Here at MIT, summer means time to dig into our research. A group of us at the Center for Future Civic Media is working on a white paper defining "civic media." We are interested in how civic media is empowering new user-creators, with related effects on governing elites. Inspiring people to take action, through access to information and the public spotlight, is a familiar goal to those of us on the team who used to be journalists. We used to facilitate the agency of an isolated person or community to make the government act for justice or change. It often...
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Smart Mobs for News Participation
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,...
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Ensuring Content in User Driven Conversations
Before I went home this summer I had the opportunity to talk with Steve Twedt, a reporter at The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette who teaches one of the few journalism classes at Carnegie Mellon. I told him about the Idealab and the user driven system I've been writing about here. The first big question he asked deserves a well thought out response: "What if the users don't contribute?" Steve is right; a developer can't rely on user contribution unless he/she is sure users will contribute. Since one can never actually be sure about that, we are left with three simple tasks: hedge...
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Public Notices 4.0: Time to Upgrade Public Meetings
Over the years my work has brought me to Rome a few times. The Roman Forum as well as the Athenian Agora have always intrigued me as a model for envisioning online public spaces. Surrounding a public space you have major public and religious institutions, a commercial market in one corner, a place for public speeches, and in Roman Forums the "Albus" or a white notice board with public announcements written in black. Today we often experience institutions (online and off) without a town square or commons in the center, which I try to counter with Issues Forums. However, today...
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Plain Dealer Should Deal Openly with Blog Ethics
By now you may have heard about the implosion of Wide Open, a political blog started by the Cleveland Plain-Dealer featuring four voices from the ranks of local bloggers: two left, two right. They were paid as freelance contributors. Here's the way the "reader representative," Ted Diadiun, described the meltdown. It began when Rep. Steve LaTourette, a Republican Congressman, found out that one of the Wide Open bloggers, Jeff Coryell of Cleveland Heights, had contributed $100 to his opponent. LaTourette was unhappy that the newspaper would pay someone who financially supported his opponent to write political opinion. He complained to...
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From "Informing" to "Empowering"
For me, our new Center for Future Civic Media at MIT provides an opportunity to weave together several strands of my career. I started my career as a journalist, writing about science and technology for Business Week magazine. Then I decided to make a career shift. I went to graduate school in computer science, and I began developing educational technologies -- in particular, technologies to engage children in creative learning experiences. How do I make sense of these two seemingly-disconnected careers? I have often explained that both careers grew out of the same underlying motivation: to help people understand the...
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An MIT Communications Forum event, on September 20, represented the formal launch of the new MIT Center for Future Civic Media. The event featured Beth Noveck (NYU Law School), Ethan Zuckerman (Berkman Center, Harvard, and the Global Voices Project), Chris Csikszentmihalyi (MIT Media Lab), and yours truly. You can find a webcast of this event here. This was the first of a series of Forums focused on the ways media can be deployed at the local level to foster greater civic engagement. This event's focus was largely definitional -- trying to map out what we mean by civic media and...
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It sounds like journalists today also have to be marketers. They have to know who they are trying to reach, and... to pitch their stories to a broader audience.
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