibit features 32 images and 16 video displays.

At the opening reception, one of our students addressed the crowd of nearly 200 people via videoconference from Iraq, and I was excited to hear numerous people citing that as one of the evening's highlights.

For future exhibits, we hope to host virtual office hours in which patrons will be able to communicate live with our students in real time through the duration of the installation. For now, we'll settle for a quick Skype conference.

If you're in D.C., the exhibit will run at the Iraqi Cultural Center (1630 Connecticut Ave NW # 200) until Sept. 1. Hope you can stop by to check it out!

We built a service that matches the pioneering crowdfunding work of Spot.us (itself a News Challenge grantee) with the public radio focus of PRX and LPM. The project is called Story Exchange, and it directs the power and reach of public radio to help drive listener support for ambitious local journalism.

The early signs from Louisville, Ky., are encouraging. The news staff posted pitches for six different reporting projects starting in January. Each idea is more challenging than the day-in, day-out reporting that the feisty staff is known for.

And each project is one that needed extra resources beyond the station's existing budget, to pay for extended reporter time, travel expenses or research costs.

The pitches appear in three places: on the LPM website, on PRX.org and on Spot.us -- all three locations act as funnels for feedback and funding. LPM alerts its listeners through on-air announcements and emails to listeners, and PRX and Spot.us amplify through our own networks.

Two of the pitches have been fully funded: the impact of coal ash dangers, and a look at the environmental trade-offs of a new bridge project. LPM also broke news with its coal ash coverage by uncovering new evidence of the contaminant in one Louisville neighborhood.

The pitch and its full funding have resulted in a series that has already aired in full or part on other Kentucky public radio stations. And LPM is discussing a follow-on hour-long special.

A third story pitch about local food as a weapon in the fight against obesity in Louisville is off to a fast start.

When a pitch is hot

Why do some pitches catch fire with listeners and others do not? Todd Mundt, vice president of Content at LPM, suggested a variety of factors:

• The timeliness of the pitch. Is the subject "hot?"
• The amount of the request. When a pitch is struggling to reach a goal, Mundt experiments by adjusting the goal lower to see if that makes it less intimidating.
• How the pitch is framed -- too general, and the pitch loses focus.
• How the pitch is promoted. On-air alerts seem to have an impact.
• Whether the pitch has a local constituency. Evidence is anecdotal, but it appears that a Louisville environmental group picked up on the coal ash pitch and used its network to spread the word.

Generally, we see confirmation of the project's premise that crowdfunding aligns well with public radio's reach, the role of strong local stations, listeners' active interest in critical topics, and sufficient willingness to contribute directly.

We've also successfully integrated PRX.org with Spot.us, extending the open-source software to enable more flexible presentation of stories and funding.

What's next?

Story Exchange is seeking expansion to other public radio markets, and starting to look at national opportunities through our Public Radio Remix service. LPM is considering broadening Story Exchange to include pitches from local independent producers and a pitch for an original documentary for national distribution.

And on the technology front, we're working with Spot.us to improve the handling of user authentication and payment processing to increase the ability for PRX and other partners to embed crowdfunding functionality efficiently.