Public Purpose Media

In Praise of Scribes

rbolepdx@gmail.com (Rob Bole) — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 21:04:00 +0000

In Clay Shirky’s s book, Here Comes Everybody (2008), he has a brief discussion of the fate of the poor scribe who, upon the introduction of the printing press, did not realize his fate was sealed and his profession’s utility would disappear. The scribe’s specialization was replaced by what Shirky characterizes as “mass amateurization,” or the radical shift away from an enforced scarcity professional skills (i.e. the guilds) is replaced with a new plenty.

It is important to note, as does Shirky, that the invention of the printing press did not immediately result in mass amateurization. Rather, it took over a hundred years to construct a rational intellectual infrastructure, as well as the accumulation of capital to take advantage of the technology. Between the Guttenberg Bible and the Enlightenment was a chaotic period of creative destruction as people tried to figure out how to use the new technology.

As more printing presses fall silent it is not difficult to draw an parallel from that time to our experiences with mass, digital, universal publication tools. The same transition that occurred between Guttenberg’s technology and Martin Luther’s radical realignment is now sweeping through our own society and economies. The newspaper industry is just the ‘canary in the coal mine.’ Companies, institutions and social groups are beginning to reorient to the new realities. They are experiencing broad access to mass media. (Governments are also feeling it too. The unfortunately violent and extreme the events that unfolded in Iran are but a microcosm – though not to those living through it – to the changing relationship of governments to the governed.)

Individuals gain tremendous advantage through mass amateurization and reformation of social capital. We have new avenues for expressions of democratic will, personal expression and collective action that accomplish important economic and social objectives with more efficient use of capital. The evidence of what is gained is well documented in thousands of breathless pages in magazines, books and blog posts. And while those positives are real and material, we also have to note how much we lose in the bargain as well.

The waning of professionalism (or elitism…let’s call it what it is) that is being buried under the avalanche of seemingly ubiquitous amateur production capacity has made it more difficult for us to know what is essential. Does a professional ‘author’ have more value to offer? Or is the unleashing of the amateur’s offerings provide the diversity and value we have been missing? The effects can be seen as traditional professional print journalism, long lauded as the “Fifth Estate” is seemingly speeding into oblivion. We can also see the waning of professionalism in publishing where book shelves (virtual or not) are bulging, but reading remains flat or even declining.

Shirky, tongue firmly in cheek, gave his take on the dilemma in a chapter entitled In Praise of Scribes. The title refers to Johannes Trithemius, the Abbot of Sponheim, who published Laude Scriptorum (“in praise of scribes”). That he had it printed instead of copied by hand (irony) in 1492 (irony 2.0). As Columbus was making landfall in the New World, the elites were seemingly fighting a rear-guard action against the wholesale change they saw happening in their world. However, rather than look at Trithemius’s treatise as a valiant, but pointless attempt to hold back progress, I think that we should consider it, perhaps sadly, as a mourning of the art and skill of the scribe’s profession that would be lost.

The lesson I believe is that we should not preserve our own scribal practices, but rather promote the preservation of important traditions. The intellectual rigor, the attention to detail, the expectation and acquisition of skill of the scribe’s era should be preserved and respected in our own. In Praise of Scribes should be a warning to us today about what we may lose in the process of technological change.

In legacy broadcasting – television or radio – the technology has little to do with the content that is being distributed on the network. Yes, there is some higher level structuring of the content based on the spectrum, data exchange and so on, but it is not like the shaping of the content with our current and emerging tools. In other words, the “form factor” of content is now, more than ever, tied to the “form factor” of the technology; perhaps never more so since the printing press was the main broadcast platform. With a book, content is limited to words on a page presented in the accustomed order – even Joyce’s radicalization of the written word in Finnegan’s Wake was set down and broadcast in the same manner as Betty Crocker’s Cook Book. (For all of Joyce’s rule breaking, scribes actually had more freedom. At least the scribes could draw in the margins…)

The evolving form factors of technology – how devices receive and transmit content, both the limitations and opportunities - are incredibly freeing. They allow the combination of various forms of communication – video, animation, audio and the written word. They are also limiting: all you are going to have (at least for now) is 140 characters via short message service SMS. Twitter and its foundational technology, SMS, are excellent in their ability to demonstrate how tightly wound is the package of content and technology form.

Twitter is instructive as we consider how we can innovate within the limitations of each technological medium. Within the 140 character limit in each Twitter message, users have spawned new language formats that give Joyce a run for his money. Take a recent tweet: {IsCool: this thurs 1pm et: #pdfnetwork call w @katrinskaya (fixed!) on #iranelection and power of social media http://bit.ly/hxfUe #pdf 09}. To those not actively using SMS, Twitter and hashtags, this is almost undecipherable but to the practiced twitter user, this is a clear and economical message, and allows the reader to follow the idea onto the next communication platform for more information. Beyond the innovation in the language, the brilliance of Twitter is its easy integration, almost without barrier, as an instantaneous communication channel, just one in a multi-part stream of communication channels that we use to connect with our world.

I am struck by Isaac Asimov’s vision of personal transportation in his Robot series. In his image of the future, our streets will be replaced by parallel ribbons of moving walkways. The outermost ribbons, those next to buildings, will be moving relatively slowly, with ribbons becoming progressively faster as you move inward. The fastest ribbon capable of ushering you over great distances of the city. Asimov even dreams of young boys and girls playing tag or follow the leader by nimbly jumping from ribbon to ribbon, trying to lose the other players.

At our disposal are communication vehicles that operate just like Asimov’s ribbons. In fact, by choosing to distribute this essay (going over 500 words it’s an essay) via a blog I am choosing a ribbon on the outside of the communication road. As an alternative, I could publish this as a self-published, online book or a monotonous series of tweets, which is at the fast center of the communications road. However, turning this into a series of tweets is a particularly bad idea; the format of that “inner ribbon” technology does not match the content.

The essay format, only hangs together if you can lead the reader steadily along a pathway of concepts to a series of conclusions. Twitter is much more successful in bringing you short bites of information, particularly if they are ephemeral. The form factor of an observation “floating across your transom” is better communicated through a portable, ubiquitous and immediate technology. Indeed, it is the very nature of the 140 character limitation that prompts the user to send out ephemera, rather than essays. (Note Pear Analytic’s recent study that 40.55% of tweets being ‘pointless babble’)

The form factor limitations in the content/technology bundle has not only led to internal innovation with the language, but also started to deeply affect the type and quality of content being produced. By its very nature Twitter is successful at two particular types of content: linking and thinking out loud.

Starting with an SMS and linking to additional sources of information replicating the web experience, as people pass articles, video and other content to each other through tweets and re-tweets. But this was only possible with the creation and widespread usage of URL shortners such as TinyURL. By mashing down long URL strings into bite-sized pieces we now get the fragment of a topic sentence, tapas of an idea, with a compelling little link to the main dish. As Shirky pointed out in his book, information overload is only happens when you don’t have the right filters. I suspect that the TinyURL is a proto-filter crawling its way out of the muck. The TinyURL phenomenon is akin to the elongated footnote, a David Foster Wallace moment that can take tight ideas using a marker that leads users to broader expository information. (In fact, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest might be the best long-form version of what I am talking about.)

Because of the ephemeral nature of SMS it encourages the instant transmission of whatever crosses one’s mind, even if banal and self-reverential. Dipping into a person’s stream of conscious does not result in much clarity (again, try to read just one page of Finnegan’s Wake), but taken as a whole, over time, even the most trivial series of thoughts starts to tell us something about the greater whole: how the person thinks, what is their point of view, what attracts and repels them, and so on. The tweets are a part of a pathway, but have a very specific purpose of providing support to the big thoughts; the stream of consciousness thinking that moves the intellectual (or what stands for intellectual) content along.

A Modest Proposal: Twitter Scholar
What would a Twitter Scholar look like? Twitter is part of the family of instant communication and collaborative tools – mobile video, commenting, chat and IM. They all have an important place in our intellectual discourse. The form factor of the technology, while limiting the morphology of the content, has a specific role that I feel is currently under exploited. We need an injection of professionalism without the elitism; knowledge but with a common touch. We can obtain these old-world scribe-like values by using the new tools wisely, even as they spread the content far and wide.

I would propose that we recruit a tribe of Twitter Scholars, those that will adopt the use of Twitter to help open up the elite institutions of art, research, science, literature and even journalism. The “Scholar Project” could have two goals: the first would be to utilize the spirit of openness implicit in Twitter-like instant communications to broaden intellectual discourse and give the wider audience insight into the thinking of influential people. The second goal would be to demonstrate how the new communication tools can widely distribute key bits of knowledge in what can be esoteric fields.

How would a Twitter Scholar project work? I would envision empowering (e.g. paying a small stipend) a cadre of interesting, influential thinkers who have an appreciation for openness…those that have a natural appreciation of teaching and mentoring. The Twitter Scholars would be paired with an expert to support their maturation with the tool to not only build skills, but continue to evolve the most appropriate framework and ontology to help the Scholar provide real value to the masses of followers. The critical issue that needs addressing is that the limitation (morphology) of the technology is the biggest perceived barrier to intellectual content. We need to learn how to do this and that is one of the most important qualities of the project: utilizing scholars to create a new content format that takes elite concepts and mash them into Shirky’s mass amateur channel.

A critical objective of the project is to humanize, and create a broader appeal, for the intellectual ideas of our modern age. Once we have acclimated Scholars to the technology, they can then use it to “pierce the veil” of their intellectual live with those events, emotions and encounters that create their frame of reference to their thinking. I believe that while many concepts are difficult to unravel, they are all informed by our human connection. To know the frustrations of picking up the laundry, the interesting thought they just had, the fascinating person they just met, what they thought of the last movie they saw…these are the “home movies” that give you insight into what a person does to leave their mark on the world.

Beyond the ephemera of a life, the medium is also under exploited as a way of parsing complicated concepts into strings of logic, albeit only 140 characters long. These singular bits of data, comprise a digital mind that is by far more complicated then the individual bits themselves. The Twitter Scholar will be an interesting opportunity to model the bits into bytes and then into terabytes of complexity.

Lastly, this medium stretches us beyond the one to many communication modes by creating new channels that allow for not only discourse, but openness that can remix content as well as bloom new concepts like the progression of Mandelbrot set. The limitation of the tools is to structure these complex ever twisting conversations: there is no democratic structure to manage the wisdom of the crowd.

The through line for the Scholar project has to be the Scholars themselves to constantly reflect back on the Twitter feed. The last component of the project is activating that teaching instinct within the Scholar to respond, provide feedback and engage with the community. This is going to require the filters Shirky discusses to discover the interesting conversations, provocative points and the sway and flow the interactions.

While the Twitter Scholars project is a modest proposal… …it is in a direct line with poor Abbot Trithemius’s sad embrace of new technology for loss of an era. Let us not let the Abbot wander about among his errata, but prop him in from of an iPhone and Tweetdeck and compete in the marketplace for minds of future generations.

What I Did Over My Summer Vacation: An iTouch Love Story

rbolepdx@gmail.com (Rob Bole) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 17:57:00 +0000

I just returned from twelve stormy and rainy days in Northern Michigan and it was unique in two respects. First it was my first time to the Upper Peninsula (e.g. rain), but also the first time that I have travelled with such as powerful mobile media device, my personal iTouch. (iTouch = iPhone – phone)

I have had the iTouch for about two weeks prior to the vacation and downloaded a number of applications, loaded a bunch of music, connected my Gmail account and downloaded a couple of videos for me, my wife and our two children (age 7 & 3). I knew that we were going to be on two long airplane trips and at least four long car trips (3+ hours) and so wanted to have something to fall back on for everyone during the lulls.

The summer vacation was all the more mobile media intense because of all of the rain. My son ran through his pile of books pretty quickly and my daughter is easily bored by sitting one place. It should be known that Sam and Lily had never seen or used an iTouch or iPhone before

There were a couple of observations:

My children instantly fell in love with the iTouch; partially because it was new, but also because it brought instant joy and they intuitively understood the interface – they had no trouble in navigating to and using applications.
There is a striking lack of applications of any merit for young children, and absolutely none from PBS Kids or Sesame Street, though Sesame Street has a very fun podcast. (Apparently PBS is in development on several iPhone apps, the first is launching is Curious George and then 3-4 more before the end of the calendar year.) Most kids apps are for either the very young (<3>
• The audio books were a big hit and there are hundreds and hundreds to choose from. (It was very cute, my two children sharing the headsets.)
There were a number of great movies, and renting them seemed reasonable. ($0.99 to $3.99, need to watch within 30 days from renting, and after starting have 24 hours to watch the movie)
The small screen is very immersive for a child, especially as they sit in a car seat…the picture is bright and clear, the sound high quality.
My children really liked to watch the video and listen to the audio books, but they were very much entranced by the interactive applications. These were the things the loved to use…making things happen with a shake here or a poke there.

The device was so easy to use and portable. The content bought or rented was good, if not great, but I felt that there was a big gap for high quality kids content on the iPhone, especially applications. While the iPhone or iTouch is expensive (+$200), it is a device that is easily handed over the back of a seat and is such as solid-seeming device that I had no worries, like I have with other technology.

The professional implication for me was that this is something that is a good space for more active development and a strong marketing campaign for our tech-savvy parents.

Public Service Media 2.0: Creating a Community Value Proposition

rbolepdx@gmail.com (Rob Bole) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:45:00 +0000

One of the core values that public broadcasting holds is its ability to serve local communities. It is what distinguishes those in public media from their more commercial brothers and sisters. However, it also a truism that, confoundedly enough, that public broadcasting believes that doesn’t know how to connect with diverse audiences.

It is a very strange circumstance that has stations knowing the community, but not making a tangible connection with important elements the audience. Which of those two statements are true? How could they possibly both be true at the same time? From a community organizing point-of-view if you cannot connect with important elements of the audience, then you truly are not serving the community at all; that public broadcasting is failing its core mission, and that fact will catch up with it sooner rather than later.

However, I do not think things are quite that dire. I think that real problem is that public broadcasting actors truly believe in a community service mission, but just are terrible in putting their role, their value add, into terms that anybody outside of public broadcasting could possibly recognize as a net positive. The spirit is there, but getting anybody to believe it needs some serious work.

At my last employer, at a nonprofit focused on utilizing technology to fight poverty, I spent a considerable amount of time building and maintaining community relationships. This experience has given me a unique perspective on how to leverage and sustain connections with the community. That experience also taught me to clearly recognize that even if I had the right combination of resources, I might not be the best person to create and manage the relationship. The first rule of working with communities is building trust with communities that have their own rules, values and goals. You have to listen to be heard, and give respect to receive it.

My goal in every interaction with local organizations was to find the right balance of “asks & gives” that resulted in a perception of a ‘positive net value proposition’. The outcome being that the community organization should be able to clearly articulate the reason that they should spend their time, attention and precious resources to work together. The second rule is that each party has their own calculus of determining whether they are receiving more than they are giving…and recognizing that the calculus utilized is largely independent of the others.

The goal of any community engagement strategy is get the partner to not only agree to work together, but announce the partnership with what they are gaining rather than what they are giving.

One note before going further: there are a multitude of local stations that are doing a wonderful job of community engagement. This essay, if successful in its endeavor, should provide additional opportunities to raise these best practices for the system to learn from and utilize.

The Environment
Before jumping into observations about how public broadcasting stations can work with community organizations it should noted that the frenetic, resource stretched, limited attention environment of public broadcasting is matched on the community and social service side. Local staffs in community-based organizations (CBOs) are fully engaged in their own mission, raising their own resources and serving too many people with too few resources. They have little time to engage in intellectual exercises and are always focused on the bottom line outcomes of tangible accomplishments.

I believe the key to working with CBOs is to utilize the same framework that stations use to evaluate whether to take the next step and spend treasure and time in a partnership. Just turn it around. Community engagement should not take as a given, rather a public broadcasting station must produce an explicit value proposition to the local community and CBOs. What are you asking for and why should someone listen (let alone agree and do something about it)?

The starting point for constructing a proposition is to conceive of the community’s needs and wants, rather than your own. It is vital that a station be very, very clear in what it is offering to a CBO, and sometimes that relationship calculus will be a net positive for public broadcasting, but also that some partnerships will be a net negative, loss leaders for the future.

Local Public Broadcasting’s Value Proposition
As stations reach out into the community they are finding that CBOs and others already have the beginnings of what is the explicit value proposition for their engagement. Whether these are the same that stations themselves perceive as their value is not the point. Again, it is the opportunity to build a convergence of values. From a community perspective there is perception of three core values that public broadcasting offers:

The Bullhorn – as respected broadcasters with infrastructure that has the potential to reach all residents CBOs value the opportunity to reach the whole audience in an economical manner. While some advocates will want to engage in editorial processes, the majority of potential partners want to leverage the bullhorn with co-created and sponsored information.

As Storytellers – following from the first point is the ability for station personnel that understand media to provide creative support in crafting content, messages, information and action-oriented content. While many in public broadcasting bemoan the capacity to be creative storytellers, the fact remains that most CBOs focus on good service, not good communication.

The Alternative – related to the issues above, many see public broadcasting as a viable alternative for original programming for the community, including in the native language. While not using the same language, CBOs naturally understand “public service media” and want to leverage local stations to create information services for their constituencies.

Leveraging Community Assets
On the other side of the balance sheet, there are a number of opportunities for local stations to leverage community partnerships to complete important service objectives. The key to utilizing these locally native talents and tools is to utilize them on co-founded projects that eventually lead to more integration in the future.

Translation – whether crowd-sourcing or working directly with CBOs that represent minority language groups, the community can provide support to translate materials of a local station. (e.g. WGBH’s Forum Network programming being translated independently) This is especially true where those materials provide clear advantage to a particular community or fits within a curriculum/program services.

Community Profile – there are a variety of techniques, some intensive and others conversational, that allow a station to discern and ultimately reflect the local communities’ needs, wants & interests. They key is conversation continually happening, than a formalized framework. Form follows function.

Public Insight Network – while APM has created a public insight network, this framework, whether leveraging APM’s tools (which are pretty darn good) or not, is a great opportunity for building advisors – formerly & informally – to provide deeper, more specific advice, as well as sources of content.

Outreach & Marketing – whether a national program service, a tent pole series or a purely local program there is some interest group/lifestyle segment that will be interested in that specific content element.

Local Services & Contracts – if local stations work well with communities and start to define themselves as open community assets, what will follow is the opportunity to tap into new income sources, whether governmental or philanthropic.

How To Make it Happen?
OK, so great. Very interesting, but how to make it happen? While people pay lots of money to consultants to help them sort out the answer, there is a core truth that every community engagement is different. There are general guidelines that have and are being discerned from community organization and engagement programs. I am going to try to summarize some of them below, but frankly the key is staying away from high-stakes conversations in favor of ongoing, multiple iterations of discussions. Some operating guidelines for stations include:

Audience - Clearly identify specific audience segments that you want to reach and engage; reach out and meet with multiple organizations and find the one that matches your station’s engagement style, but has an honest representation of the community. (There are untold number of organizations that purport to represent the community, but underneath have limited respect and awareness of that community.)

The Conversation – Stations should leverage multiple opportunities for input and output, including rapid, low-risk cycles (“otherwise pick up the phone”). Spend the time through lunches, coffees, tours (everyone likes a tour) and meetings where you get to know them, how they work, what are their needs. Don’t go in high and fast with “we want to engage”, but start low and slow with “who are you”, “how did you get here” and “what do you think about ________”.

Go to Them – While everyone likes to go into a studio – it is so outside the normal course of life – bringing an audiences into the station is only a starting point. In the world of portable equipment, where a Mac with Final Cut Pro is replacing AVID studios is easy to assemble a ‘digital media in a backpack’. The resulting content might not have as high production values, but for many community organizations we need to understand that the quality of the information is the highest priority, not its production quality. The basic formula is engagement/relevancy + information = action.

Community Planning Processes – stations should identify three to four critical community planning processes and get involved in the work. These are wonderful opportunities to define a net positive value proposition, as well as loss leaders that may result in funding in the future. Some of the most important that match a range of public service media goals include emergency management, workforce development, local district education planning and healthcare needs/program assessments.

Hire Right – next time someone leaves the station and hire a trained and experienced community organizer (preferably one that has some tech familiarity). As a former community developer…well, we come cheap. A very good, experienced organizer can be had for $35,000 with health benefits.

Recruitment – even if you are university licensee or other flavor, target specific board seats for community representatives to fill, specifically with people who can go toe-to-toe with other business and government leaders on the board. Beyond the board there are umpteen opportunities for broader community advisory boards, as well as project specific community conversations.

Over the next several years stations will either revitalize themselves or find a somewhat meaningless existence of being irrelevant. A key opportunity to avoid the fate of self-referential loathing is to invigorate a community conversation. Some stations are doing this through costly capital investment in new facilities that represent a new physical manifestation in the community. While these are fantastic, splashy endeavors, I think that there are just as effective methods for the station ‘on a budget’. These start with removing public broadcasting as the center of the conversation, and replacing that with new conceptions of community needs and how public broadcasting will present itself as solving local problems not just reflecting them.

A Digital Ecosystem & Public Broadcasting’s ‘Silent Soon-To-Be Majority’

rbolepdx@gmail.com (Rob Bole) — Fri, 29 May 2009 16:04:00 +0000

I recently had the privilege of attending a small dinner with Jack Dorsey, Chairman and Founder of Twitter. Hearing him speak about how Twitter is being used beyond the likes of Ashton Kutcher and P.Diddy as a tool in “solving the big problems” was thought provoking. He told us about a growing number of unlooked for and unheralded uses, from emergency managers in LA and San Francisco integrating Twitter into their emergency planning, to poets and writers in New York using it as a new distribution network and robots speaking to each other (and the rest of us) in Boston.

The genius is that this extremely simple tool has spawned extremely complex opportunities for consumers, which are further complicated by new sets of relationships, applications and linguistics. (@RT @grrlboy I totally agree! #topeka). Twitter is a good window into our dramatic new digital landscape by the simple fact that it is so compatible with other forms of media. Thus we see the beauty of chaos theory, from simplicity comes complexity.

The world, as it always was, it a much more complex place than that poor relationship.

When we think about digital audiences, the so-called digital natives, we have to engage more dimensions, such that shift our thinking from old-school demographics to more complex lifestyle-centric groupings. As referenced above, the complexity of the digital audience is and was equally true in the broadcast world, but conveniently hidden behind the blunt instruments of media metrics. Today we know the digital natives more often express loyalty to interests, fancies and attraction then they do with the schedules printed in TV Guide or demographer/marketers labels.

Digital natives are breaking new ground on constructing, what my former boss, Rey Ramsey, has called a ‘21st Century Ecosystem’; where digital and traditional media blend with each other, but also have deep connections with offline manifestation of actual human interactions and transactions. A new digital ecosystem is centered on the consumers who now have easy access to the tools that allow them to construct their own universe of information and services, resulting in a complex deep ecology of people, application and the bits of data that trail behind them.

Ironically, the rush to push broadcast content online now only has reinforced the formation of this new ecosystem as consumers mash, remix, share, comment, tweet and post. For many broadcasters they feed video into the digital world thinking that it is a nice sedate house with a television inside. Actually, they feed their content into a saw mill that chops it into hundreds of jagged little blocks that are the fuel for millions of camp fires where diverse tribes of online consumer huddle.

Today people time-shift, place-shift and device-shift all of their media streams to meet not only the requirements of their complex lives, but also their own fancies. This is the essential lesson of the digital ecosystem – that it is a highly personal, highly referential and individual to the person in charge. Some think of this as fragmentation, but in reality it is the creation of a new order that requires new sets of analytics to perceive useful patterns, niches and groupings; a new digital ecology.

Rather than “punching through the din” of media, the future is following the consumer where they lead us. Rather than unifying the audience we need to provide varieties of multiplatform and multi-application content that escapes through multiple rivulets out into the world. And rather than to try to continually experiment to discover the secret formula, the audience desires the high-quality information that PBS, NPR, PRI, APM and stations are already producing, but perhaps not in the containers that are so familiar to the system.

So, what are the elements of a digital ecosystem? While no expert – because really is no expert frankly – the average digital native lives in a continuum of media inputs and outputs. The continuum travels from simple/quick and immediate (Twitter) through appointment (and one-way) media (broadcast). The rise and fall of usage of any particular media stream moves with the rhythm of the individual’s day. A few minutes in the morning yields a Facebook update, watching an episode of The Office on a iPod on the train to work, a shared video out through multiple networks after getting an email at the office, twittering during a business presentation, watching NewHour in the evening on an HD TV while keeping up with your friends via Twittering online, Facebook and email at the same time. (And then supplement that with Hulu, more iPod and Nintendo DS when someone travels.)

And even this picture becomes more complex when we think about the all of hooks that are being created between Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Digg, et.al. Content is fungible and as producers we need to respect and understand that it is an opportunity to provide additional user value.

The multiple dimensions of the digital ecosystem may be confusing to some, but one of the core lessons that public broadcasting stations must wrestle with an ecology defined by the combination of bandwidth, device, time/availability, digital skill level and lifestyle-identification.

The goal of programming is not to hand-off promotion to promotion to promotion, rather producing content that comfortably can be distributed within the ecosystem. While editorial may, largely, remain the same across topics, the quality and temperature of the content may undergo significant shifts as it moves from ecological niche to niche.

This is not a widely understood strategic opportunity within public broadcasting, but one to watch is Tom Karlo at KPBS (San Diego) as he merges his television, radio and online content producers into one unit. Rather than forcing the same story out onto different mediums he is weighing lifestyle, access and opportunity to repackage and re-report content out on various platforms and syndication channels. Tom’s experiment in San Diego should be watched by all of us for lessons and good ideas.

The adoption of robust digital ecosystem development is not an easy leap. While many cite a fundamental generational barrier (perhaps also an ego barrier?) to understanding and operating in this ecosystem, there are other obstacles that public broadcasting must address.

A key problem is that there is no effective single package of metrics that allow public broadcasting to pull back to a high enough level to identify clear digital ecology trends and niches. It is not that there is a lack of techniques for this type of analysis. Our friends in political campaigns, business intelligence departments and financial market trackers do a pretty good job of understanding and exploiting trends data. The core problem is that our media metrics have spent too long in front of the TV; they are fat, slow and tired. This is an area of opportunity for public broadcasting to again lead the way.

The new digital ecosystem requires that public broadcasting turn its strategies on it head from a set of “appointment media” programming to variety of engagements – including appointment media - with audience that allow them to break the old rules and formulas of content consumption, distribution and participation. Some implications for public broadcasting include:

Develop and publish editorial and content policies that recognize the digital ecology of its consumers; provide a range of editorial content delivered on multiple platforms aimed at interconnecting interest areas, but also ‘niche-only’ content;

Understand the appropriate use of content creation and distribution tools to tell a story, such as layering high cost/static techniques (e.g. documentaries) with moderate/dynamic tools (blogs, social networking) with cheap/immediate opportunities (Twitter).

Use the opportunity to create ‘digital only’ or ‘digital first’ content as a gateway and starting point for more robust story-telling that may involve multiple future platforms;

Embrace digital metrics not as a ‘winner or loser’ measure, rather as a guide to refining digital ecology strategies. But also break the traditional model by using a variety of metrics and analytics, such as BBC’s trust measures, transactional data, online and offline focus groups and consumer engagement tools to really understand the patterns and niches;

Leverage the investment of others to distribute and syndicate your content, whether it is PBS, NPR, Google, Microsoft or other technologies. The goal is branded content playing everywhere, and not ownership of the pathways; (For a more radical view read http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/05/12/pbsCouldBecomeACauseForThe.html)

Accept that your input of content into the world might not be the last say; you are not writing a canon, rather creating high-quality information that will only last if it offers an interesting, important (and dare I say it…entertaining) perspective;

Leverage the public broadcasting brand by attracting, associating and curating (I still hate that word, let us minimize our brand association with museums) the BEST content on the web. Users want a trusted editor that can help explain the context of the world and provide some sense of navigation and action, a perfect role for public service media!

The new Digital Ecosystem in massive, confusing and shifts constantly and rapidly, which can cause terrible indigestion in anyone who attempts to “own the space”. One of the key lessons that we must embed throughout the public broadcasting system is that we must place more trust and expend more energy in understanding the individual/user/consumer. We must sweep away the days of brilliant minds declaiming from the mountain top out to the wilderness. Time to put on our safari hat and jump in.

What is Public Service Media?

rbolepdx@gmail.com (Rob Bole) — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:12:00 +0000

It has been awhile since I posted to this blog...partially because of work, but also because of my transition from One Economy as head of media. I am moving onto a new position starting April 20th, and once I land and understand the relationship of my external blog and the new position I will start to write more regularly.

Not to be coy, I can write about it later in April, but the new job will rock. I will have a front-row seat on how public broadcasting is evolving towards a new definition of itself. The term public service media has been bandied about quite a bit to describe how public broadcasting looks as it swings into this century.

It might seem strange to some to think about the evolution of public broadcasting over the next 100 years. There are always dire predictions floating about the fate of public broadcasting and that at any moment it might disappear.

I think that being alarmed about the disposition of the politics around the $400 million or so that comes from the federal government is useful, as it keeps your elbows sharp and eyes focused. However, public broadcasting is a $2.5 billion dollar industry and whatever the political winds a public media system, albeit in a very different configuration, will remain.

Ones view is that Armageddon occurs with substantial cuts to public funding, but is that as things change whether the fundamentals of public media remain strong, powered by digital platforms that allow a new vitality of participation coupled with low-cost entry barriers.

My own position is that the United States and Americans in general are far better off with a robust, engaged public broadcasting system and that comes from having Americans support the system. It is just plain good economics and politics to have an alternative to commercial media that is supported by government.

However, the biggest transformation that public broadcasting needs to undertake is not embracing digital - these are merely tools - but rather truly entering into service to the public. Public broadcasting must go from a "nice to have" to a "must have" for Americans over the age of 10.

What is not being violently discussed with any detail is what does "public service" actually mean?

I am going to write more about my definition for public service, but I think one really, really good sign is the leadership at CPB, most notable Pat Harrison who put the money down for the Economic Response grant program, which is on top of the work already funded at KETC on foreclosures. That type of immediate response and relevance directly touches upon the definition of public service.

I also applaud the work that NPR, PBS, Frontline, WNET and others are undertaking around restructuring news coverage and interfaces with local journalism. Also the work over at PBS Interactive in building the common video platform/community, COVE, and all of the tools spilling out of Station Remote Control.

These are the mixture of tools, platforms and strategies that begin to build the structure of "public service media." However, let's not forget the overall plan for all of the progress being made in assembling bits of the structure. What is missing for me is the heart of the change. That we turn over our actions to be in service to the public; their needs, helping to expose new opportunities and navigate around barriers for the fundamental purpose of improving lives. Right in the heart of our founding documents is the notion of "the pursuit of happiness", and this is the test that public service media must constantly put itself.

It is a bright future and public broadcasting, from the smallest station to the largest national player, has so many assets, talent and passion that the next few years are going to be extremely fun.

A Response to David Sasaki's Very Interesting Post

rbolepdx@gmail.com (Rob Bole) — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 00:27:00 +0000

On November 18th, David Sasaki posted a very compelling post titled "Toward a National Journalism Foundation" on PBS's MediaShift Lab. As I said, I thought it interesting, but I believe it was too narrow for what public broadcasting is (could) become. My response posted on the MediaShift Lab is below:

The premise of David Sasaki's argument is only true if it is viewed through two, limiting filters: that journalism or in a broader sense 'information' is the ultimate goal of public broadcasting and that public media management means institutionalization.

I would urge a broader view of Public Broadcasting in the form of "public purpose media", meaning that public + media could suggest a wider range of roles of different players, especially in realm of digital media. Public media of all stripes is one of the most focused (rigid?)forms of intentional media with a legislated purpose to inform and educate. However, like all things Internet-related, the old formulations are being subverted as technology allows viewers to become users that work together in new ways to take personal and collective action.

A founding principle of public broadcasting that I believe is widely shared is that quality of life largely depends on the quality of information that we can access. Everybody has the opportunity to make decisions and the fundamental question for policymakers and 'public purpose media' providers is how to help individuals become informed decision makers, achieving better outcomes.

Rather than just to be informed, the point of public media has to be how it can materially improve our lives. This takes us well beyond the traditional province of Public Broadcasting. Beyond a goal of an informed citizenry it requires public media to wrestle with the challenge of producing tangible, positive outcomes.

The new public purpose media should look to supporting outcomes that have been referenced in the current media environment, but never truly addressed, such as improving access to financial services (and financial management skills), access to health care, educational attainment, ability to secure a safe and affordable home...namely just addressing the 'should haves' and directly into the 'must haves' of a life.

Beyond broadcast in the digital medium means two things to me; one, we can erase the divide between inspiration and action (you watch, you click to finding a job), and two, the valued providers of 'public purpose media' are wide and varied, and might include folks without a broadcasting license.

Moving beyond broadcast means that content can come in smaller packets of information and action that are consumed across a wider digital universe. The News Hour is truly journalism at its best, but David rightly points out EveryBlock as a valid news source, another example of packetization of media.

However, I think his proposal and viewpoint are two narrow for the true meaning of public media. Where is the place of the financial skills management site in the public broadcasting universe? What is the responsibility for public media to move beyond the 'companion web site' to the the power and authority of public broadcasting to organize a digital diabetes program and into an ongoing resource for helping low-income Americans manage their chronic disease regime?

There are organizations - public organizations, individuals, nonprofits - that are doing this work everyday and using the ubiquity of the web to reach new audiences with new transactions and services, as well as information and education. What is their role in the future of public broadcasting, or for that matter in the proposed National Journalism Foundation?

The Smallest Unit of Information

rbolepdx@gmail.com (Rob Bole) — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 07:14:00 +0000

I have become a semi-avid Twitter user over the past several weeks as a way to take notes during talks that I found interesting, get the word out on our work and occasionally relate what is strange and wonderful. While I don't use it too frequently, I have found it convenient and a good way to distribute information.

Using Twitter has made me wonder what is the smallest unit of information that is useful to help people make a decision or be "informed"?

Twitter is 'micro-blogging' within 140 characters, about three short sentences. While not clear to me the character limit on a Facebook status it seems they are only effective in one sentence. Most video news clips are not much longer than one to two minutes.

We are increasingly parsing our existence into smaller or smaller units and then distributing those small packets out to our social networks in new ways, back through Facebook, onto Youtube, personal Podcasts and so on.

Public media has always excelled with the long form; the hour and half documentary; the 58 minute program; and even the smallest unit, the 28 minute talk show. This form is effective in implementing instructional design, communicating important contextual information and helping to viewers to connect to the material.

This, of course, all goes to hell when you cut the material down into a two minute clip. But does it lose its value as a piece of information? Does it lose it's public purpose? I think that it probably does because the content was never meant to be digested in the digital age. The fact that it was recorded digitally and posted on the Internet means little other than it is more "distributable".

The problem lies in the fact that while the Internet has begun to make the short-form documentary (<5 minutes) more than just a demo reel for filmmakers, we still have an emerging opportunity to Think Smaller about public purpose content. How small can we go to help fulfill our goals of education and action?

The right answer is probably "it depends"; depends on what is the purpose of the content - education? information? skill-building? advocacy? It depends on the audience and how well you know them. It depends on the level of action/outcome you expect.

One role of ultra-short content is as a teaser to lead people into a fuller form of content. The Facebook status is a great example that leads people to more information. Another role is the short clip to teach a discrete step or a single piece of information, stripped bare. It could have the purpose of linking people together, long chains of individuals each connected by a small content element, like electrons orbiting a nucleus. (Or better yet, chains of quarks.)

One of the things that I most liked about the Internet when it started was the hyper-link, which for me was taking small pieces of information and linking to a related piece of information and linking to another piece of information and so on and so on and so on...until you built a wholly different appreciation of the subject. From the Blue Whale to textile manufacturing in ten easy steps.

In the rush for complexity and structure I think we may have lost the the appreciation of small units of information. Perhaps it is time again to reformulate the greatness of smallness?

Obstacles to Sharing in Public Media

rbolepdx@gmail.com (Rob Bole) — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 23:48:00 +0000

There was a recent blog post from Steve Bowbrick at BBC Common Platform about the obstacles to "sharing content, technology and resources with the outside world" that is particularly practical here in the States. Steve's graphic of the obstacles he has cataloged:

Besides the very nice handwriting, he makes the point:

The number one obstacle, if the many conversations I’ve had here at the BBC over the last few weeks are anything to go by, is rights. Rights rights rights. Rights rights rights rights rights. The Gordian knot of multiple, overlapping rights regimes and multiple historic rights owners for every asset in the BBC’s catalogue.

Here is the start of my response:

The rights issue is a big obstacle and one that folks just hate to address because if involves the economic interests of folks we love to love, namely artists, documentary filmmakers, etc. and folks that we love to hate, such as Hollywood, commercial media, reality shows, etc.
It also involves lawyers, which can drive media folks batty…so there are lots of obstacles to just getting up enough energy to address the point.

However, there is also another issue that tends to get swept under the rug a bit: “To what purpose?” Sharing is great for self-expression as Lessig suggests, but the leap from “re-expressing” to original content is not too wide or insurmountable. If folks want to create, they can create without having to go to far afield in finding cleared or free content.

Here is what I would ask us to work on: let’s carefully define the purpose of sharing and follow that through the thicket of rights, especially with the BBC or US public broadcasting. If sharing leads to a substantial benefit for a definable public purpose (i.e. fighting poverty) then that should be the guiding point for both pursuing the collaboration, as well as modeling organizational behavior.

For full discussion on Steve's blog here and on, oddly enough, Flickr here.

Been A Long Time

rbolepdx@gmail.com (Rob Bole) — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 04:08:00 +0000

My blogging has slowed down in the past several weeks as work has picked up and there has been disasters all about -- Hurricane Ike and then the markets. And then the big one, the election. This has been an interesting time for One Economy of late, as well as public media in general.

I am not sure that I feel that our response to the times has been quite adequate. Public media has spent a lot of time preparing for the election and the results have been impressive. Everything from the overnight defacto role of You Tube, to the impressive "election centers" of both the commercial stations, as well as the PBS Vote 2008 and NPR's Election 2008. In an upcoming blog post I will pull together my notes comparing how public media's digital coverage of the election compares to their higher profile counterparts.

What has rocked through our collective world has been the series of hurricanes, with the most serious being Ike slamming into the Texas and Louisiana, and then the one-two punch of the economic crisis.

On one hand, I was so very proud of our team, especially the lead, Colin Lovett in pulling together our Ike response to the people displaced or cut off in their homes in Texas. We put up the Hurricane Ike Help Center and continually improved the site over the few days out of the launch. What we did that was great was deploy a team of young interns to explore and identify open resources for people in the community, such as pharmacies, grocery stores, health clinics, etc.

Paired with our work is the work of Andy Carvin and his huge array of volunteers at the Hurricane Information Center. As much as One Economy created a hurricane center based on a controlled workforce, Andy successfully leveraged a huge network of supporters, volunteers and a true "open source" community effort to create something special.

However, One Economy has been slower on the economic crisis. Keep your eyes open for our response. At the same time public media has not done an impressive job either. We have all been describing how big the economic disaster wave is ("My, my, my...that is certainly a big wave."), but not focused on the impact that wave is going to have on the families we ultimately serve.

One exception is what the Washington Post is doing with their Hard Times series. I have been very impressed by the quality of reporting and the presentation online. It is effective, compelling and, most importantly, authentic. It rings true with what we are feeling in the country today.

These are the challenges that we face. These are the challenges that are the most important for us to address everyday.

Make Me Happy, Love Me and I am Yours

rbolepdx@gmail.com (Rob Bole) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 20:45:00 +0000

I came across a wonderful presentation on Karl Long's blog ExperienceCurve. This is a great poke in the ribs to make sure we are building information and content that is engaging, relevant, but also makes people happy (i.e. improve their lives).

Happiness as Your Business Model

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: magnolia worpress)

What Time is It? or Midnight on the Internet

rbolepdx@gmail.com (Rob Bole) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 05:00:00 +0000

I had a very good conversation with my wife recently about the value of accessing media at all times of the day (and night). She is a dedicated mother and professional that works part-time, a decision we both made during the young lives of our two children.

While this does not compare to many of the experiences of the women that my nonprofit serves - young, single moms - it does give a flavor of the world of people trying to find the time to improve their lives, catch up to the world around them and generally find what they need on the Internet.

By watching her what comes readily apparent, as was her very convincing argument to me, was that we in public media should be spending far more time thinking about the temporal qualities of our online content and tools. She believes that we take for granted that because we are posting our content digitally that it is accessible 24/7. Her argument is that our content may be searchable, readable and even interactive at any time, but it is certainly not built for people using content in small amounts of time sandwiched in between putting the kids to bed, or after paying the bills and going to sleep at midnight.

A young mother at 10:30 pm with 30 minutes prior to falling down in exhaustion needs some special attention to detail to get content points across. Here are seven lessons from a harried mom for creating great midnight content:

"I'm too tired to search for it" - midnight users like to have simple, clean, crisp design. Tired eyes don't scan well on active, messy pages, nor do they sort well through complex information structures.
"Oh God, it's a tome" - lose the wordiness, get to the point, I don't have all night.
"I'm lost!" - don't get too clever with the internal linking, we want straight stories that lead from key point to key point to tool to picture to etc.
"What else do ya got?" - we appreciate grouping of content, such as an article, a poll, a tool, etc, but again it needs to be labeled clearly with appropriate design ques. Don't make me guess what I am looking at.
"I'm just passing through" - please don't make me go through registration to look at the simple stuff, or even use the interactive if I don't think I am coming back. If I have to remember one more password I am going to kill someone.
"Community, schmunnity" - please hold the discussion forums, the comment sections and all of the other ways for me to leave you feed back or get involved. If I like it you can show your boss my time on site, but I don't want to meet your friends.
"Nor do I want to get to know you" - hold the emails, I am not looking for being your buddy.

I would love to hear your own thoughts about how to make digital content more consumable in the midnight hour, as well as differences between the young, old, woman, men, etc. I would also love to see a contest - hmmmm - that challenges designers and developers to make a site exclusively for people to view between midnight and 4 am. I wonder what we would get...

Day 2 & 3 Impressions

rbolepdx@gmail.com (Rob Bole) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 07:38:00 +0000

The insanity continues...but I am starting to discern some interesting order. There are at least three orders of participants: the plebiscite that travels on foot, the political sharks seemingly lounge just inside roped barriers (how they move from party to party is still unknown) and Elite, who definitely travel by screaming motorcade.

There are also stars there, of both the political stripe and movie types. I was at a party for 14 Women, a movie about the women of the Senate. I am not sure about the movie, but the celebrities were fast and thick...Anne Hathaway, Susan Sarandon, Angela Bassett, Annette Benning, Ellen Burstyn, Toby from the West Wing, Rachel Leigh Cooke, Tony Goldwyn...etc. Since I had a press pass, I got to go up to the "VIP Lounge" and hang out with them, sort of. In many ways they were very regular folks...just with lots of security about. I spoke with a couple of them, just quick chats, but it was interesting at least.

I have not provided any impressions of the actual political speeches, events and people. That is because I only saw the convention when I actually left and watched it on TV. Frankly, I was working a lot and did not get to see anything.

That is not to say that I did not see some of the back office. I got into the "unassigned press gallery", which I thought would be some impressive set booths on the floor, something like you see in the Senate with Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Don't think so, it was two stories under the floor of the arena. There were long tables with hundreds reporters all typing and filing away on their computers. There were a number "spin doctors" floating about, but I believe they were about 14 and from Iowa...so we must have not been very important.

I also wandered behind the TV studios and got glimpses of the floor through the bright lights of the studio...but that was about it.

There were two other notable encouters. The first was with my old boss's, boss's, boss, Ed Rendell, now the Governor of Pennsylvania, but formerly the Mayor of Phiadelphia. I saw him going into the Westin and quickly introduced myself as a former employee. He stopped everybody, turned towards me and asked what I was doing now, how I was doing, etc. It was the same old Ed magic and it was thrilling for me.

The second was a 10 minute chat with Gary Knell, CEO of the Sesame Workshop. I introduced myself and he came and sat at a table I was at and we compared notes about public broadcasting. I am a great admirer of his leadership in charting a new media course at the Workshop and that was also a thrill.

OK, so this post, again, has nothing to do with public media, and almost nothing redeeming about it, but I will have to think about what I learned...and share with you the amazing footage we got at the convention for the If I Were President campaign.

Day 1 Impressions: Innovation & US Economy

rbolepdx@gmail.com (Rob Bole) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 22:33:00 +0000

Today was a bit of insanity. There were thousands and thousands of people going here and there very importantly. There were famous faces. There were faces that seemed important, or least that is how they looked. And there was security. Lots of security.

Amongst the meeting journalists, bloggers and the multitude of DNCC staffers who hand and take away tickets, lanyards and passes, I did manage to take in the New Democrat Coalition's Forum on Competitiveness & Innovation. It was a large panel that was dominated by Big Pharma - Eli Lili, Pfizer, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Medco Health Solutions and Amgen and a smattering of Congress representatives. Also the CEO of Best Buy...very odd. Of course the striking thing is that there was not one person from technology, nor Silicon Valley. Two big guns from Google's government relations where there, I wander what they thought about it.

However, there were some interesting thinking being laid out everyonce in awhile.

We Don't Invest Enough in R&D - The ratio between R&D and the US GDP has not changed since 1992.
Everyone Should Know What is IP - The panel felt that US citizens should be aware of the importance of intellectual property...well that might be a stretch considering they are more aware of losing their homes and their jobs. Which leads us to WalMart, the place where half of America gets conditioned to goods that are copies of styles of other people's R&D.
To the WTO! - A number of Congress folks wanted us to march to the WTO more often to take the bad guys, China I am going to assume, to task.
Please Don't Go, Just When We Started to Like You - most of the CEOs were concerned that our visa and asylum systems were pretty terrible in keeping talent in the country. Interestingly it was "All Quiet on the Western Front" with the Congress folks on the panel...

So, what does this have to do with public purpose media? I want to think more about it, but for many it seems like we are looking at the wrong industries to get the innovation that truly challenges us.

At A Supposedly Historical Moment

rbolepdx@gmail.com (Rob Bole) — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 05:34:00 +0000

Today I arrived in Denver for the start of the Democratic National Convention. The nonprofit I work for, One Economy, has a media site called 247townhall.org. The site is a place for young people to get involved, connected and have a platform for their thoughts and ideas. Our goal is to help young people begin a conversation that leads to both personal and community change.

Under the very creative and able hands of Mohammed Bilal, the Managing Editor of 247, we have launched a campaign called "If I Were President". Working with GOOD Magazine, Rock the Vote and others we have both celebrities as well as over a hundred (and growing)young people finishing the simple statement of "If I was President I would..." The responses are funny (see Mos Def's outtakes), interesting, clever and powerful.

The campaign, which will be officially launching in September through the elections have led us to come to Denver, and then Minneapolis after that to get at the heart of what it means to the leader of the United States.

I have never been to a convention, but I am hoping to meet interesting folks, be inspired and get to see how a democracy works at its most flamboyant. Everyday I will write a dispatch of what I saw, heard and did (or what was did to me...lots of security here). I also have signed up a Twitter account to keep those that are interested in what happens every second, but also as a way to take mobile notes along the way.

Up early tomorrow to pick up my press credentials and off to the Show!

Organize Something

rbolepdx@gmail.com (Rob Bole) — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 19:00:00 +0000

There are moments in your work where you start to think about breaking free of the projects that are in front of you and doing something completely different. That happens to me whenever I read the paper or a blog post about someone coming up with an interesting media site, or a new set of functionality where everyone goes "Ah, yes..." (It is at these times that I remind myself that I AM actually doing what I want to do and broke free of another, older life...oh well, that is just me.)

There is that urge to be the sole genius or even the person with the special gaze that can see disparate pieces that really form a coherent pattern. That is certainly what popular culture likes to laud, but I think there is an equally interesting, and potentially more important, impulse.

Organize Something

Many of the original fortunes of the Internet were built on organizing: organizing book sales, organizing auctions, organizing information, etc. There is still a lot of organizing left to be done and not just for the marketplace. (Though that is a sweet opportunity for the big payout.)

If anything, public purpose media has TOO many rich targets for organizing. The marketplace is, frankly, a mess.

The uber-post Web 2.0 thinking for me came awhile ago in Umair Hacque's A Manifesto for the Next Industrial Revolution, which urges us to "organize" a bunch of very important somethings, he writes:

"A blueprint for the next industrial revolution emerges. Here’s what it looks like.

Organize the world's hunger.
Organize the world’s energy.
Organize the world’s thirst.
Organize the world's health.
Organize the world's freedom.
Organize the world's finance.
Organize the world's education."

Well, let's not ever suggest that Umair is a small thinker...but this list is not a bad place for public purpose media thinkers to start as well. There is plenty of fragmentation in the delivery of services and information above where media can play a strong role in helping to improve lives.

The Role of Fragmentation
Before I go off on organizing, let me say there is definately a role for fragmentation in the world. For one, fragmentation can often represent creativity. After Katrina there were hundreds, if not thousands of sites started on bringing people news and information on what was happening. As the tools for the creation and distribution of content/funcationlality drive to ubiquity we get a great unleashing of creativity, but at the same time we are awash in stuff. Stuff on the Internet is everywhere.

Pick Up Your Stuff

In particular I like something that appeared on the Broadstuff blog in response to a string of thinking about Hacque's challenge. In particular I like this bit:

People would rather live with a problem they can't solve than a solution they don't understand. There is a risk of applying the most modern technologies to problems that can be more simply solved....In my view Web media have especially high impact potential as they:

Reduce transaction costs
Access to correct information
Allow people to self organise
New financial structures

These seem to me to be the perfect corallory to Hacque's grand vision and provide a set of guiding rule as we think about media with a public purpose's response to the opportunities presented in organizing our world.

The Memory Project

rbolepdx@gmail.com (Rob Bole) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 07:48:00 +0000

How does a community remember? How do digital communities integrate past knowledge into new conversations? How does social media begin to store, categorize and most importantly serve up collective memories for examination and self-awareness?

Just a few questions posed for a side project I am starting...would love your input.

Open Source the PBS Player

rbolepdx@gmail.com (Rob Bole) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:48:00 +0000

A few weeks ago PBS announced that they selected thePlatform, partially owned by Comcast to create a media player for all online streaming, including affiliate video. This was a solid start in building a system-wide digital strategy and was a nice complement to their announcement that they would be distributing content through the fantastic Hulu service.

The Big Bear in the Room

The strategy obviously bears some comparison to the already established BBCi Player that is gaining great reviews and traction in the UK. While the BBC has a completely different operating environment than PBS, there are great lessons to be learned (to be stolen...um, honor with imitation) from their player. Some highlights ripe for borrowing:

Cinematic design with a dramatic dark background (or go converse with Hulu's white background) that sets off the videos.
Good organization of programming, by channel, cateogry and a solid "all channel" line-up.
Cool use of the iconic buttons in the radio channels, which could be repurposed for PBS on content types.

Frontline Ain't No Slouch Either

However, beyond ooh and aahing over all things British, the folks at Frontline and WGBH have created their own very solid player. The home page of the individual Frontline series is nicely laid out, connects with lots of the high-quality supplementary content (an improvement over BBCi) and the player itself itself is commendable in its simplicity of presentation.

What Do We Want?! Open Source the PBS Player

I don't mean that PBS should create an open source player, but rather let's open up the next generation of video streaming to creative partnering with the broader world of public purpose media entities. Let's stretch ourselves to move beyond lovely display and into concrete action.

What is the next generation?

Simple, it is helping people take the next step. Meaning that public purpose media should lead users to improve their lives, whether it is becoming more engaged in their communities, expanding their education or taking a concrete action in their personal lives. We must break away from the hubris that great art/film is the act in itself. What we want from public media is to be informed and inspired, but also lead to improvement, to action, to the next step.

And to be honest, PBS nor NPR are in any position to make that next step occur. They need help. They need partners. They need to socialize with the rest of the world. Come on, it's only lunch.

The Take Action Widget

A challenge: PBS should convene a small group of savvy public purpose entities, folks like The Nature Conservancy, the Smithsonian Institution, and - if I can humbly submit - One Economy Corporation to design a series of experimental widgets for the PBS player that could be attached directly to a program or category of programming. The purpose of the widget would be to connect users directly to action, as well as broaden the reach of PBS to play a more significant role in the lives of its viewers. For example, you watching a great program about endangered frogs on Nature and the Nature Conservancy widget let's you sign up for their 'Frog Alert' news service, connects you with an upcoming Amphibian Rally and '10 lessons in Saving Frogs in Your Home Town'.

There will no doubt a number of things to consider - how to 'certify' proposed widget creation, how to make sure that the connections are not self-serving, but public service, and so on. However, by allowing the broader world of public purpose media to participate, that is also allowing affiliates to work with their own local partners, PBS can leap frog beyond playing catch-up to showing the world a thing or two about public media.

Public Media: The Virus

rbolepdx@gmail.com (Rob Bole) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:41:00 +0000

Is it better to control the distribution channel or is it better to infect mass media?

I am increasingly believing that the best bet for the future of public media is to forsake the old fortress mentality of purity and sanctity and throw the lot in with the barbarians of commercialism and supposed nihilism. When the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created in 1967 we believed that our democracy needed to "enhance the knowledge, and citizenship, and inspire the imagination of all Americans." However...things have a way of changing don't they?

When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there for a day without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you — and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.
-- Newton N. Minow on May 9, 1961

The Internet as English Ivy
Victor Kamber quipped that with the growth of the Internet that "the wasteland has only grown vaster", but at the same time, like a virulent case of English Ivy, it has grown into the cracks to bring information to new audiences and new ways. While one could argue that this, this and this are Minnow's worst nightmare on steroids as a distribution channel the Internet has tended to prove itself out as not so bad.

And what about the Public Broadcasting side? Umm, not so good. As one example, in a recent NY Times article stated "The average PBS show on prime time now scores about a 1.4 Nielsen rating, or a little over half of what the wrestling show “Friday Night Smackdown” gets." (To be fair, they pointed out that NPR listeners are up to over 30 million from just 2 million in 1980.)

Laughing Babies Drive Me Crazy
While there are literally thousands of opportunities to distribute content that are open to mass audiences, the ability to actually reach those masses is not such a sure thing. You can post a great, solid piece of work on You Tube, but that damn laughing baby is going to kick your butt.

If a public purpose media entity wants to move to scale they are going to have to look to infecting their content into existing media channels.

As media distribution companies proliferate online they are increasingly searching for authentic, quality content in areas we might consider for a "public purpose". For example Think.MTV (broadcast), Good Magazine (publication) and Current (cable) are all examples of what would have been traditional outlets that are aggressively online creating and aggregating content for mass audiences, but with a clear monetization strategy in mind.

Top Reasons to Infect Commercial Channels
We need to become public media viruses, infecting the host body with high quality, in-demand, authentic content. We use the infected system's infrastructure to distribute our content amidst commercial content that is engaging, entertaining; something that much of public media - still - needs to learn.

Multi-Modal Marketing - love the triple play of publishing, .tv and mobile.

Standing Next to Angelina Jolie - if there is someone gorgeous next to you it makes you prettier

Be More Interesting - a little competition with a bit of celebrity here, a little ironic humor there...it's not going to hurt you for pete's sakes.

Ad Revenue (Share the Wealth) - a little money to help fund the mission isn't going to hurt...

Co-Production - ah, the ultimate potential, working with Viacom on a four-part series on diabetes in America, the other triple play: cash flow, distribution & leveraing talent.

New Skills Required
The traditional skills of the film documentation need to be adopted by online public media producers to increasingly court these hybrid channels for opportunities to co-produce and distribute their content. Current's Make a Pod content is a great example of the new medium of scalable public media distribution. And now just compare that with PBS's producers site.

Laws & Money
The mad, mad, mad new world content producers are going to have to start to get comfortable with a new world of digital copyrights, creative common licenses, promotional rights, etc. We are also going to have to increasingly understand and present content with clear eyes towards monetization strategies that provide targeted web-based products and increasing potential for advertising dollars. That means starting with the niche audiences and keying on the trends that drive traffic and dollars. Lastly it will mean at least a passing understanding on the underlying technology of online monetization, including Google's AdSense and Microsoft's adCenter.

I don't believe that the future of public media will be rosy unless we start breaking the molds. Let's not recreate the traditional broadcast world online by a go-it-alone approach. For public media producers at scale we need to reset both the legal, monetary and creative landscape. Start to pick up the phone and start dialing those 27 year old New Media, Business Development folks...they are waiting for your call.

Social Media & Disasters: Creating Community Content

rbolepdx@gmail.com (Rob Bole) — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 02:47:00 +0000

The place where the public media rubber meets the proverbial road is in response to a disaster, which are increasingly displacing huge numbers of individuals and causing billions of dollars of damage. For example, Hurricane Katrina caused over 1,800 deaths, displaced well over 50,000 people and caused over $81 billion dollars of damage.

Online Media Takes Charge...Sort Of

The Internet is almost the perfect medium for a quick response and information. There is a hurricane, a fire or a flood and almost instantly you can find a Flickr feed, videos on You Tube, an article on Wikipedia (see this example) and people giving up to the minute coverage via Twitter. In fact in most cases today it seems that online social media reporting is beating conventional news sources to the punch in bringing disasters into the media stream.

You get convergence of too many donated goods, too many self-deployed firemen. You may now have a convergence of too many freestyle bloggers and wiki types and whatever. How do you sort out charlatans from the real, and how do you give primary attention to the ones who are authentic and credible? - Claire Rubin, Emergency Management Fellow, George Washington University

The problem is how do we make it sensible, usable and actionable? A primary culprit is the market failure of organizing information and resources. There are significant efforts underway to create standards for "responders" and some very admirable news clearing houses, such as ReliefWeb, Reuters AlertNet and HumanitarianInfo, but none of these sites fully leverage the power of social media to build a framework for individuals caught in a disaster (or recovery) to take action. Everybody always hands the next step off to the other guy.

How can we leverage the power of online media to directly help people access resources and services? I can mortgage my house, buy a dog, find a partner and get health advice online...but if I am caught in a disaster I can only get "call this person" or "donate here".

Stages of a Disaster

The most important decision when formulating a response is figuring out what are the problems you are trying to solve. Is there a lack of news coverage? Are people finding resources? Are families separated from loved ones?

The next dimension is considering at what time to implement a social media response. There are common stages to disaster recovery, detailed in this chart by Ray Schurfield. They are:

Heroic (Immediate) - person takes actions to protect lives and property. Social Circle = family, neighbors & emergency teams.
Tunnel Vision (Weeks, to Months) - detachment & emotional numbing with person very-activity focused on basic tasks. Social Circle = Family, friends, work colleagues, civic groups.
Honeymoon (One Week to Three Months) - strong sense of lived through an experience, clearing debris and wreckage. Social Circle = Pre-existing & emergent community groups.
Disillusionment (Third Week Onward) - disappointment, anger, sadness over unfilled promises of aid. Focused on rebuilding personal life and sense of community lost. Social Circle = Self, Family.
Reconstruction/Recovery (Lasts of Several Years) - sense of determination in solving problems, seeking help and rebuilding lives. Social Circle = Community Groups, Government

Effective Media Tools for Disasters

Each of the stages have more effective social media tools than others, considering both the ability (mental and otherwise) of people caught in the disaster to use the tools, as well as the application for the tool at the time.

Twitter - in the immediate after effects (heroic phase) many disasters knock down widespread Internet access, but mobile devices are still able to connect. There are obvious voice applications, but online applications like Twitter have the potential to be a great resource users. The potential for disbursed family members to keep coordinated. Twitter has been used as a way to post minute-by-minute news updates, which was used to great affect during the Southern California Fires, but still remains to be proven as a family organizing tool.

Wikis - in both building common knowledge and where the situation is constantly evolving the creation of wikis play an increasing important role to support communities. The most obvious usage has been reporting and analyzing news, however they could support community building during Honeymoon to Restoration phases. Wikis can be effective tools to pool knowledge about the state of a community, of the location for emergency services and even basic community knowledge as it rebuilds itself.

Flickr/YouTube - whenever disaster strikes immediately we see photos and videos posted, and beyond the gawking factor, rich media can provide immediate, accessible and high quality information. While deploying a camera crew can seem daunting, today there are more high quality, but low-cost options than ever before. For example a Flip camera combined with off-the-shelf video editing program and you can quickly get video online through You Tube or other video streaming site. We (One Economy) deployed three staff to Southern California and over three days captured almost two hours of edited video of Red Cross, Homeland Security and other responders providing first-hand accounts of where people can get help, what to bring and what to expect.

Discussion Forums - perhaps much maligned, the old school discussion forum, especially moderated by experts can play a key role in helping to build community and share common knowledge.

Google Maps - mapping is finally coming of age, especially the robust tools that are available via Google Maps and Google Earth. The Red Cross has some particularly good examples of using mashups to chart disaster information. Building a mashup gives community members a visual picture of the community, especially of the relationship between government and other relief services. However, as Paul Currion on Humanitarian.info noted in a good discussion of maps "all of these magical online map services rely on the not-so-magical process of somebody actually doing the mapping, and to confirm a major change such as the destruction of a bridge requires an official survey." One suggested solution was a project that Michael Maron is working on called the Open Street Map, which is a community-built wiki world map, which seemingly responds to the 'ground truthing' problem.

Good Old Content - to go completely old school, some of the best tools in response to a disaster is simply picking up the phone, get busy on Google and start writing content that helps users navigate the complex systems of relief and recovery. One of the best examples where elbow grease has made all of the difference is one of the best recovery sites ever build, Lousiana Rebuilds. One Economy did have a very small role in the creation and growth of the site, but this effort is well worth replicating and is worth a whole separate post.

Getting Ready for the Next One

Beyond making the important decisions about defining what is the problem that needs to be solved and what stage should an online intervention happen, is the preparation that happens before the disaster. This includes a clear set of procedures, along with a framework site is a must for a successful response. A good rule of thumb is something you can 'unwrap' in less than 48 hours with starting content shows that you are on track. In a subsequent post I will go into how One Economy has built its disaster response.

PBS Starting To Make Big Moves in Video

rbolepdx@gmail.com (Rob Bole) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:57:00 +0000

There have been two recent news items about PBS making strong moves in video distribution of great interest.

The most recent was an announcement that they would be distributing content, such as episodes of NOVA, Wired Science, and other programming through Hulu, a company created to stream video, mainly TV and movie, content. Read more at NY Times technology blog.

The other piece of news was that PBS has recently signed up with thePlatform, a media management company that is a subsidiary of Comcast. By adopting a central video management and distribution platform PBS will manage the broadband video back end for both the main PBS portal and distribute video to station sites, help stations publish local content on their own sites and let stations share videos with other stations’ sites. Read more at Current.org.

Two major moves in the matter of a few weeks? This is an interesting set of aggressive moves that somewhat seem at cross purposes. On one hand they are making a major investment into a media platform for aggregating content across their national and affiliate sites, and then a new push to syndicate content onto a separate channel. And Comcast and the News Corporation to boot.

I am looking forward to watching these developments.

Tag Your It: Mobile My Existence

rbolepdx@gmail.com (Rob Bole) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 23:09:00 +0000

Everybody is talking mobile platform as alternative methods of reaching low-income populations. In a previous post, To Innovate or Not To Innovate, I talked about how advanced cell phone technology is being distributed by rapid replacement cycles. However, for public purpose media content we are ages behind in being clever about the mobile phone world. Largely the best thinking is about alternative distribution of information through opt-in SMS news services...

Perhaps we need to look to the gaming industry, and here is an interesting application: PhoneTag Elite. I have no idea if it will be successful, but it sounds pretty fun:

PhoneTag Elite™ -- an Exciting New Mobile Adventure

PhoneTag Elite™ is a hi-tech game of tag, played alone or with a group of friends that utilizes the GPS in your mobile phone. Location is key and your mission is to capture your opponent while cleverly outmaneuvering your captor. Using your mobile phone as a navigational aid, you physically move around the streets or parks as displayed on your mobile map as you attempt to capture your target and evade your pursuer.

PhoneTag Elite™ builds both team and community relationships, encourages physical and mental agility, and introduces a new way of playing virtual games from your mobile phone. But, most of all PhoneTag Elite™ is designed to be fun and build community with you and your peers.

Gameplay Modes

PhoneTag Elite™ has two types of game play: standard and team. In both types of play you will be placed onto a map specific to your location. Additionally, you can play PhoneTag Elite™ with a group of friends or you can join an existing game that has players from anywhere across the United States.

Hmmm...what could we do with this? Health tag? Money Tag?

Wonder Twin Power Activate: Part 1

rbolepdx@gmail.com (Rob Bole) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 23:29:00 +0000

OK, they are not twins (nor triplets), but I want to celebrate the power of teams in making great content work. This all may be very obvious for most online content developers, but we often forget, especially in the blogging world, that great content is not created by the lone genius. However, for the "public purpose media" world there are so few large organizations working on building interactive public purpose content that it is largely left up to the lone guns sorted about the Internet.

This is one part of my team at One Economy, namely the three project managers who shepard content from idea to actuality. They are Ada Kardos, Bob Hollister and Tom Quick in order. They have the splendid role of taking the crazy ideas from our CEO, me, our partners, our Producers and pulling them into workable functional specification document and then stewarding the work as it passes to programmers, designers, through usability testing and then out into the world. And then they do it all over again with functional updates forever more.

In One Economy's evolution the use of Project Managers is a relatively recent phenomenon, with the full team only being on-board in the last six months. Before that it was just Tom Quick and our now Director of Technology, Clark Ritchie. However, this direction has made all of the difference. Under the direction of Richard Tammar, our Director of Web Development, we have been moving aggressively from building projects to building platforms, which in the end has fundamentally improved our productivity, sustaining cost structures and flexibility.

For those readers that are professional web developers or media types this is all old hat, but, again for those organizations that are struggling with how to use media for community development let me clearly state that you should consider using a project manager for anything beyond putting up a simple page of content. Any moving parts? = Project Manager

The 10 Characteristics of Great Project Managers

Detail Oriented - the more anal the better as web development dies on the unanticipated details.
Organized/Logical - you may be detailed oriented, but if you do not take those details and organize them into a logical framework then forget about it...
Clear - they draw out from you all of the scenarios that users will engage with the site and then for good measure come up with a few more that you did not consider.
Reformed Programmers - a good project manager is at least an OK programmer, they need to understand the capabilities of the language and mechanics.
Communicators - the central function of a project manager is to be a connector and communicator and make sure that designers, producers and programmers are moving towards the same goal.
Good Sense of Humor - a dry sense of humor is the best as it is amazing the amount of changes, details, personalities that come cascading down on a project.
Knowing the 20% - my rule-of-thumb, taught by my CEO, is that most project sponsors come with wanting, demanding for about 20% of a project and the rest they don't really care about or is seemingly 'behind the scenes', which can be maddening as that stuff really, really matters and the visionary principle does not have a clue on the core infrastructure. (I am describing me by the way.)
Mean Bastards Underneath - OK, it seems like a Project Manager is a really nice person, but underneath it they have to MAKE people get the job done at a high quality. That can be by wearing someone down or getting on the phone and sticking it to them to "get it done right this time!"
Dates Mean Dates - see above, but apply it to production dates. These really matter and if your project manager does not understand that then they are not a project manager.
Innovative Long-term Vision - from my personal experience, the best project manager is all above, but they are always thinking about making things better for the launch and for long-term sustainability of the work. They need to know the likely movements of technology and help us stay ahead.

I only wish that you could have Project Managers as good as ours...and no, you can't steal them.

A New Media Marketplace

rbolepdx@gmail.com (Rob Bole) — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 00:13:00 +0000

I broadly break up the media world into three major actors: Original Content Producers, Content Aggregators and Content Channel Distributors. As often the case with horizontal and vertical integration many, if not most actors have a stake in all three areas. One of the best examples is Current, which has Current TV and online (Distributor), gathering user submissions (Aggregator) and does its own news reports (Producer).

Through my work at One Economy we also play in all three roles; we create original content, we aggregate it in channels such as our media site 247townhall and distribute it over platforms like the forthcoming Public Internet Channel. But the interesting issues are not the pieces, but how we are evolving those pieces into a portfolio of media offerings that in turn, play a role in helping to reorganize our notions of public purpose media.

The Marketplace of Media

Imagine a bazaar in some dusty, far off city. It stretches from horizon to horizon and filled with colorful tents to cool, dim souks to high minarets where the people are called to prayer. And in this marketplace are thousands and thousands of buyers and sellers all frenetically calling out prices and wares, sorting through huge piles of products and negotiating for services. It is just a big, messy, crazy place, but it has a certain charm.

Now transpose that to the digital world. We have sellers and buyers all looking for each other. The buyers are looking for online content or services or products and trying the best way to discover the perfect thing at the best price. The sellers are putting up larger and louder websites jostling for real estate to catch the digital eye.

We love the marketplace and people get rich off of building a better map of the marketplace (Google), aggregating products and services into big box digital retailers (Amazon), creating unique products and distributing them (Current.com) or even organizing their own section of the bazaar into a mini-marketplace (eBay).

The Clean Room

Inside of this hectic, crazy, kinetic bazaar is one area that is orderly, quiet, clean, friendly if perhaps a bit bland and all of the content is "above average". The only problem is that the content produced is not terribly useful (i.e. almost everything in a high-end furniture store), and the other big problem is that there are really, really high walls with guards that surround the this oasis of a marketplace that only let in highest, but expensive digital goods.

This is the current state of the public purpose media marketplace.

If we dare to to venture out into the bazaar and poke around a bit we can find wonderful content. The revolution has put the tools of quality into the hands of everyone and people are using them to build information and services that are completely new and innovative. Then there is content created by the sellers themselves, rough, but exhibit characteristics what is most in demand, that it is "authentic" or true. There is a lot going on that is fantastic in the crazy bazaar, but it is hard to find amongst everything else and largely it is created for its own sake and not connected to anything else.

The Most Beautiful Vase Ever

Also these small artisans have no natural home, so they set up their own little tent, create the content and try to distribute it out into the world. Sometimes it goes viral thanks to You Tube or Digg (to mix analogies, the Roman forum of content), but generally it is more like Garden Girl TV.

Garden Girl is produced by Patti Moreno and her husband in Boston. The show is focused on "urban sustainable living" and it is a close rival to broadcast quality, but at a fraction of the cost. It is flexible, fun, inspiring and educational. And it was done without huge production houses, distribution deals and complex financing. It has value, it is useful and it is worthy.

However, in the bazaar there is the most ironic thing happening. The big sellers have trouble in finding the handcrafted authentic product to turn into money. The handcrafted product can't leverage the resources of the big boys to turn their authentic information into their goals of public purpose action. And the only place that has the current potential to organize the marketplace, the public broadcasting system, has built around itself an unassailable wall to ward off - rightly or wrongly - the taint of commercialism.

One Economy & Public Purpose Media: A New Marketplace

One Economy and its work represents the founding of a new association of sellers and buyers within the huge bazaar and we are going to do it in a whole new way. While we are going to have some walls (standards), they are going to be a lot lower than public broadcasting. We are going to revel in the craziness in our quest to find great content from the Original Content Producers and we are going to partner with our fellow Content Aggregators, but offer them something new by helping a) organize the OCP folks and b) add some value with our own "Take Action" content. And finally we are going to partner with the big box sellers in the bazaar, the Content Distributors to give them something that public broadcasting cannot, mainly organized, regular, actionable, discoverable content that can be monetized.

We are remaking the rules all the time, and while I cannot say what the future holds it is great fun and with great purpose that we hope we will acquit ourselves with great distinction. So stay tuned for the Public Internet Channel and the future.

Walking with Dinosaurs

rbolepdx@gmail.com (Rob Bole) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 03:00:00 +0000

I had a meeting today with a not-to-be-named educational financial service provider about a potential content sharing relationship that would improve information for college-bound low-income students. They are going through a number of financial troubles, so that they are cutting back their "community funding", which is understandable. What we were offering was to license a portion their content and distribute it on the Beehive with appropriate attribution branding.

A Win-Win?
It was what would appear as a classic win-win. They would use our channel to get their content (and related branding, as we vetted the content as being accurate and non-commercial) about how to appropriately finance a college education for low-income folks and we would get what we saw as solid content by experts that they would help maintain.

Upload Digital, Download Print The first issue arose when all of the content was only maintained as a PDF. OK, it is printable, so the logic is that organizations pass it out to folks without access. It might be a little cynical as studies generally show that income is not a predictor of online behavior and that most US measures show that the digital divide, while significant is shrinking. But, OK I can see the logic from the lenses of 2001. My main concern is that the content discoverable and is relevant? Meaning, you take all of that great intellectual property and lock it up behind the walls of what basically comes down to a paper document on the web. I also suspect that once an organization like the one I was speaking with commit to a PDF they tend to treat it like a dead piece of paper and not an interactive piece of knowledge to be updated and maintained. Oh it was just crying out for some simple measures of interaction...online expert blogging for crying out loud, the subject is what they DO.

Our Playground, Not Yours
Next up, you had to register to download their free content. The stated reason is that they wanted to know who was coming online to use their information. So, they are concerned with something akin to ROI...that's good! On the other hand, and to write this kindly, the number of downloads is a rather, um, dull measure of ROI. (Is anyone using the content actively? Is it engaging and usable? How are they using it? Are not these more important measures of ROI for what could nominally considered public purpose media?)

Not a Good Sharer
Finally, they were very hesitant to share the content directly, but were just fine with us linking to their site. Linking? Ye Gods, their content is good, but how attractive is it to the user, let alone our perspective of how we have been aggregating the marketplace, to offer up a link out to their site. We all appreciate and patronize sites that provide a compelling interactive media experience in our personal lives, but when thinking about providing that experience the big fences come up.

Consumers to Providers: Please, Please Me!
I don't mean to pick on the corporation's lack of a coherent media strategy (or at least one that is a bit antiquated). However, this experience pointed clearly to one of the biggest barriers facing public media information aggregators; namely that the content is locked behind too many doors. This is almost pandemic of the for-profit and nonprofit organizations that serve low-income folks. They subscribe to a very traditional form of service, otherwise known as "I have got what you need." In other words, the whole of the social or community service platform is dedicated to an industrial process that has already preformed the pathways to success and widgetizes the outcomes into regular packets of "case management", "income transfers" and "asset supports."

Do I disagree with the government, nonprofits and the stray multi-billion behemoth trying to provide a safety net for our poorest citizens? Hell no, but I do thoroughly object to the difference engine they use to process outputs when we know that each human being that seeks shelter, food or even a student loan has a particular set of questions and answers that apply to them.

While across the pond, the UK's OFCOM (see previous post) did recently look at the availability of public service content, and what were the big lessons?

In general, provision of public service content is strongest in genres where provision is underpinned by a competitive market, with well-funded commercial providers pursuing established, sustainable business models,typically focused on advertising revenues.

While the UK might not be the perfect comparison to the US, the sentiment is laid out strongly - if you want to have great public purpose content you need to have an active marketplace. We could debate whether commercial providers are better or worse, but the fact of the matter is that public purpose content, such as the stuff as I started this post off with - educational information - today is primarily locked up behind organizations that have very little incentive to make it useful and tangible. We have to start to change all of that.

A Call to Arms: Being A Change Agent
What are the characteristics of a 21st century, digital-savvy, social service change agent? Here are my top picks (and what are your picks?):

Has two separate web offerings: a corporate site and a consumer exploration site that allows potential clients to understand the culture and requirements of the services or products provided;
Separates the product from the idea, meaning that the knowledge accumulated around navigating major life moments that a change agent brings to the table is just as important the product or service provided;
Offers variations of services or products to niches, rather than demographics. While there are clear reasons for being culturally competent and offering services in multiple languages, a media savvy change agent will offer their services as 'content packages' to groups of like-motivated folks and focus less on race, sex or income.
Recognizes that geography is meaningless for knowledge and seeks to serve the whole nation by promoting the change agent's intellectual property by leveraging 'engagement' and participatory media, such as blogs, videos and mutual benefit networking. (And maybe just help organize a new market of ideas to fight poverty?)
Realizes that the best way of encouraging participation and success is by letting people tell people stories, rather than God-awful propaganda from an annual report. (And for that matter, no annual reports on the consumer experience site!)
Video and audio are cheap(er) and way more effective than print, especially for low-literacy or highly skeptical audiences.
Does not invest in technology, but platforms and better yet other people's platforms and then let's other people play on them.
Print is dead, long live interactive media. I mean at least turn that brochure into a wiki for goodness sakes, attach an expert blog and target it at specific communities of interest to act as a catalyst for conversation.

The First Step is the Start Is it this easy or simple? Of course not and there are hundreds of consultants who will tell you how to make it hard and complicated (and expensive), but there are so many tools out there that are just being used to tell our friends that we are going out for a beer, and why don't you meet me, and then look at us online as we are drinking our beer. For Pete's sake, just starting is a beginning and we will be doing a sight better than we are doing today.

A Series of Niches

rbolepdx@gmail.com (Rob Bole) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 02:57:00 +0000

I was recently reading Nick Reynold's blog, an editor at the BBC Internet blog and all-around astute guy on Internet trends, and came across the following statement:

[t]he internet is becoming more dominant and sometimes the internet feels like a series of niches, not a broad mass medium. TV too is becoming a series of niches.

This is not a totally new thought, but it struck me at the right time to consider how important we think about the practical impacts that media can have on our daily lives. Most importantly we need to be clear about the special relationship that public purpose media has on evaluating and measuring those impacts in terms of benefit for users, rather than general moral stands on "the value' of public service media.

I Lived in South Philly
I think that Nick is right on about the Internet being a series of niches, just like my former home Philadelphia is a series of neighborhoods. People often don't have much to do with what is happening six or seven blocks away, but we all still make up a great city. To keep up the analogy the we often think of public purpose media as being the wonderful, bright and shining downtown of high-end news, cultural programming and civic engagement shows. That is not the whole city and for the people who live in South Philly, going downtown does not seem like a great option. They like their own neighborhoods, perhaps a bit gritty and run down, but we know everyone and the content that is created in this community is not pretty, but better than that it's useful.

Wake Me Up When You Go, Go
In the UK the Office of Communications (see Wikipedia's entry for more), the lord high executioner of television there, something like a super FCC, uses the following definition for the purposes of public service broadcasting:

Inform the World
Reflect & Strengthen Cultural Identity
Stimulate interest in "art, science, history and other topics"
Promote awareness of different cultures and vie....huh! wha! Sorry, I fell asleep.

They go one to define public service content as having the following characteristics: High Quality, Original, Innovative, Challenging, Engaging and Accessible/Discoverable.

OK, these are very laudable, and I agree whole heartedly on the last point, but these sound more like the characteristics of a partner in a what will be a very tiresome relationship.

Towards a New Definition of Public Purpose Media
I like the quote of my friend Dan Fellini, the Executive Producer for the Public Internet Channel who says "Public service content does not need to be high quality, original, innovative or challenging to work. It does, I believe, have to be engaging, discoverable and accessible. It’s best when it is high quality, original, innovative and challenging, but those things can get in the way of getting a message out, I hate to say."

Where is the action and impact in the type of neutered content definition used by the UK? Where is the local expert, the guy that sits down at the end of Tommy's Bar & Grill and gives you that one piece of advice that is perfect?

Dan goes on to say "The fact that information exists and it is relevant, accessible and leads to action, is what makes content ‘public service.’ That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive for high quality content. We should. It adds to our authority and avoids our message being muddled by poor, distracting production. But at the end of the day, the actual content — the message, the thing that leads someone from idle to action -- is king, and its delivery quality, its originality, how innovative it is... It is secondary."

To let Dan carry it home, here is what I think is a very good starting definition of the characteristics of public purpose media:

Inform people about their world
Reflect and strengthen community
Stimulate action to improve life through content
Demystify complex topics and promote awareness of change opportunities, and provide access to tools to affect those changes
Provide more than just the bare necessities. Art, culture and critical thought are important to everyone.