Most of the discussion in this area focuses on what you and might want in our own communities - things like crime reporting, new local ordinances, and hyper local happenings and events on your block. As David Sasaki points out Everyblock and Oakland Crimespotting are great tools to address these needs.

But what about the folks that are not at and will likely never be at the table for such discussions on "democracy" and "information needs" of local communities. I'm talking low income and underserved communities. How can their issues be addressed in the frenzied and brave new world of media and information technology? Does it take more citizen journalists, more Google mapping projects, and other top down, technogeek solutions to bring everybody in? Or do we need a new bottom up approach that empowers local communities of every flavor and socioeconomic status to identify and develop their own tools and information needs?

I'll admit it. I am as guilty as the next talking head that attempts to speak on behalf of the so-called "voiceless", even though I like to think that many of my ideas (like Locobeat) have been inspired by what I have learned living and working in and around low income communities.

But that's not good enough. If we are really serious about democracy for EVERYONE, each community must speak for itself, design (technology tools) for itself, and have relevant conversations about and among itself.

So the questions then become...

How can we support (and understand) community-based empowerment without a top down, "let me help you" approach? One that's respectful and not condescending?

And how can we get creative tools and resources in the hands of people who can and will use them to directly answer the question of local information needs?

I don't have any great answers, but lots of great projects are already happening in an attempt to address these challenges head on. Things like Global Voices. And this is just the beginning. IMHO the next step is to let go and have communities themselves decide what their information needs are, who and how they will addressed....as well as how they can be sustained without handouts. Frankly, this will take a lot more than blue ribbon panels. and and more "commission" reports.

The tools and commitment are already here. The business and management models are not quite yet figured out. but the call to action has arrived and all of us - and I mean all of us - need to respond. So let's figure it out, together!

p.s. Some really cool mobile tools are emerging in the community empowerment space, many of which will be on display at this month's Netsquared conference in San Jose, CA.

It's something I've wondered about for years...why people are willing to accept a constant barrage of bad news? And not just recent Chicken Little reporting about the economic meltdown, but the endless reports on murders, shootings, natural disasters, bombings, etc. Not that we should ignore the real state of affairs in the world, but if you read any newspaper or watch the nightly news it would appear that we live primarily in a chaotic and violent universe with little to be hopeful about. And there is a fundamental (some would argue unhealthy) bias in presenting a primarily "we are doomed" worldview.

So maybe it's time for some good news? Literally, media outlets specializing in hope and inspiration as a mainstay. Or a section of the regular news called "the good news". I know you probably won't sell as many newspapers by replacing a headline like "Bomb blast in Mosul kills 50" with "Teacher inspires 3rd Grade class to help family in need". But I have a hunch there is a sizeable appetite and market for good news even beyond the current period of national despair. You only need to look at the massive (and lucrative) businesses built around positivity gurus like Tony Robins, Eckhart Tolle, and Wayne Dyer to see the revenue possibilities. Oprah's TV and follow up online interviews with a diverse group of positive-oriented spiritual leaders in January of this year attracted a global audience of millions. And these weren't even well known or mainstream religious icons.

Check out The Happy News for one example of "always positive" reporting by citizen journalists. Here's an appeal for a new social network called totally good news.

Watch more Sharkle.com videos on AOL Video

Can folks suggest others?

I wonder how negative reporting in the U.S. compares with that of other countries, and how that reporting impacts the national psyches of respective countries? Has anyone ever done a study of this?

Maybe mainstream media could benefit from a little pick-me-up, benefiting both our collective mood and the bottom line? Like many I can't wait for a little good news.

Despite a healthy appetite in general for locally relevant news and information in ethnic communities across the U.S., it will be interesting to see if such online citizen journalism sites and networks produce results. Which communities will respond to citizen journalism and will they respond differently than mainstream communities have responded? Will they attract new, diverse voices to the field of journalism and will they create entirely different forms of community journalism?

No doubt projects like the Media Mobilizing Project in Philadelphia and the globally oriented Rising Voices, among others, can offer some important pointers for this work.

And lots to learn here from groups like New America Media and others already experimenting in this space. Most importantly, we need to listen carefully to communities themselves and not just throw new tools in their direction to see what sticks. Speaking of learning and listening, here are a couple of California-specific factoids worth considering when pondering the future and tools of online ethnic citizen journalism in the U.S.:

1) Nearly 8 million Latinos in California (approximately 60% of the total) do not have a computer and Internet at home.

2) At the same time, more than 80% of Latinos in California own a cell phone.

One of the sessions was titled "Online Giving Markets: Niche or Revolution". Even though the session didn't frame the online giving trend as revolutionary (at this point less than 1% of giving is done online), personally I think they are on to something BIG. And organizations like Social Actions get that and are pushing the envelope. Here's an attempt to explain where things could and perhaps should be headed, from a ComputerWorld piece...

note: This post was also published on SmartMobs.com

The first time I started paying attention to this trend was about a year ago when Nate Ritter of San Diego created a Twitter channel to provide up to date information on a series of wild fires that ravaged Southern California.

More recently, and in response to hurrican Gustav, Internet activist and a social media strategist for NPR, Andy Carvin, put together an independent Hurricane Information Center on the fly. The site was a grassroots effort that soon gathered momentum among other tech savvy volunteers as Gustav's more menacing cousin Ike came on the scene.

What makes Carvin's effort particularly interesting, other than the fact that it was built on a social networking platform (Ning) and has more Web 2.0 bells and whistles than you will likely find on any mainstream media site, is it's spontaneous and completely voluntary nature. It wasn't created by and for NPR, or any other major news network, and yet has some of the best information and features for people impacted by or following major hurricanes in the United States. it integrates up to the moment national weather service information with local reports of people on the ground, shows maps of hurricane locations, and helps people find immediate assistance through zipcode based tracking tools. After Ike touched down, it streamed useful ads from Craigslist with offers of assistance and housing for hurricane victims. And the site is ready to go for use in up and coming storms.

The Hurricane Information Center is not pretty from a user design standpoint, but the array of information and services provided is extremely impressive. And without any apparent resources besides some technical expertise and a commitment to get people practical information ASAP, it is exactly what you would expect for last minute, community-driven project.

So is the Hurricane Information Center a bell weather for a new kind of citizen journalism, and are we likely to see more of this happening as average do gooders leverage free and open information sharing and reporting tools to help people locally, nationally and internationally in times of crisis?

Finally, what other examples of "Citizen Journateerism" are people aware of and is there a different or better name for this stuff?

A Gustav Information Center on the social networking site Ning:

A government Gustav Twitter feed

A Gustav Wiki with centralized information:

And a whole slew of live video feeds and news broadcasts on LiveNewsCameras.com

Please help spread the word to those who can benefit from the resources now in place, many put together by volunteers.

Are those significant statistics and if so HOW significant? Depends on who you talk to. Based on the fact that only 3% of US cell phone users regularly watched video via their handhelds last year it doesn't say much. But If you are a mobile carrier like AT&T you are probably smiling as the iPhone and other smartphones are driving mobile data revenues at a growth rate of 16% annually. That apparently equates to an increase from $24 billion in 2007 to $100 billion and 250 million data subscribers by 2017.

But what does all this growth in mobile and location based services really mean for the news media and their advertising efforts? Despite various glib predictions like here, your guess is as good as anyone's. We need to be clear that mobile media as a relevant business opportunity is hazy at best. It is one thing to throw around mobile ad spend dollar predictions and another to show models that actually work for XYZ media outlet. So what if 45% of US mobile video users watch the 2008 Olympics on their handsets if nobody returns the video host sites after the Olympics is over. And exactly how can my newspaper or your eZine capitalize on an iPhone multimedia addict anyway?

At the end of the day mobile media, for all its promise, is still a mainstream wanna be. Look at this chart of the top 10 most visited mobile phone websites...how many of them have you actually heard of or seen?

That said it still important for content producers and aggregators to keep their eyes on the mobile media 8 ball... because the WAY we experience media and TYPES of services offered are changing, not just the vehicle itself.

As the iPhone has proven, there is a tremendous appetite for enhanced mobile interfaces and the freedom to create them. With the recent release of an iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) and others on the way from Google's Android, etc. there are whole new classes of applications to be created which will radically alter the user experience and introduce services we haven't even imagined yet. Here's a taste of up and coming location based services, for example. The end result of innovation on the user experience and services end will be new opportunities to broadcast and share information that make mobile blogging and Twitter streams seem like a stone and chisel. Sure business models should be on everyone's mind, and they are certainly on mine, but not at the expense of dreaming BIG about a new day in news and information that mobile tools makes possible over the long run.

One useful place to start that dreaming is at AppVee, a site devoted to reviews of new applications being developed for the iPhone. Upon visiting it you will notice that many of the top 10 new iPhone applications are in fact News related (including a NYT application).

Mobile computing may not be a contender for media gold in Beijing but by the time the 2012 Olympics roll around it could be a very different story.

Organic City is one of thousands of locative media projects created over the last several years as participatory media and location-based technologies collide in new and interesting ways. Organic City is certainly not exceptional in its use of locative media or the selected technology, but its community storytelling approach is indeed something special - the underlying assumption being that stories by and for local people are important and worth hearing and sharing. It is a slightly different assumption that drives projects like Story Corps, which rely on shared experiences and universal emotional connections as opposed to geographic proximity.

Another apparent assumption (or a presumption on my part) around Web and mobile-enabled hyperlocal storytelling projects is that people actually want to hear the local stories of friends and strangers. And that once a locative story sharing service is made available it is only a matter of time before it will catch on and "earballs" build in the form of increasing participation and audience. It is this second assumption that I wonder about. In other words are people listening (locally) and do they care about what other people in their neighborhood want to share in the way of personal stories and anecdotes? Another more crass way of putting it... is there marketplace enough to justify more efforts aimed at local storytelling?

I ask this question because Organic City, for example, does not appear to have taken off. The site has been around a couple of years and has apparently not seen much new activity since the spring of 2007. (Note: this may be because not enough people know about the site or because it is no longer being actively managed.) I wonder if other geographically relevant "man on the street" storytelling and tour sites have gotten any traction. And I don't mean local news aggregators, citizen journalism, or professional tourism projects. I mean people who are sharing and swapping stories as if they were sitting around a campfire or leaning over a neighbor's fence - not engaging in intentional journalism. Think of a kind of informal digital storytelling to place.

At the end of the day, despite the fact that we all love stories and participatory media is hot, does hyperlocal sharing go beyond local news, the classifieds, Google maps, and advertising?

Maybe I am asking the wrong questions? Perhaps the local aggregation and sharing of stories should not be viewed as a buy and sell commodity that is measurable and gains value by appearing high up on a Digg ranking. Maybe the fact that we can more easily share stories is good enough in and of itself, without needing to assess click through rates and business model potential.

But that still doesn't resolve the central question of whether there is an appetite for local storytelling. And it doesn't begin to scratch the surface of an important and related question: Can an online or mobile medium do word-of-mouth storytelling justice? Can it help to create community? Can it (or should it) offer us something of value that we don't already have?

The above is a "word cloud" created on Wordle, a tool that sorts through text on a webpage, blog, or document and spits out a visual representation giving prominence to the most frequently appearing (source) words.

Not surprising that words such as "news" are large and prominent on IdeaLab, but look at the size of "data" and such words as "can" and "will".BTW, it appears that Wordle only indexes current discussion, a kind of snapshot in time, as opposed to indexing a blog or website it its entirety.

Regardless, for us visual types its an interesting way to "see" and sense current blog activity and hot topics rather than trying to process it all through reading. It also might serve as an interesting way to gauge ongoing audience interest and participation.

Just for fun, and for comparison's sake, here is a "Wordle" of today's New York Times home page:

You can do a Wordle for your own blog or blog feed as long as you have an Atom or RSS feed.

"My name is Jose Gutierrez. I am 18 years old and live in East Oakland, off of International and 24th Streets. We don't have a computer in my house, and other than Spanish language TV and radio we get all of our information on our mobile phones on LOCOBEAT (fictional).

-On my cell phone I have my neighborhood mapped out. I know which blocks to avoid because of gangbangers & drug dealers (and I get color coded updates from people in my neighborhood when violence happens to help me decide which places to avoid and which safe routes for my little brother Ernesto to take walking to school)

-Neighborhood job openings appear on my mobile map as they are announced, and I get a text message alert when I walk by a store or and business on the street that has an opening.

-I belong to locobeat's social network that lets me know if I know anybody that knows the person who is looking to hire, and keeps me and my friends connected. We get alerts when friends or friends of friends are nearby and have a color coded system for people we don't like or the cops come around.

-My friends and I share and rate the music of local rappers and Hip-Hop artists that we like, and we have created our own marketing business that lets everyone know when and where our favorites are playing. We also earn money from ringtone and song downloads, and can mix our own beats on the fly.

-My uncle Jaime is a day laborer, and he gets a text message in Spanish when a day job is available, that tells him where to go...so he doesn't need to stand out on the street all day.

-My mom uses locobeat to get alerts about fresh vegetables or other things she likes to buy arrive at our local supermarket.

-When I walk by the community center or library my cell phone tells me what events and classes are happening there this week and I can register to attend. Announcements are in Spanish & English.

-My cousin was killed in a drive-by shooting last month, and when you walk by the corner where he was shot, you can hear and see a tribute to him on your phone, along with stories about him from friends and anonymous tips from people who saw it happen and know who did it. Or you can add your own tribute or message that is added to the LocoBeat community news made up mostly of video and voice reports filed by people who live in the community along with news from were we come from in Mexico."

There are lots of great mobile projects and tools (i.e., mobile banking) aimed at the poor in the developing world, so why not in the US too? What are your ideas for a mobile future in low income and underserved communities, and anyone interested in working on a real LOCOBEAT?

But we still have a ways to go with all of this mobile-enabled location activity...

The economic opportunity is a big one, which is precisely why so many services are coming on line, and why so much attention is being paid to open mobile platforms (i.e., Android and LiMo) that will fertilize the space. In addition to the myriad of location based services (LBS) and online-social-networks-going-mobile products being introduced there are also many informal experiments that demonstrate the power of location-based mobile tools.

Here, for example, are some "geo apps" developed for the iPhone by students at MIT during a 3 month course:
"One project named GeoLife gives users a way to set to-do lists and get reminders on their phones. Walk by the market, and the device might buzz with a message that you're supposed to pick up milk. Another effort, named Flare, was designed to help small businesses like pizza shops cheaply track their drivers.
Then there was Locale, which lets users configure their phones to automatically adjust their settings when the devices detect themselves in certain zones. So you might set your phone to automatically go into vibrate mode in the office and silent mode at the movie theater, and ring everywhere else.
The other student projects included Re:Public, a social-networking program that helps people make new friends in their area. Loco offers a way to find events around town and invite other people. Snap guides users to interesting places in their vicinity."

But the cool factor has not yet translated into critical mass adoption. Basically it boils down to the fact that LBS services are still too geeky, most people don't know how to use GPS and triangulation on their cell phones, and social networking (so far one of the key drivers in LBS) may not be the app that moves the needle on location-based activity adoption. These and other challenges are well addressed in this pair of News.com articles on social mobile networking, here and here.

In the news space we are seeing some interesting, location relevant reporting emerge. In addition to live blogging, street-level video capture with cell phones, and the geotagging of stories and events on Google Maps, CNN's Magic Wall touchscreen introduced a new mainstream tool for location specific coverage. The latest trend, combining a number of the above features is so-called geo-broadcasting. A good example of that is Fox News's traffic helicopter which offers an (online) live, birds-eye view of traffic in Chicago, mirrored by a map which allows you to follow its itinerary in real time. But even these high profile efforts are experimental and not yet supported by clear, revenue generating business models.

Over the long term, and as some of these services achieve critical mass adoption, we should expect to see "smart" features that connect us more meaningfully to our real world environments and offer fresh and dynamic information and news all around us. Instead of walking along staring into our cell phones for directions and texting/typing messages, cell phones will truly become remote controls for interacting directly with our physical spaces. Here are the latest revenue projections and a whitepaper on opportunities & challenges.

Despite the newness of the space, news organizations should be figuring out NOW how to leverage both mobile platforms and formats to deliver news in new ways, and to go local. Unlike politics, not all news is local. But in a mobile world expectations are moving rapidly in that direction.

That said, I think GeoGraffiti is on to something - and it's more than just riding the latest location based service (LBS) trend. People increaingly want information locally, and on the fly, as GPS and cell phone triangulation have proven. Second, social networking is going mobile, and he/she who figures out how to best tie in location-based friend/stranger scouting with user friendly information sharing is gonna benefit tremendously. (Note: right now there are a gazillion mobile social networking services trying to tackle this, but the technology and various flavor of offerings are still too new and restrictive). Finally, audio and video lend themselves better to mobile networking and interactivity than text. Text has simply been easier to use date, but that is likely to change quickly with the next generation of smartphones and open mobile platforms.

Once we do see audio and other forms of mobile and localization technologies come on line, it will simultaneously open up a number of doors for news reporting. In addition to live blogging and Vlogging, news can actually be pegged to a specific location and stories evolve in a location-specific way. Imagine, for example an accident in your neighborhood that is first "reported" on by a bystander who sees it happen and tags a text, audio, or video report to that exact location. The information (instantly available either on the Web or via sensors at the exact spot where the first report was issued from) can then be accessed by other observers or a reporter who shows up on the scene. Even after the event the now location-tagged event can be added to by anyone walking by, and that information can be accessed on the scene or on the Web via zip codes, street addresses, the victims name, or other standard search tools. A family member, for example, could post a video or picture memorial about a victim of the incident that is now available for anyone to access as they walk by the location where the accident happened. The likely value of all of this is that news becomes much more robust and accessible to the people who are most interested in it and affected by it - not to mention it encourages easy and direct participation.

And there are numerous applications of the above that are entirely news and media relevant. Tourists could access very localized and up the moment information about a place (including mainstream news reports that are geotagged). Citizen journalists could become the keepers of a dynamic and evolving geomap of the neighborhoods and issues they cover - potentially providing much richer participation by locals and more locally produced content that literally lives on and is tracked in reference to the streets where it happens. An exciting move in this direction is so-called geo-broadcasting, covered here.
Add in local business advertising and you have yourself a business model for sustainability. Or you can integrate it with such things as traffic reporting, as this Chicago Fox affiliate has done with it's AirFox reports.

Ultimately, the shift from GeoGraffiti to GeoJournalism could be both a major opportunity, and another way to reinvigorate traditional journalism.

Just for fun, here is our own Dan Gillmor, talking on YouTube about how web censorship is affecting citizen journalism, posted prior to the launch of the YouTube Citizen news channel. Hopefully we will see more of him and his students, and the great work of such projects as Global Voices there.

1) News Consultancies: Leveraging local information channels & relationships to connect average people with local influencers and experts.

Examples:
-An online/offline service which people pay journalists to help them navigating local political/business channels. i.e, the fastest way to get a building permit approved or knowing which local developer to talk to about a project.
-recommending a trustworthy plumber of mechanic.
This idea has some interesting potential, particularly on creating local communities of trust via social networking, but it also might disadvantage journalists who are no longer viewed as objective reporters but as knowledge brokers for hire.

2) Paid reporter access: News organizations offering a "premier access package" that allow the buyers to participate in a group or one-one-one session with a well known journalist. Certainly there are people (particularly publicists, marketers, and PR firms) who would pay for this kind of access, but it also raises some nasty ethical questions aound journalistic access going to the highest bidder.

3) Micropayments: The notion that people would be willing to pay small amounts (a few cents) for a good piece of journalism. The idea here is that good news takes $ to produce and and that people will actually pay for top quality reporting. My sense is that while it is true in theory, we are already too far down the "information is free" road to make this a viable and sustainable model in and of itself. Perhaps the more important questions are how much are people willing to pay (ifn anything) and what is a simple enough distribution/payment mechanism that could effectively put this model into play?

4) Joint Subscriptions: The notion being that large and small news outlets combine forces and offer a kind of a la carte menu of options that add greater value than the current walled garden model. This could either involve the "packaged subscriptions" where you get 2 or more news offerings at a discounted price, or the recombination of selected large and small news/media into a single offering (i.e., The New York Times international business section +My local news/sports). I sense there might be an appetite for the latter, as online news custom aggregators like DailyMe and Netvibes suggest, but getting various outlets to collaborate and share revenue could be a beastly undertaking.

5) Small is Beautiful. A number of local, community-driven models at the 30,000 residents level seem to be working here. Look at Village Soup and Paulding.com. There are also a number of local community building experiments that go beyond local news aggregation, small business advertising, discussion forums and community portals to offer social networking and community reporting - like www.everyblock.com, www.i-neighbors.org, and SocialChord. One interesting idea that was floated (does anyone have an example?) was the notion of small communities of geography or interest banding together to fund particular reporting and specific stories - a sort of community underwriter news model. I believe David Cohn of NewsTrust is cooking up a marketplace model along these lines.

6) The convergence of journalism and "do gooderism". Some wondered out loud if people would be willing to subscribe to a news outlet if it is taking on a particular community service project like a neighborhood cleanup or supporting a particular local/global cause? This is simply applying corporate social responsibility and the "good by association" model to news. Not sure if anyone has successfully attempted this?

7) Non-financial exchange models: The idea here is news organizations creating a different kind of currency besides $ for their services - like getting free or discounted news access/subscription in exchange for donating time or offering a particular service to the community or the news outlet itself. While I am skeptical that this model would get much traction (not to mention it sounds challenging to organize and denominate) businesses might be willing to sponsor volunteers and pay for their news access as part of a corporate social responsibility campaign. Anyone have any examples of this one?

8)Information and journalism is FREE. Isn't it already if you have a computer and Internet connection? Enough said...

9) Benefactorism: Similar to the notion of community of interest supported news mentioned above, this involves individuals or organizations (outside of the news media, public broadcasting, etc.) funding a particular news item, reporter, or project. Isn't this already happening too?

10) The single journalist (or small group of journalists) as news outlet. The idea here, leveraging the free and easy distribution network of Web 2.0, is to avoid large and bloated news bureaucracies in favor of disaggregated journalists that work and distribute on their own. Isn't this what we call blogging? I guess the real question is whether or not a journalist or small grouping of them can earn a living off of this type of Go-it-your-own-way or Union of hotshot journalists model? Google Adwords won't put your kids through college, so why not try...

11) The eBay model: I heard this idea raised a number of times in varying formats, that you can create a market that matches reporters with distribution outlets. See Reporterist as one example. Again, I wonder if anyone can make a living off of it (assuming you want to)...and how one determines who qualifies as a reporter? Also wonder if this type of model ends up pushing compensation for reporting below "fair market value"?

12) National consortium/union of local news organizations, dailies, etc. : With the relative stability of local dailies and the rise of citizen journalism, some suggested the time is right for a large, representive organization that could provide a better array of support and credentialing for small journalism. Such ideas as pooled advertising distribution (along the lines of Federated Media or Adify) were part of this discussion.

Lots of interesting ideas and models discussed, along with some wonderfully creative approaches. Just wish there were more hard-core entrepreneurs present to take a steely-eyed look at these and other business models. I also missed hearing the voices of youth and the next generation of media creators/consumers. The latter, in particular, need to be a more integral part of the conversation moving forward.

For folks intersted in locative media and news, it will be one of the topics covered at this weeks NewsTools2008 conference Silicon Valley. Hope to see you there!