Shelbyville project kicks off with a series of "Welcoming" videos

Chances are you haven't yet heard of Shelbyville, a small rural community in Tennessee. If not, then you're probably also unaware of the upcoming "Welcome to Shelbyville" documentary or the online project that is forging a pilot, or prototype, for communities to tell and share their own stories. So let me share my initial impressions of this remarkable, ambitious effort.

Last Monday I was lucky enough to be a part of a "digital brain trust" of 20 progressive media and non-profit representatives at the Bay Area Video Coalition headquarters. The event was convened by Active Voice, a San Francisco-based non-profit that uses film, television, and multimedia to spark social change. We spent two hours reviewing the Shelbyville Multimedia project and offering ideas about how to finish it out and what to do differently next time.

What is the Shelbyville Project?

Active Voice conceived the vision of building a story-driven web platform and brought together a team consisting of Free Range Studios, a creative services firm, and documentary filmmaker Kelly Whalen, who produced webisodes for the project. Over much of the past year, the parties combined efforts to create the ShelbyvilleMultimedia.org website and "Welcome to Shelbyville", a documentary directed and produced by Kim A. Snyder that will air on the PBS series "Independent Lens" on May 24.

The Shelbyville project is a series of stories about immigrant integration. One of Active Voice's objectives was to introduce people to Welcoming America, an umbrella organization that works to promote mutual respect and cooperation between foreign-born and U.S.-born residents. It is overseeing "welcoming" initiatives in 14 states, including Welcoming Tennessee.

"They opened doors for us in Shelbyville and introduced us to other affiliates, who hosted community 'sneak previews' in October," said Active Voice operations director Daniel Moretti.

Active Voice approached Irina Lee, the creator of First Person American, about working on a pilot based on the Welcoming Stories theme.

The idea, Moretti said, was "to combine FPA's aesthetic and authenticity with Active Voice's need to attract user-contributed stories. We're hoping to raise funds to keep going, to both send Irina to other cities, and to commission other artists to create new Welcoming Stories formats."

You can see the webisodes about the project -- produced by Active Voice in association with the BeCause Foundation -- on Shelbyville Multimedia's Vimeo channel. You can also see some of the Welcoming Stories on the Tumblr site created by Active Voice and Free Range.

Positive Stories

The tone of the two sites is positive and uplifting.

As Moretti told us: "We didn't want to build an advocacy site but a site to help people take the next step by providing options for different levels of engagement."

While the project took a lens to the issue of immigration in rural Shelbyville, Tenn., Moretti pointed out: "We're media strategists, not immigrant integration specialists. We had a feeling that what was going on in Shelbyville would resonate with people in small towns and large cities across the country, and we're eager to help them connect to these issues in a human and nuanced way. But Welcoming America is doing this important work for the long haul, and we hope the website will be a great vehicle for them."

The story-driven web platform that Active Voice and Free Range developed, then, is not just to showcase webisodes, parts of a documentary or even the story of Shelbyville. Active Voice sees it as an early pilot of how other communities can tell their stories in a deep, meaningful but easy and lightweight way, with the focus on individuals' stories rather than forcing users to wade through a complex backstory.

If you're an educator, activist, or community organization that wants to engage on a deeper level and embed some of the webisodes on your own site or blog and invite conversations about the stories, head to the webisode discussion questions page.

The initiative's promise as a prototype

In my opinion, this is a superb initiative. I think it will attract considerable interest across a number of sectors: educators looking for meaningful materials to incorporate into curricula, community activists and cause organization folks interested in a promising new social change platform, and others.

The producers were wise to tap into an outside brain trust for a reality check at a critical juncture in the project -- two months before the documentary airs on national television.

Here are some reactions and ideas I tossed out or have thought of since -- some of which others echoed or built on:

• I love the non-linear aspect of the site and the stories that are built through each resident. Every "character" gets his or her own page, containing a profile, his or her webisodes, a brief quote and short bio. Nice. John Bruce of ForwardMapworks called it "transmedia," allowing the user to enter the story at multiple points.

• Also I love the focus on character arcs and interesting personalities, rather than loading visitors down with too many facts.

• I suggested holding a live online town hall in Shelbyville on the evening of May 24 to coincide with the national broadcast -- and to web stream it with LiveStream (another participant suggested CoverItLive) to enable both viewing and comments.

• I also suggested offering the webisodes as an ongoing weekly series on a national site or in a local publication to gain added visibility and traction -- maybe in Nashvillest, my favorite hyper-local web publication.

• And I suggested creating a strong call to action on the front page of Shelbyville Multimedia and to create a Welcoming Toolkit that would offer tools and resources to community activists and reformers.

• I would toss out the Shelbyville Multimedia logo and create a new one with the state of Tennessee as the backdrop while incorporating a dot to designate where, exactly Shelbyville is located -- the very first question everyone asks when they come to the site. And use it across all online properties.

• I think the project took a slight wrong turn with its initial branding. "Shelbyville Multimedia" doesn't convey the idea of community residents sharing their personal stories. (I will also add that some good URLs, like ShelbyvilleVoices.com, are still available.)

• As a result, it's difficult to tie the disparate elements of the project together. The team used WordPress as its still-in-progress web platform and a separate Tumblr site, with completely different branding, as a way for people to contribute their own stories. In the end, the Tumblr site seems to detract from the main site.

• The team also decided not to allow comments or conversations on the main site, chiefly because of issues regarding limited resources for moderation. I wouldn't have gone that way: I think you need to build in those capabilities as a fundamental part of any site that calls itself a community platform. Certainly conversations should be encouraged to bloom across independent sites and blogs, but the lack of a central "conversation hub" seems to swim against the tide in this era of interactivity, even if many of the conversations are happening elsewhere.

• As it is, that shortcoming can be ameliorated by adding a series of conversation widgets -- pulling from Twitter or outside blogs -- on the main site.

• Similarly, the fact that supporters who want to embed Shelbyville webisodes on their own sites cannot do so without obtaining permission in advance seems like a business decision forced on the team by traditional filmmakers concerned about control over digital rights. Certainly, there are tradeoffs and difficult choices that face project leaders when choosing nationally acclaimed filmmakers over untested documentarians who lean toward openness. But I sense that, for the next project, there are plenty of talented filmmakers and digital storytellers who prize sharing and creativity and are adept at producing high-quality visual stories.

Those reservations aside, Shelbyville Mutlimedia deserves kudos for pulling together an accomplished site in just a few months. It's an inspiring, rare, and possibly groundbreaking project that's worth your attention -- and perhaps a welcoming initiative in your own community.

What are your impressions? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

I'm at Day 2 of a remarkable two-day conference that is bringing nonprofits, citizen journalism and social media together in ways I've never seen before.

I'm jazzed, hopeful and intrigued by the challenges ahead. The passion in the room is palpable. The 40 people who convened at the Visioning Summit yesterday in San Francisco, and the 30 participants who are steering the program today, consist of some of the most talented and forward-thinking innovators — nonprofit execs, strategists, journalists — that I've come across in recent years.

Above is the presentation I gave at this gathering, organized by a group of nonprofits in a project called the New Media Lab (there's no public presence yet, just a private wiki). And while its focus is squarely on the role that journalist/media producers will play in our project, I've taken the liberty of extrapolating it to the new roles that journalists should be expected to take up in an age of social media if you work for a startup, whether it's for-profit or nonprofit.

Called Doing Good 2.0: The next-generation's impact on communication, media, mobile & civic engagement [fixed link], it looks at the forces driving Web 2.0 and the next-generation Internet, the role of mobile, the new cultural norms that social media is ushering in, and the role of the New Journalist: how we need to still tell compelling stories about people and causes but how we also need to expand our repertoire in this new arena by wearing multiple hats:

• entrepreneur
• conversation facilitator
• social marketer
• futurist
• metrics & research nerd
• journalist/storyteller

Here are some of the questions we've just begun to tackle:

Should nonprofits create their own media?

What should be the business model for social cause organizations in the future?

How can the media producers funded by this project work with nonprofits to build a sustainable business venture that connects to their core constituencies?

How do you turn passive audiences into engaged communities?

What happens when you bust the silos that keep us from working together across sectors?

I've signed on as a paid advisor to the yearlong project, which will happen largely virtually. The idea is that the alternative, progressive nonprofits — the National Wildlife Federation, National Civic League, Free Speech TV, Mother Jones and Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy — will assign point people to work with producers selected by San Francisco State's Renaissance Journalism Center.

Leveraging free and open source tools

Some of the ingredients that will be sprinkled into the project's secret sauce: use of mobile; an emphasis on social media; use of high-quality video across multiple platforms (Web, cable and broadcast TV); and business plans from Manas Consulting to make it all self-sustaining.

The goal, in a phrase, is to "help non-profit partners find innovative ways to get their members to engage in conversation, volunteer, subscribe, donate and advocate."

The role of the "New Journalist" — which we're calling media producers — in this project is paramount: The producers (who hail from SF Gate, the Miami Herald, an Emmy-winning documentarian and others) will be sitting down this afternoon to map out how to weave a tapestry out of all these moving parts.

"This is a project for those who like to play around, who are comfortable with things shifting fast and often," Jon Funabiki, founder of Renaissance Journalism Center, told the producers.

During my talk I showed off this heart-tugging video from aglimmerofhope.org as a compelling example of storytelling for a cause and showed off a suite of free open source and social media tools and platforms. I also pointed to a few ahead-of-the-curve ideas for partnerships:

Among those in attendance: Funabiki; fellow IdeaLab contributor David Cohn, founder of Spot.us; Jed Alpert, co-founder of MobileCommons; Arthur Charity, author of "Doing Public Journalism"; management consultant Richard Landry; social entrepreneur Ron Williams, and many other smart folks. Jon Schwartz, who runs a string of progressive nonprofits, is funding the project, and Halcyon Liew organized the proceedings.

With a little bit of luck, we'll figure this out. I'll report back on our progress in the months to come.

I left the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Association Summit of newspaper publishers and ad managers Thursday just as two executives from the Associated Press were winding up their presentation on the new AP News Registry.

The new initiative, announced in July, contains two key components:

• All AP stories will be released online wrapped in a new microsoformat that includes rights info, who created it, etc.

• The wrapper also will carry a built-in "digital beacon," or tracker, to monitor use of the content by others to track usage and compliance. (As I understand this, the content is not encrypted but carries a lightweight bug technology.)

As a social media consultant and journalist who spoke at the summit just an hour earlier, I asked whether the dialogue and AP's plans were public information, and Kevin Walsh, AP's Kevin Walsh, Vice President of Marketing, responded, "It is now."

AP's plans were met with the predicable negative reaction in the blogosphere (see, for example, the comments at bottom of this article). But AP should be credited with its transparency during this process, and from what I heard at the summit, its plans make a lot of sense. Thousands of sites are unfairly piggybacking off the work of journalists, and if newspapers and news organizations like the AP are to survive, there has to be a mechanism for compensation.

As an internal AP document titled Protect, Point, Pay - An Associated Press Plan for Reclaiming News put it: "The evidence is everywhere: original news content is being scraped, syndicated and monetized without fair compensation to those who produce report and verify it."

Fair use won't be easy to define

It's a topic I have some familiarity with, having written Darknet and reported on Hollywood studios and media companies' reluctance to embrace their digital future. At the time I wrote the book, there was widespread music file sharing (there still is) but also an increasing recognition that the original Napster was misguided and the music industry needed to devise legitimate forms of compensation for the artists. (Apple's iTunes and Rhapsody are among the companies still trying to create a frictionless business model.)

My view on the new AP initiative is similar: Some reuse of AP's content is socially and legally acceptable, but there needs to be limits. What will matter, in the end, is how this plan will be carried out by AP and the cooperative's members. If they go too far and claim "all rights reserved" around the first two sentences of every AP article, the blowback will be enormous. Fair use exists, and in the past the AP has paid too little heed to those concerns — even though AP reporters rely on the same fair use doctrine in their reports nearly every day. (For example, I didn't get the AP's permission to use the graphic at the top of this post.)

Todd B. Martin, AP's Vice President, Technology Development, reassured the publishers in the room that the intent of the news registry isn't to go after every blogger who borrows a snippet of an AP news story.

Instead, Martin said, "We're not going to stop a blogger from cut and pasting an article. But we are giving you visibility into the 20,000 other domains where your content appeared and the top users and where it was monetized. So you can get a list of the top 100 [infringing] sites with over 100,000 views, and then facilitate business development opportunities" with the sites in question. The registry, Martin said, would help create new business opportunities and products and also buttress more rigorous legal enforcement of the AP's intellectual property.

That business development, presumably, would go something like this: You're taking our content without authorization. Sign up for a subscription, remove it, or face the legal consequences. It sounds as though AP will be creating a new category of subscribers that falls short of a standard membership subscription.

I asked the first question: When a blogger or third-party publisher reproduces part of an AP story on his own site or blog, how much borrowing is permissible? What is the cutoff point between fair use and a trigger mechanism that requires a subscription payment?

"We're focused on removing the ambiguity around the use of our content," Martin responded. "The registry will help you decide whether that use is permitted or whether it's a business development opportunity" requiring payment.

Which, of course, doesn't answer the question at all. For a simple reason: There is no bright line. But I do agree with AP on this: There is a line at some point. It comes down to context: reasonable lightweight borrowing vs. patterns of appropriating reportage and photographs for profit. It appears AP and its members will take things on a case-by-case basis until some conventions and rules of the road are established.

Recently in his MediaShift blog, Mark Glaser did a brilliant job of exposing the unscrupulous practice of sites like Gawker and site scrapers that reuse copyrighted material without authorization, payment or transforming it in a significant way: Using the 'Steal-O-Meter' to Gauge if Stories Steal or Promote.

It's a conversation we've avoided for a long, long time.

I'm working with the Poynter Institute to put together an online class for senior newspaper executives on how to use social media in the newsroom. From what I can discern, it's one of the least understood concepts in traditional media.

For the Knight Digital Media Center program conducted through the Poynter, I'll likely be giving a webinar and taking part in online instruction around how journalists are already using the tools of social media. So I'd love to see some specific examples of how you're using social media (aside from blogs), or examples of how other sites are using it in a way that could be applied to news sites.

I know that more than 800 journalists are using Twitter now. But how valuable are they finding it, and what other tools are they using. So here are some questions:

• Do you use Twitter to interact with your readers? How? Do your readers offer story ideas, tips, interview questions?

• Any examples of how Facebook is being used by journalists?

• What about Google Maps mashups, like you see on Everyblock (and formerly chicagocrime.org)?

• What about interacting with users on video hosting sites like YouTube, Vimeo or other online communities outside of your own?

• NewWest.net uses Flickr photo galleries on their site. Anyone else?

• Any innovative examples of user-created content, especially video or podcasts? How do you generate content from social networks?

• Would love to hear examples of interesting news widgets that spotlight news feeds.

• Have any journalists had success with using social news sites like Digg, NowPublic, Reddit?

• Anything else you use: LinkedIn? wikis? delicious? Creative Commons? online petitions or campaigns?

• What social networks or groups do you use to interact with other journalists about social media?

• And finally, do you use any online resources for your social media needs?

If you offer some suggestions in the comments below, I'll contact the journalists or organizations using these tools and incorporate the examples into the webinar (scheduled for May 12) and let you know how to see it. Social media consultant Paul Gillin, Michele McLellan and Vikki Porter, director of the Knight Digital Media Center at USC Annenberg, are some of the others involved in this project.

Here at the IdeaLab, we've been hearing a lot over the past year about Drupal, the open source content management system that is now powering tens of thousands of websites, including Ourmedia, The Onion, Sony Music artists (I really like myplay.com) and a host of citizen media sites.

The other night I had dinner with Dries Buytaert, the self-effacing founder and creator of Drupal. Buytaert chiefly credits the tens of thousands of volunteer programmers who contributed to the platform's code base over the years. (Ourmedia is about to relaunch on Drupal 6; here's our beta site.)

In this 11-minute interview, Buytaert talks about Drupal over the years, the power of open source publishing, and a new partnership with Acquia, a Boston-area company that gives citizen publishers a free publishing platform and tech support to get it up and running. It's an important development in the evolution of Drupal from geeky boy toy to mature CMS.

Watch video in H.264 QuickTime on Ourmedia (at full 480 pixels wide)
Watch video in Flash on Vimeo

As one of the very early members of the Online News Association, I've attended my share of ONA conferences over the years. This year, I wasn't able to attend the annual gathering that ended in Washington, DC, over the weekend. Instead, I spent most of last weekend at TechCrunch50, a technology conference in San Francisco now in its second year put on by TechCrunch, one of those upstart startups that may put the San Jose Mercury News out of business some day.

Reviews of the ONA conference have been mostly positive, especially for the keynote delivered by my friend and fellow tech blogger Robert Scoble. (To get a glimpse of the future of media and Web TV, watch his talk here or read his Q&A with ONA here.)

But I wanted to mention one of the more intriguing startups I came across at TechCrunch50: iamnews, a small outfit run by an Israeli, Nir Ofir (above is a shot I took of him last week). The site took the top People's Choice award at the conference.

Ofir describes iamnews as "a global open newsroom powered by you." (Because it's only as open as each publisher wants to make it, perhaps a better way to describe it is a DIY, or Do It Yourself, newsroom.) The site says it's geared to "independent reporters, photographers, media moguls and anyone who wants to connect with reporters from the world and collaborate in the creation of news."

Alas, the site is still in a closed alpha and is seeking investment capital, but what Ofir showed me was impressive. It has the makings of a modest content management system, giving publishers or editors the ability to designate members with certain roles (assignment desk editors, reporters, etc.) and a workflow queue similar to the editorial review process in a newsroom, as well as Web 2.0 features such as reputation systems for citizen journalists.

The goal is not to become a stand-alone destination site but to power blogs and citizen media sites that want to bring paid or volunteer contributors into a more structured editorial publishing environment. The site, Ofir told me, is for bloggers and publishers who don't have the resources to start their own full-fledged news site.

Ofir writes on his site:

The Web is the Newsroom

I believe that the Internet of today is already a global newsroom, and we all take part in it. Video sharing, photos, blogs, and social network platforms are our tools for creating news. The most current example of this were the recent reports of the earthquake in China; reports that were communicated by means of a platform such as "Twitter". These reports preceded formal TV news reporting by the traditional mass media.

However, there is problem with this global newsroom. The content and sharing tools which are available today, (such as we could only dream of three or four years ago) are not sufficiently adequate. The main reason for this is the excess of information. There is so much incoming information that the news networks are unable to screen the material, or select the preferred topics. There is also no current solution for quickly investigating the reliability of this material, or the reputation of its sources. There is simply no way in which to gather the information from so many sources, or effect the collaboration of these sources for the purpose of creating reliable news. Even if this were possible, there would still be no way to compensate the participants for their contributions.

iamnews will try to help remedy those shortcomings in the citizen media ecosystem. (Ouriel Ohayon has an interview with Ofir -- in Hebrew -- here.)

It's comforting to know that, as 20th century media empires and business models begin to crumble, there are enterprising folks out there who still believe in the fundamental importance of news -- gathering, editing and distributing the news -- to our lives.

Last week Hal wrote a post about the positive reception to the site in the documentary filmmaker community and the site's partnership with Spot.us, an even newer effort that aims for the audience to financially support community and investigative journalism. Spot.us founder David Cohn has written about the Knight Foundation-backed effort here on the IdeaLab.

Here's a Q&A interview I conducted with Hal this week. 

Q: ReelChanges.org is just getting off the ground. Where did the idea come from?

A: ReelChanges.org is working to create a new business model that can financially support high-quality professional journalism. It's the first project of the Palo Alto-based Center for Media Change, Inc., the 501(c)3 non-profit I established last year with the help of some very talented and able colleagues, friends and associates. The primary mission of the Center for Media Change, Inc. is to enrich our culture by helping to democratize, decentralize and improve the news and information media, particularly its representative quality. ReelChanges.org is the Center for Media Change's first major accomplishment: the creation of a new online tool that enables direct financial relationships between professional documentary filmmakers and members of the public.

This is something I've wanted to do, in one form or another, for a very long time. My friend, computer programmer Andy Hertzfeld, and I first started talking about using the Internet to enable public financing of different types of intellectual property maybe 15 years ago. As you may know, Andy was a key developer of the original Apple Macintosh graphic user interface. As a journalist, I covered technology and business issues during the PC and networking revolutions for a number of publications and news networks, including public radio and CNBC.com. Like a lot of people, Andy and I have always wanted to see these new technologies used in socially, economically and culturally beneficial ways. Even now, there remain so many untapped opportunities to close those gaps, the gaps between what is and what our new technologies make possible. This is one of those ideas.

Q: How so?

A: ReelChanges.org reflects some of what I think many of us hoped could be achieved once we had better technology. I don't mean to sound too utopian, but I think many of us born somewhere near the middle of the last century hoped that as more sophisticated technology came online over the last few decades it would enable more highly-evolved ways of living and of organizing our lives and our society, including greater empowerment of communities of interest and an overall decentralization of power. It hasn't quite worked out that way in all cases. But ReelChanges.org advances that overall vision.

More specifically, ReelChanges.org constructively addresses the impact of the Internet on professional journalism, beginning with documentaries. The basic idea is much larger than just documentaries, though. It's about creating a new content-driven revenue stream to support professional journalism at a time when the old revenue stream is drying up. And, even more important, it's about helping the public find and develop its more authentic voice. It's about using the Internet to harness the power that like-minded individuals create when they act together, in this case to fund types and forms of media that may well differ in important respects from the media that pleases more conventional gatekeepers, such as network owners, advertisers and foundations.

Q: You say you had this basic idea many years ago. What finally got it off the ground this year?

A: About three years ago, I hooked up with Berkeley-based documentary filmmaker Yoav Potash. Yoav offered to take on an outreach role with other documentary filmmakers and to recruit some of them to help us build and test a new web-based application, with Andy helping to oversee it -- that would allow us to pioneer online public financing of documentary projects. Once we figured out exactly what we wanted to do, it took us a little over a year to obtain official 501(c)3 status from the IRS.

Q: You often talk about "audience-funded media." What do you mean by that?

A: I'm not sure if I invented that term. In fact, it may not even be accurate to call AFM a "new" category. After all, the public has been commissioning acts of journalism and paying for them in advance for hundreds of years, at least since the days of the first commercially published dictionaries. ReelChanges.org merely brings this time-honored business model into the current online networked era. In fact, to this day I remain surprised that no one really focused on doing this here in the United States before us. Not that it's an easy thing to do, it certainly isn't. But because it is so obviously necessary. I mean, how else are we going to change and improve the content of our media unless we can figure out how to pay for, how to finance, media that has the increased social and cultural utility we need?

Fortunately, the basic ReelChanges.org concept is already working in at least one other country, South Korea. That's another reason we think it can work here, too. Just last month, South Korea's popular OhMyNews.com service raised $130,000 from 34,000 people in 10 days to pay for a live webcast of protests about a controversial trade deal. The corporate-owned media in South Korea wasn't giving the public the news and information they wanted, so the Korean public got on the Internet and paid for it themselves. That's the basic model. To give the public a workaround so they can obtain high-quality professional media without ceding all the decision-making power about the content of media to big corporations that can have narrow or even undisclosed interests in the stories being covered. Or not being covered.

At present, as an industry journalism is suffering its worst slump in history. Newspapers are rapidly downsizing or closing entirely. Broadcast bureaus and even entire divisions are being shut or decimated. We hope that over time the ReelChanges.org business model, applied initially to documentaries, might also help breathe fresh life and new resources into the larger profession journalism itself as senior decision-makers within the media industry come to understand the basic idea ReelChanges.org demonstrates: that if you do it right, the public will pay to be involved in the decisions about what the news and information media industries cover. Also, we think it is likely the content and focus of coverage will shift in important, socially beneficial ways when the public is invited to become more deeply involved in helping set the agenda.

Continued: Click here to read the entire interview.

At the Future of Civic Media conference at the MIT Media Lab in June, one of the best presentations came from
the co-creator of Many Eyes.

Fernanda B. Viegas, research staff member of IBM's Visual Communication Lab in Cambridge, described some of the uses for this visualization tool. For example, during the Congressional testimony of then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a visualization Word Map graphically showed how often he used the phrases "I don't know" and "I don't recall."

Here's a dataset I just uploaded to ManyEyes on civic engagement and mobile media. You can see it as a tag cloud, as a word tree, or in other ways.

Watch or download video in high-quality (H.264) on Ourmedia
Watch video in Flash on Vimeo

The first is an 11-minute talk with Nicholas Reville, co-founder and executive director of the Participatory Culture Foundation, maker of Miro at getmiro.com. Miro's an important, rapidly maturing application that lets you watch and subscribe to millions of channels of content created by anyone with something to say (you can pull down any videos with an RSS feed, for example). You can also browse through more than 4,000 channels in its directory listing. I've been using the open-source Miro for almost two years now and it's become a regular part of my grassroots media routine.

Watch or download video in H.264 on Ourmedia

Watch video on Vimeo

In the second, Sean Tanner, research director of MAPLight.org, talks about how the organization provides transparency to the political donations system through widgets that tap into pubic information databases.

By visiting MAPLight, you can customize and embed a widget related to any congressional race or to the presidential race. Here's the current Presidential Money Race Widget:

Watch video in H.264 on Ourmedia

Watch video on Vimeo

David Cohn, who writes below about the interesting issue of whether audience-funded journalism would work better for beats or stories, explained the contours of his nascent project, while a consultant, journalists for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and Fog City Journal, and yours truly pitched in with thoughts about where this whole citizen journalism business is going.

My contribution consisted of the observations that traditional newsrooms are becoming more and more disconnected from real people's lives, thanks to newspaper chain budget cuts, while people are becoming increasingly connected to each other, and to alternative news sources, thanks to the Internet and social networks. That random acts of journalism (a term I coined a few years back) need to be supplemented by sustained and deeper examples of journalism at the community level. That Digg-style crowdsourcing overly relies on mainstream media sources rather than original grassroots reporting. And that efforts like Spot.us, where citizens fund stories at the community level, are important experiments that bear watching -- and, more importantly, sustained support.

But what made the evening memorable was that these folks clearly got it. They didn't need to be convinced that corporate budget cuts were hurting journalistic coverage at the local level, or that certain kinds of stories weren't being covered because they fell outside the accepted frame of standard news conventions. They didn't need to be persuaded of the value of neighborhood storytelling. Instead, they asked tough, informed questions about the marketplace business model, mulled issues around fact-checking, editing and reputation, and suggested a revenue-sharing model to share freelance fees with the spot.us community.

Two days later, PBS's NewsHour ran a segment on the rise of independent nonprofit journalism, citing such efforts as Pro Publica ,the Center for Investigative Reporting, American University's Investigative Reporting Workshop, the Global News, with correspondents in 53 countries, and the Center for Independent Media.

Something is beginning to stir. And I think it will have lasting consequences for us as a society.

• All in all, it was a fascinating gathering of some of the real thought leaders who will be driving new media forward in the coming years. The program grew stronger as it went along.

• The Media Lab setting was inspirational. This was my first visit here, and the mix of astonishingly bright students and faculty meshed well with us ruffians from the outside world. One suggestion for future gatherings: Invite student and members of the university community to take part in the underattended breakout sessions. Certainly a wide range of students would have found our session on citizen media thought-provoking.  

• Loved the "Diving Deeper" format, where speakers gave presentations on stage, then made themselves available at small tables outside the hall after the session for follow-up inquiries. Will be making use of this.

• I was highly impressed by some of the student demos I saw, including Say What? (which uses interactive storytelling as a path to youth civic engagement) and Buy It Like You Mean It, and some of the more mature projects, like Speakeasy, Selectricity, iCue and IBM's ManyEyes.

• The project "Cameras of the Future" made me want to fast-forward five years, when this technology will be incorporated into many commercial cameras. The subject you shot is slightly out of focus? No worries! If it was shot with one of these gizmos, you can reorient the focal point -- weeks after you took the shot. (It doesn't work with the fuzzy shots from the current generation of cameras, and no algorithm will likely ever be able to change that.)

• About 16 of us had the best time tooling around Central Square while part of a Street Media posse guided by Rekha Murthy. Excellent tour. I'll never look at signage and graffiti quite the same way again.

• One of the secrets I'll be taking back to Silicon Valley is Backchan.nl, a clever Web-based program that enables conference-goers to participate in a "backchannel conversation" with the most timely and relevant questions voted up to the top.

Citizen media on international stage

• Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices described the progress of the Knight-funded Rising Voices project, run by David Sasaki and Georgia Popplewell. I've been impressed with the citizen media project from the start but hadn't known about its scope and depth.

Ethan briefly outlined these 10 Rising Voices projects: Nari Jibon, a new media skills training center in Dhaka, Bangladesh. A Calcutta group called Neighborhood Diaries that provides creative writing and citizen media tools for marginalized children. Iran Inside Out, a group in Teheran that uses videoblogging to open doors to Iranian perspectives. FOKO Club, which pursues, environmental issues and poverty in Madagascar through citizen journalism. A street theater group called Repacted in Nakuru, Kenya, that documents post-election violence and refugee issues. A journalism project in Freetown, Sierra Leone, called Think Build Change Salone. Young people exploring the prison system in Kingston Jamaica in  Students Expressing Truth/Prison Diaries. A project in Uruguay called Blogging Desde Infancia. An effort to bridge cultural differences in La Paz, Bolivia, called Voces Bolivianas. And, perhaps most remarkably, HiperBarrio, where teenagers in the public libraries in the poorest neighborhoods of Medellin, Colombia, practice video journalism chronicling the lives of local townspeople.

In all, the project has created 300 new bloggers in 21 communities in 10 countries. "If you think this stuff can't be done, you're wrong," Zuckerman said. "Anyone can author media."

• Brian Sholin's ReportingOn helps journalists collaborate with each other by exchanging information about stories they're working on.

• During our session on citizen journalism, Amy Gahran had some good advice for journalists (amateur and pro) trying to pry public information out of government agencies like the EPA and Department of Energy: don't identify yourself as a journalist (at least unless you have to).  You're a citizen, too, and citizens who ask for government reports aren't usually shuffled off to a press office whose chief goal is to stiff-arm the media.

• Two fun quotes during our session: "You don't want to crowdsource your brain surgery." So crowdsourcing has its limits. And: "I play guitar. You don't call me a citizen guitarist."

• From G. Patton Hughes, publisher of Paulding.com: "Now -- what people are talking about right now -- trumps the me" on discussion forums.

• Cool educational site designed to engage and empower youths: Scratch News Network, where 145,000 projects have been uploaded and a new one comes in every two minutes.

• I knew that SixApart's blogging service LiveJournal skewed young, but didn't know it skewed that young. The most predominant age group among LiveJournal bloggers: 18, followed by 19 and 17, with a heavy dropoff after age 24.

• Factoid shared by Knight Foundation's Gary Kebbel: 1.5 billion internet connections worldwide and 2.5 billion cell phones.

• More Kebbel: During its first two years of the Knight News Challenge, Knight received few applications from newspapers because they "were not comfortable" with developing open source tools that would help them but also made available to their competitors. One more reason newspapers are on the way to irrelevance, in my view. 

• Students at the UCLA Daily Bruin are creating a digital newsroom to allow staffers to report on the fly without having to be in the office.

I've just arrived at MIT in Boston, where the Future of Civic Media conference is being held over the next three days. Attendees are gathering to compare notes, soak up new ideas (including some smart technologies devised by students here) and tease out ways to maximize the impact of civic media in our lives.

Here's a proposal that I'll be bouncing off the assorted thought leaders: Civic Media Innovation Camps. The camps would be one part road show — trainers and local new media experts sharing learnings around social media technologies, case studies, interesting experiments and success stories -- and one part curated bottom-up knowledge base that would capture, organize and archive relevant materials and make them accessible and easily discoverable.

The key feature of such Innovation Camps, however, would be this: cross-pollination across fields. Participants would include hand-on managers and developers from online news organizations, pioneers and coders from the tech sector, and clued-in educators from academia.

Silo busting

Looked at another way, Innovation Camps would be an exercise in breaking down information silos and reaping the whirlwind of knowledge sharing. Academics have confessed to me they face challenges in taking innovation in the classroom and transferring it to real-world venues, such as online news operations. Online news managers tip their hands that they have trouble keeping up with the latest developments driving the social media revolution. And too many tech startup CEOs think of journalism as yesterday's news.

But there are voices seeking out collaboration and common cause.

At a recent Aspen Institute roundtable on mobile technology and civic engagement, Katrina Verclas, founder and editor of MobileActive.org, pointed out that the mobile space was rife with innovative experiments. "Some really interesting things are happening, but no one is aggregating the knowledge. The lessons learned sit in innovation silos. You need to start silo busting -- that's how innovation spreads, by sharing and picking through these little pockets of good stuff."

In Silicon Valley, the San Francisco Bay Area and among technology geeks, the "good stuff" is partly spread through camps. Starting with BarCamp (which David wrote about here) and extending to newer gatherings like DevCamp, the "unconference" phenomenon has spread, with makeshift gatherings springing up from Seattle to Bangalore.

I've attended, and helped organize, a few of these over the past couple of years, and the payout in engagement is worth the lack of formal structure. At Mashup Camp two summers ago (which I blogged here) I first met Adrian Holovaty in person and first learned of a startup called Ning, a social networking platform now boasts more than 140,000 social sites. (At a BarCampBlock organized by Socialtext, I snapped the photo at top of the sessions that took place.)

Beyond NewsTools

The idea of "action camps" was briefly kicked around at NewsTools2008 in April during a breakout session with Geneva Overholser, the incoming dean of the USC Annenberg School of Journalism, that tackled journalism, technology and the public interest. About 20 of us (high-level new media representatives, technologists, academics) discussed the need to connect local communities with innovations taking place (or ready to take place) in the emerging media world. The conversation began with the observation that gatherings like NewsTools were valuable for high-level conversations, but that this "think tank" approach was ultimately less valuable than a framework that emphasized action and continuity. In other words, results.

We also agreed that:

- results from such an effort should be open sourced;

- the goal should be to advance journalism and the public interest without regard for whether such efforts support existing media business models;

- experiments, prototypes and case studies in different fields should be reviewed, aggregated and shared openly.

An ongoing series of Civic Media Innovation Camps could serve that function, setting up shop for a day or two in cities across the nation, bringing in guest speakers, inviting participants (geeks and managers) from the media, technology and academic arenas, and providing a couple of trainers-in-residence to lend structure to the proceedings. The output from the participants could then be organized, extended and carried over to the next Camp.

The weakness of current efforts, in my view, is that they tend to be one-offs: singular gatherings that share the DNA of a smart mob. The camps whip up interest in a subject, but there's little focus on tangible output, calls to action and long-term sustainability. A Civic Media Innovation Camp, conversely, would add an element of predictability, a dash of reliability and a framework for capturing knowledge, acting on it and sharing it in an open, distributed network.

Buy-in from Future of Public Media Project

I shared the idea two days ago with Pat Aufderheide, Professor and Director of the Center for Social Media at American University,
Jessica Clark, director of the Future of Public Media Project, and associate director Ann Williams. They all supported the concept, even as they were busy putting the final touches on next week's Beyond Broadcast conference, which focuses on innovation in public broadcasting.

"There should be some central storytelling place," Pat said. An umbrella organization that pulls together disparate experiments in civic media innovation and then disseminates it to all the stakeholders.

I think MIT's Future of Civic Media, working with AU's Future of Public Media Project, the J-Lab, and similar efforts at Harvard's Berkman Center, Arizona State and elsewhere, would be the perfect home for this.

Following is part 3 of my 3-part series on open APIs and crowdsourcing community news. Part 1, Part 2.

At the NetSquared conference for nonprofits in San Jose on May 27-28, one of the most intriguing projects I heard about was Social Actions, a project to tie together disparate cause movements through an open API that would aggregate information about dozens of different campaigns and allow users to take action to further a cause.

"Our mission is to put actions in front of people who are most likely to take part," Peter told me. A few hours after our chat, NetSquared announced that Social Actions had won $10,000 as a winner of the 21 Featured Projects winners as well as a second grant for $10,000.)

Here's our 6-minute video interview on Vimeo and on Ourmedia.

I think this is relevant to news organizations for two reasons:

• Traditional news organizations have been in passive mode for decades. It's time to consider planning campaigns that engage the readers/users and invite them to participate in a direct way toward a goal, whether it's a charitable cause or a public service, such as a public awareness campaign. The traditional mindset of journalistic objectivity has turned newspapers into passive observers, out of step with the passions and interests of their communities.
  
• There's that term "open APIs" again. As Peter explains, online news publications are free to hook into these APIs, meaning that instead of just reporting about a problem or issue, news reports could go one step further and offer tools and links that let users take action, whether it's to donate, write a letter, sign a petition, join a mailing list, become a member of an organization -- and that only scratches the surface of the potential for interactivity and collective action.
  

Howard Rheingold wrote about Smart Mobs in his latest book. The approach of participatory media flies in the face of the traditional media paradigm of delivering content down one-way pipes to a passive audience of consumers. But increasingly, we're turning to social networks and collaborative tools to make sense of and take control of our media, our communities, our lives.

I'm on an open API kick here at IdeaLab, so here's the second of three entries on the potential of application programming interface for news organizations. (I'll post a final video interview on Monday.)

This is a way to give the public true access to public records. Oddly, that rarely happens now, with media organizations playing gatekeeper and releasing stories through the editorial process -- but not the raw data itself.

In this 8-minute video interview I conducted yesterday at the NetSquared conference -- notice the venue: Cisco, not a media company -- founder-CEO Michael Schnuerle discusses Louisville-based YourMapper.com, a young startup that hopes to make a business in part by helping the public gain public access to public records. The company has already licensed its mapping technology to at least one news publication.

Central to YourMapper's plan is an open API, which can prove incredibly powerful when paired with the proper datasets. Schneurle even waged a months-long battle with Kentucky officials wielding only the Freedom of Information Act before the state attorney general came down on his side.

News organizations ought to get behind this effort by releasing their own open API to public records in their communities. Now, here's the important twist: Instead of just making the data available internally, for its staff to analyze and reinterpret, news publications ought to bring readers and users into such efforts.

As I said in Tuesday's post, it's about enlisting users in a collaborative effort to tap into rich sources of information about what's happening in your reader's communities.

Call it data jockey crowdsourcing. I'll wager we'll see scores of such efforts in the coming years.

Instead, this was a kind of news that only a geek would love: MediaBistro reported, and Read/Write Web republished, word that the New York Times is planning to release an open API this summer.

Huh?

An API, as Wikipedia reminds us, is short for application programming interface. Those of us in or near Silicon Valley are well aware of its power and potential, but even here we see it chiefly in the world of tech companies. (Even MediaBistro misunderstood this latest development, describing it as "social networking.") Terms like open APIs remain a foreign language in the vast majority of newsrooms.

That's a shame. Because the salvation of the news industry -- if there is to be one -- will come not from corporate board rooms but in unleashing the pent-up power of the citizenry as one leg of a multipronged participatory media strategy.

Newspapers remain the richest source of news and information, both current and archived, in any locality. For every journalist on staff at a mid-size daily, I'll wager there are at least 10 data jockeys willing to dive into some aspect of its datastream to create an interesting new map, widget, chart, game, animation, virtual space -- anything that feeds off a rich source of data. Not everyone can report the news, but large numbers of programmers are willing to share their coding prowess and inventive takes on political contributions, birth records, neighborhood crime, housing sales and much more, if we will only let them.

As Read/Write Web pointed out yesterday:

An API is a logical next step for newspapers. It will give developers access to their vast amounts of well-researched data, and allows the paper's brand to be spread easily across the web. More access to Times content and the ability to mash it up in new and interesting ways can only be a win for both readers and the paper.

"The web of the near-term future isn't about pages any more," wrote Marshall Kirkpatrick in his massive post on APIs in March. "It's about data, flying around, hopefully under the control of users, and offering a world of possibilities that few of us could have imagined just a few years ago."

Start reading about APIs. Learn, imagine, expand your publication's horizons. Then begin the hard and humbling work of reinvention.