MediaShift Idea Lab

How the Indie Audio Community Is Transforming Storytelling

jesse@metalab.harvard.edu (Jesse Shapins) — Tue, 08 May 2012 09:00:00 -0500

A version of this post also appeared in the Association of Independent's in Radio monthly AIRBlast.

I first started working with independent producer Kara Oehler in 2005. Almost a day didn't pass without her telling me about something that happened on the "AIRDaily" listserve. I'd been on listservs before, but I had never actually talked to other people about them. These conversations with Kara were my introduction to the network of more than 800 makers brought together by AIR.

At the time, I was living in New York but was partially still in Berlin, where I was completing the multimedia project The Colors of Berlin. In Brooklyn, I was enmeshed in starting UnionDocs, a documentary arts center in Williamsburg, and also engrossed in launching Yellow Arrow, a place-based storytelling project combining stickers, mobile phones and the web. A self- taught artist and designer, documentary bled through all of my work, more as a way of seeing the world and approaching artistic practice than as a specific set of rules -- let alone a single medium, despite the fact that when most people hear the word they immediately think of a film.

As I continued working with Kara and better got to know this remarkable community of indie audio producers, what struck me most was its open, heterogeneous approach to documentary. It's very hard to put a finger precisely on the reasons why this exists. But my hunch is that because audio documentary is a relatively fluid genre that operates in so many different contexts at such varied lengths (broadcast news magazines, long-form series, live performance, "listening rooms," etc.), the people engaged in it are more open to redefining and experimenting with its boundaries than those who are entrenched in more established modes of documentary (e.g., classic voiceover-driven video docs).

I am now deeply involved in collaborating with this community through Localore. Since the beginning, Zeega has been involved with AIR's Localore, a broad constellation of producer-led innovation projects embedded at local radio and television stations across the county. Over the next nine months, Zeega is working with eight of the 10 Localore projects. Each project is tackling the same set of problems, but every one will have a distinctive design and conceptual framework.

At Zeega, we love this challenge. We create projects across multiple platforms, connect digital media to physical spaces, and develop open-source tools that enable anyone to experiment with the web as a creative medium. These days, this means spending a lot of time talking about the future of interactive documentary from SXSW to the launch of the OpenDocLab at MIT, from the European i-docs Festiva to dialogues with colleagues at Frontline and PRX to a day-long session at the TriBeca Film Festival to last week's Hot Docs. During all these conversations, I've been thinking about what distinguishes Localore from other initiatives.

Here are a few speculative early stage thoughts.

Audio is driving innovative web experiences

By and large, the public discussion around the future of interactive documentary has been led by the film community (e.g. Mozilla's Popcorn project) and researchers (e.g., Mandy Rose and Sandra Gaudenzi). The most significant venue for experimentation over the past years has been the National Film Board of Canada.

While filmmakers and TV stations are a part of Localore (we are thrilled to be working with Julia Reichert and Steve Bognar!), the primary impetus for the initiative is the audio community. In my mind, this starting point offers a very unique opportunity.

One of the things we've been talking about a lot at Zeega is how important sound is to high-quality immersive experiences online. Probably my favorite interactive documentary is "Welcome to Pine Point." Made by The Goggles, a design duo formerly behind Adbusters, the visual design is certainly a major part of what makes the work so incredible. But it's the sound which grabs you right from the beginning, with the buzz of the fly playing with the loading animation, and is sustained throughout with atmospheric music, archival audio and other simple, but highly evocative effects, such as slight rustling when we see wheat in the foreground. (For more on The Goggles, see this recent Transom post).

Another recent Canadian Film Board project where audio drives the experience is "Bear 71." What's fascinating to me, is that this is basically a linear audio segment that was written for voice, around which users can explore a trove of interactive experiences at their own pace. Overall, I think this works remarkably well. The linear story sustains your attention and narrative engagement, while you control the visual unfolding.

A first wave of thinking about radio's transition to the web seemed to be simply how to make audio files that were produced for broadcast available online. Then there was podcasting, a unique digital distribution mechanism that opened up new audiences and forced a rethinking of format. Increasingly, reporters have been asked to produce text in tandem with their audio pieces, plus images or slideshows that illustrate the sound. The problem with all of these approaches is that they are looking to translate traditional audio practices for online instead of thinking about what unique characteristics drive the web and how audio can inform these.

Neither of these Canadian projects were made by people whose backgrounds were primarily in audio, but I think they illustrate the capacity for audio to be the backbone of rich, interactive experiences that could only be realized in an online environment. And I think these approaches are just the beginning of the potential for creative combinations of sound, story and interaction.

A recent project with audio that Zeega worked on at the foundation is Pejk Malinovski's "Passing Stranger," a sound-rich chronicle of poets and poetry associated with the East Village. Initially developed as an audio tour, we worked with Pejk to conceive of a web-based experience. Instead of trying to illustrate each location with tightly synced visuals, we focused our thinking on how to keep sound at the center of the experience, but use video to draw people into the embodied sense of standing on location. Explicitly rejecting a literal attempt at illustration, each location has a simple full-screen video of the contemporary location, shot from a tripod, coupled with Pejk's produced audio.

To drive home the unique relationship of sound and moving image, you can pause the audio, but the video continues playing, which mimics the experience one would have standing on the street -- you can pause an iPod, but the world outside will always keep moving. (You can see this interaction here.)

Authorship in this new space is essential

The changing nature of authorship is one of the questions discussed over and over in the interactive documentary community. In part, this is fueled by general enthusiasm throughout the media industry for user-generated content and the (I would say misplaced) notion that now that the tools of recording are so widely available, everyone can be a producer and share their story. One thing I've learned from the audio documentary community over the years is that good storytelling is very, very hard -- in any medium.

Because radio can't rely on images to carry a narrative or evoke a mood, radio storytellers tend to be some of the most exceptional at crafting poignant stories and refusing to let a single moment of potential boredom creep into a narrative. In my experience, This American Life and Radiolab are two of the most successful examples in any media form of tying quality reporting to captivating, surprising personal stories. And it's no coincidence, in my mind, that The Moth is a part of the public radio ecosystem and not TV or film.

This expertise in quality, short-form storytelling will be a huge advantage for the radio
community as it makes the transition to creatively combining broadcast and the web from the beginning of projects. This editorial rigor translates not only into the audio components of interactive projects, but to works as a whole.

Another thing we've been talking a lot about at Zeega is the notion of "editing interactive" -- in other words, submitting interface ideas to the same intense editorial process that a story would receive. This forces us to treat interfaces as forms of time-based media, imagining in great detail the sequence of a user's experience. And it requires giving special attention to moments of transition (a classic editorial challenge), which in an interactive context can be addressed in many ways, such as through subtle animations from one click to the next or by atmospheric sound that persists through scenes.

Participatory experiences are also authored. Audiences may be able to participate in new and powerful ways, but they can't necessarily craft extraordinary stories on their own. A great example of this editorial rigor applied to interactive experience is Chris Milk's "Johnny Cash Project." Not a conventional documentary, the starting point is a web-based music video for "Ain't No Grave," Cash's last studio recording. The site has a very simple structure -- you start by watching the video. Music begins in tandem with evocative, grayscale hand-drawn images. Below the main player, there is an unconventional timeline composed of a moving grid of tiny thumbnails. If you click to explore this, the video stops on that frame, and you realize that each of the little images is a different drawing of that frame. And you are then prompted to draw your own interpretation of the frame.

But instead of a totally open format, the site has a built-in drawing feature that provides you a reference image from the original video on top of which to draw. You are provided highly constrained tools (e.g., it must grayscale) for drawing. Instead of feeling limited, these constraints are incredibly enabling, as it's fun and simple. The rule set focuses a contributor's creative energy. After drawing the frame, you can submit it to be included in the website, and your name is added to the credits of the overall project.

Interactive documentary tied to broadcast fosters the unexpected

One of the major challenges facing interactive documentaries is distribution. The Canadian Film Board's work has the benefit of being showcased on a site that receives significant traffic and promotion by the government. Many interactive documentary projects, though, are independent initiatives (even if they have broadcaster support), and to my knowledge, no major projects recently have been tied directly to broadcast series.

A requirement for all of the Localore projects is that they're to be developed in the context of a local public media station. I think this is brilliant and one more quality that sets the initiative apart from others internationally. The potential for this broadcast element is tremendous. It ensures a significant initial audience, enabling novel forms of participatory documentary.

My first experience with tying broadcast to digital was Mapping Main Street, a project made with Kara, Ann Heppermann, and James Burns as part of MQ2, AIR's first-generation innovation project preceding Localore.

What I loved about creating a project like this is that you initiate something open-ended, and you actually have no idea what people will do. And you can learn from what people do -- and the surprising things they do can become the center of a project. For example, Amy Fichter (aka xenia elizabeth) heard the series on her local station, along with the prompt to contribute photos of Main Streets nearby. She proceeded to use the project as an impetus to travel around her region of western Wisconsin, taking photos and talking to people in towns that she had often passed through but in which she had never stopped. Amy documented so many Main Streets that when a gallery owner ran into her taking photos on the gallery's Main Street, the ensuing conversation led to an exhibition of her Mapping Main Street photos.

While it's possible to create sustained engagement with a project that is not tied to broadcast, I think broadcast makes a major difference in generating an initial wave of participation and having a constant connection to a community of contributors. This is a huge advantage for the radio community.

We hear over and over about the death of local news, but local public media stations are unique beacons, where audience is growing and the business model is not driven by advertising, but instead by people invested in content and supporting their local communities.

At ROFLCon: The Spread of Memes in China, Brazil and Syria

stempeck@gmail.com (Matt Stempeck) — Mon, 07 May 2012 09:00:00 -0500

ROFLCon returned recently to MIT, bringing together the things and people who are famous on the Internet. Ethan Zuckerman, the director of the MIT Media Lab Center for Civic Media and co-founder of the citizen journalist network Global Voices, was the moderator. He's probably best known for the Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism.

There are all kinds of great Internet memes out there that we don't get to understand just because we don't speak the languages. Memes require an enormous amount of background contextual knowledge to understand what, exactly, makes them funny.

Ethan referenced his previous ROFLCon appearance, where he talked about Makmende and challenged the organizers to bring in a more global outlook. Fortunately, ROFLCon responded in force and provided Ethan with an all-star panel of international Internet culture translators.

An Xiao Mina is a social media artist, strategist, translator, and many other things. If you're reading Ai WeiWei, it's probably due to her.

Bia Granja curates São Paulo Social Media Week and YouPix, a series of Brazillian meme festivals. She recently held a memes conference in Brazil with 6,000 attendees.

Anas Qtiesh is a Syrian blogger and program manager at Meedan, a non-profit community which bridges language barriers between Arabic and English about Mideast events. He aims to help us ask, how do we laugh along with the Syrian revolution?

Censorship and memes

An Xiao Mina started with the train crash in southern China, where government censors attempted to cover up the actual reasons for the crash, but failed to keep up with the speed of Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. The censorship department's propaganda was ridiculed online in a variety of memes both comical and dramatic.

As most of us know, the Chinese web is censored in a variety of ways. There's a censorship algorithm looking for certain keywords. There are human censors. And there's real-name registration, so they know who you are when you post something. And lastly, the most powerful form of censorship is the self-censorship they force via chilling effects.

China has 512 million people online, 312 million of whom are using microblogs. An Xiao Mina is interested in political memes, because they're almost impossible to censor.

Many of the Chinese memes, like Grass Mud Horse, evade censorship by keyword detection by relying on clever plays of language and euphemisms. Grass Mud Horse became the lolcat of Chinese political memes. There are plush toys, cartoons, fake Happy Meal toys, rage comics. This has turned into a metameme, The Ten Mythical creatures of Baidu.

An Xiao Mina called memes "the street art of the social web." When artist Ai Weiwei was arrested and held without charge in 2011, he became famous on the Internet. His face showed up everywhere in many kinds of remixes online, from currency to propaganda posters. People turned sunflower seeds into a symbol for him, and a snack as common as Skittles proved impossible to censor. And then his face became actual street art in Beijing.

Memes of Beijing smog have been particularly successful, leading the city to take action to clean up the air. Many viral Chinese hits prove that humor is universal: a man in a bear costume sliding headfirst down a staircase.

Chen Guangcheng has also been the subject of memes. Most recently, sunglasses have been used to symbolize Guangcheng. (He is blind.) Artists are leading this initiative, similar to the Million Hoodies March for Trayvon Martin. One example is the Free CGC knock-off of Kentucky Fried Chicken. When Christian Bale tried to visit Guangcheng, he was roughed up by a heavy-set guard. So people on the Internet created "PandaMan versus Batman" posters. And when Chen Guancheng escaped, he referred to the meme in the website. Others have created movie posters "Dong Si Gu redemption."

How powerful are these going to be? We don't know yet. However, An Xiao Mina thinks that the participatory culture of memes is leading to more participatory societies.

When Ai Weiwei was censored for pornography, people started posting photos of themselves partially nude. So Chinese human rights lawyer Li Tiantian has followed suit, posting a nude photo of herself as well.

Ethan asked An Xiao Mina where she finds the memes. She answered that she looks for them by following people on Weibo. As far as she knows, there's no Reddit for China.

The youpix party

Next up was Bia Granja of @youPIX, a convenor of meme-based events in Brazil. She told us about the event, which brings in around 6,000 people. "Joining a youPIX Festival is like jumping into the Internet." At YouPix, they party, they listen to music, and they discuss Internet culture. Other events involve a web culture quiz, which puts pies in people's faces when they get Internet facts wrong. M00t came and danced to Sou Foda.

What's Internet culture like in Brazil? The most famous meme is "Tenso," a version of photobombing where a GIF zooms in on the face of a person in the background of a photo. She also talks about Cala Boca Galvao, a meme where Brazilians trolled people on the Internet to protest soccer presenter Galvão Bueno.

Bia hopes to use local memes to explain to us what goes on in Brazilians' minds.

The Brazilian media landscape is consolidated among only a few companies and owning families, and these players have extended their dominance into the online space. Traditionally, Brazil has had very little in terms of alternative media. But 67% of Brazilians are on social networks. It's the third-largest country for Facebook, the second largest for Twitter, the second largest for Tumblr, and the third largest on Google+. Brazilians own Orkut: 90% of Brazilians online have an Orkut account.

Bia showed us a series of popular Brazilian memes, including "Nipples are Very Controversial" boy.

One predictable rule for Brazilian Internet memes is that if it comes with a funky beat, it'll likely be popular. The biggest Brazilian viral video of all time is the 2011 video "Sou Foda" which received 14 million views. A young boy dances in front of a green screen while rapping explicit lyrics. "Sou Foda" plays like a Brazilian Rebecca Black, low-fidelity music video and all.

Brazilians love to have fun. Bia said he was nervous coming into this panel with fellow speakers from Syria and China, because much of Brazilian online culture is focused on good times. As a developing country, things like literacy and Internet culture can be contentious, as the intellectual elites will say that Internet culture is using language wrong and lowering society. Bia thinks we should let them debate with each other and just have fun. After all, Brazil is incredibly powerful online. The most influential person on Twitter, according to the New York Times, is Brazilian Rafina Bastos.

Ethan pointed out that Bia knows every line of all these videos -- that we need a meme dance champion smackdown.

the role of memes in the Syrian Revolution

Next up was Anas Qtiesh, a Syrian blogger and program manager at Meedan, a non-profit community which bridges language barriers between Arabic and English about Mideast events.

He said that governments have control over how much fear they cast on the people. Memes are important because they help break that.

You couldn't have a "Daily Show" or "Colbert Report" in Syria -- they'd be taken down in a second. So Syrians rely on these Photoshopped images for solidarity, to know that they are not alone, that there are others resisting.

"Conspiracies are like germs, which increase every moment," Syrian President Bashar Assad said on June 20. As soon as he said this, CGI germs from cold medicine commercials everywhere began appearing in satirical images.

Walid Muaellem, Syrian foreign minister, said "We'll forget that Europe is on the map." This led to a world map where Muaellen has eaten Europe, complete with cartoons of an engorged Muaellem scarfing down the continent.

Another quote, "He was a lion -- we turned him into a giraffe, but he turned out to be a duck" led to fun animal-based mocking.

Beyond helping people break beyond fear, memes can also be propaganda. People created mock weapons with pipes and fireworks. Someone created a website for a fake Qatari Revolution, which led to other parody websites for Chinese Revolutions.

In these campaigns, official state propaganda was remastered, and then the meme evolved to "Chinesify" all of the things. Chinese clothing and culture was added to photos of Syrian leaders. This wasn't meant to be racist against Chinese people, but rather mocking Syrian leaders and their denial of revolution.

And, Anas said, no revolution is complete without rage comics. The memes weren't just against the regime. There are also cartoons challenging Islam with secularism, where secularism is represented by rage guy and a challenge accepted game. Others have created a history of their revolutions in rage face form.

Ethan concluded: "If Scumbag Assad doesn't come out of this conference, we have missed a tremendous opportunity."

How 'Screenularity' Will Destroy Television as We Know It

dcohn1@gmail.com (David Cohn) — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 09:00:00 -0500

Yesterday I announced the next project I'm going to work on which will focus on mobile news consumption (Circa). As a result, I've been thinking a lot about screens.

In the future, consumers will not make a distinction between their television, phone or computer screens. The only difference will be the size of each screen, its placement and, therefore, what you most likely do with it.

But one will not call the handheld-sized screen their "mobile phone." That you might use it to make phone calls will be happenstance. You will just as easily make a call on the 15-inch screen at your desk or the 40-inch screen in the living room.

Let's call this future moment the "Screenularity." It is the moment in the future when, as a consumer, there's no distinction in functionality between the various screens we interact with. Much like Matt Thompson's "Speakularity," this will be a watershed moment for how we consume information and, therefore, journalism.

THE DEATH KNELL OF TELEVISION

For the entire television industry as we know it, this will be a back-breaking moment. It's not a question of "if" but "when." We see early signs of it in Netflix and Hulu, but the cracks in the dam haven't even started to show. For national broadcast journalism organizations like CNN, Fox and MSNBC, it will create a lot of disruption. For local broadcast journalism, it will leave them utterly decimated.

Local broadcast journalism simply has no added value when compared with the wealth of information on the Internet. They rely on personality-less hosts that talk at you (not with you). Combine this with high overhead to do local reporting about topics many people simply don't care about, and you can start to see how this looks bleak for local broadcast affiliates. Breaking news is broken. Local broadcast websites are offensively bad and nowhere near competing on the open web. Their continued existence relies on the fact that the majority of people still get their news from television. But once the Screenularity hits, that will no longer be the case. There won't be a "television" just various screens. People will get their "lean back" information from the same screen they can engage with. Dogs and cats living together ... mass hysteria!

THEY'RE NOT HAVING THIS CONVERSATION

Whether you love or hate the "future of news" crowd, we should admit that it's painfully devoid of broadcast journalism. I am not 100 percent sure why. I've heard Jay Rosen give a decent explanation, and it can be summarized as: "They just don't care, it's not in their interest."

I'm not saying there aren't any folks within broadcast who are forward-thinking. But considering the disproportionate size of their organizations/budgets/audience to more traditional print mediums, they are painfully absent from conversations about the future of the industry. From what I can observe, the television journalism world has no interest in the future-of-news conversation, and their websites speak louder about this than any defense they could possibly make. This is dangerous, because the majority of people still get their news from local broadcast networks. There is no plan b. There is no fallout shelter.

A DANGEROUS IDEA

For this month's Carnival of Journalism the question is: "What's a dangerous idea to save journalism." Mine is the Screenularity. Local broadcast outfits need to operate as if it's here. I recognize this is dangerous, because it assumes that an industry will disrupt itself. That inherently means there will be danger involved. People will lose their jobs. Organizations will falter and crumble. But others will come out the other end and reinvent an industry on their own terms.

Media companies must become technology companies so they can create the platforms that define the type of media they produce. If they're the ones who create the platforms, they will continue to create media on their own terms.

If local news broadcasters don't embrace the Screenularity and create the platforms themselves, they'd better hope that somebody else does it for them. And "hope" is a horrible strategy. That's what leads to complaints about "Google" or "Craigslist" killing journalism. All they did was create platforms that define the type of media produced. If you aren't creating those platforms then you have no excuse to complain about the terms those organizations create.

Take a Survey Instead of Paying? Google Follows the Spot.us Model

dcohn1@gmail.com (David Cohn) — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 09:00:00 -0500

This came across my social media feed Thursday morning: "Google Unveils New Revenue Option for Web Publishers."

In short: It's a simple technology where readers who come across a pay wall can opt into taking a survey instead of having to reach for their wallet. The survey then creates some funds for the publisher and gives the reader access to content.

Why does this sound familiar? Because it is.

I hate to sound like that guy at the bar who says "that was my idea," as I cry into my whiskey because it's not just about the idea/concept. It's execution. And certainly anything Spot.Us (or really any startup) does can be executed at a grander scale by the big three (Twitter/Facebook/Google).

When I first expounded on this concept it received a lot of praise. Dan Gillmor called it the most innovative thing in news advertising in years. I obviously can't/won't take credit for giving the idea to Google. Often these kinds of ideas are out there in the ether for various people to reach out for. The same could be said for crowdfunding in general when I first proposed Spot.Us. I certainly didn't invent the concept -- I could just tell its time was coming.

I hope upon hopes that this is a concept whose time has come. Especially in light of the real "year of the pay wall."

Good for the bottom line; bad for journalism

What is a pay wall? In essence it makes content valuable by creating scarcity. While good for the bottom line -- this is bad for the essence of journalism. It says, "This information is valuable and if you pay you'll know something that other people won't." The higher purpose of journalism is to create an informed democratic society -- not to create a subset of society who can afford to be informed.

Finding an economic alternative to a hard pay wall is a good thing. The New York Times fired an opening shot with their "pay fence." When I observed their positioning I thought it was something more akin to a poorly implemented NPR membership model than a pay wall. I still hold that view.

The idea behind Community Focused Sponsorships (Spot.Us' version of Google surveys) was that we entered the advertising game, but instead of the funds coming to me (the publisher) I'd let the public decide which stories would be funded. In order to get their vote counted, however, they had to engage with the ads -- thus creating the value to begin with.

Some people value money greatly and won't spend it on journalism. For this large subset of society, the surveys are ideal. What we found on Spot.Us was that the number of folks who valued time over money (preferred to donate rather than take a survey) was below 1%, whereas when we offered a survey the number of people who engaged rose to be closer to 10%. Moreover, these people were more than willing to take new surveys as they came about. Some members of Spot.Us have taken every single survey we've ever offered. (With a sales force of one -- this is not exorbitantly high -- but still a positive indicator.)

On a long enough time line an individual who took surveys was more valuable to the organization than an individual who donated hard cash. People who gave money on average gave $40 twice -- separated by 60 days. So after 70 or so days I could say a donor was worth $80 to the organization. But in 160 days I couldn't say they'd be worth more. A survey taker was worth $5 a pop, which means after 16 surveys they are just as valuable as a donor. Anything after that is gravy and perhaps a reason to shift gears.

Next Steps

The New York Times metered pay wall was an opening shot. The Google consumer survey to get around pay walls makes an excellent one-two punch.

But neither of these are knockout blows.

For anyone considering a metered pay wall, take some time to think about this process. I strongly believe that a metered pay wall is the dipping of our toes into membership programs. Which begs the question -- how do you become a member? Can you become a member by taking actions instead of just donating? I believe we are only scratching the surface here.

Megan Garber I believe got it right with her tweet "Did Google just launch an alternate economic system for the web?"

If you think that the final benefit of the Google surveys is to create some extra cash or a substitute for a pay wall, you're thinking too small. You aren't taking the plays that are already in motion to their logical conclusion. In truth, I wonder if Google itself is thinking too small. I'm not sure if they grok what they have started with this product.

I'd be lying if I tried to play "predictor" and hate when people do that. But so far my nose knows which direction to go. I can't be 100% certain how it will be implemented, but I do believe that going from singular surveys to creating meaningful relationships with organizations, just as if you had donated, makes a ton of sense. You did, after all, provide some personal data, and in the age of information that's just as good as gold.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Auntie P.

A version of this post first appeared here.

The Faces Behind Public Lab's Grassroots Research Community

shannon@publiclaboratory.org (Shannon Dosemagen) — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 09:00:00 -0500

This post was co-authored by Sara Wylie, a a Public Laboratory co-founder.

Public Laboratory is an open-source software and hardware development community dedicated to producing low-cost tools for environmental research. The nonprofit portion of Public Lab grew out of using aerial mapping to address the BP Oil Spill. Since then, we've grown enormously as a community, expanding to more than 400 contributors.

As part of a series, we'll be discussing contributions to open hardware projects by people other than the initial seven founders of Public Lab who write for the PBS IdeaLab blog. We're focusing on these individuals as Public Lab is about to hit a growth spurt -- we met our recent fundraising goal by over 550 percent in our very successful Kickstarter campaign. As part of this campaign, Public Lab will be shipping more than 300 balloon-mapping kits to people worldwide.

By focusing on those who have contributed to Public Lab's growth, we aim to highlight how these new balloon mappers can become actively involved in growing this innovative online research and development community by contributing stories of their mapping work, innovations they make in kit designs and uses, and their experiences in creating their own Public Lab research sites.

Contributions to Tool Development and Kit design

Public Lab is designed around the concept of "recursive publics" developed by Chris Kelty, anthropologist of science and technology. In his book "Two Bits" Kelty coins this term to describe how open-source software communities are brought together by working on, improving, refining and versioning the structure that brings them together: software code. Unlike a representative democracy where citizens vote periodically for representatives who work on their behalf to shape their shared legal system, open-source software tools for collaborative coding enable participants to actively reshape their own communities' infrastructures by contributing to ongoing projects, generating offshoots of existing projects, and even developing new versions of the software that enable collective coding projects.

Inspired by this and other ideas about open hardware development, Public Lab's founders, and now staff, set out to build a community where individuals could reshape research tools as well as expand research questions within the non-profit's mission of generating low-cost tools for environmental health investigations led by everyday people.

A particularly thriving branch of research in the community is low-cost thermal imaging. Kyuha Shim of RISD's Digital+Media department developed the first working prototype of what we term a thermal flashlight and shared it with Public Lab's broader community.

Eymund Diegel, an activist working at the Gowanus Canal Superfund site, has taken the concept of the thermal flashlight for detecting home heat leaks and developed an idea applicable for the site he's working at. His thermal fishing bob is designed around identifying thermal pollution in the canal. Most aquatic organisms, being cold blooded, have their metabolic clock governed by water temperature, so when they end up in warmer water, the demand for food and oxygen increases -- thus a warm water inflow can create dead zones and other life cycle disruptions.

Lief Percifield, a New York-based technologist and the developer of DontFlush.me, who has been working on the thermal fishing bob with Diegel, said one of the reasons the development of open hardware projects has been successful is the "expansion of tools and incorporation of people from a huge variety of fields and backgrounds is essential to how tools are designed and then created. It's going to be amazing to see what comes in the future as the network continues to expand outwards."

Michele Tobias, a Ph.D. candidate in geography at the University of California-Davis learned about Public Laboratory last summer, while using aerial photography to look at coastal landforms and environments. Since then, she's made extensive contributions through research notes, and she helped organize mapping during the Occupy Davis Protests last fall.

Tobias explained that she has "contributed instructions to the balloon and kite mapping curriculum for how to make ground control point targets and instructions for how to make a sturdy camera housing for heavy cameras like SLRs." She is planning on adding another one soon -- a "pattern for how to sew your own drogue tail for kites" and has also added four research notes. Her research note from the Occupy UC Davis mapping event went viral, which she said "is pretty cool." Like many other members of the Public Lab community, she's contributed advice and support on our active mailing lists where members can post questions, ideas and interesting news items.

Contributions to Grassroots Community Development

Public Lab was formed not only as an organization that develops and designs low-cost "non-technical" technology, but also out of the direct experiences collaborators had while working remotely and locally to address the largest oil spill in U.S. history in the Gulf of Mexico. This collaborative project is Public Lab's a benchmark for success that we look for in other community research sites.

In coordination with existing members of the Public Lab community who have been aerial mapping in Lima, Peru since 2010, anthropologist Anita Say Chan has been working to map the "pueblo jovenes" -- literally "new settlement zones" (which normally gets translated into English as "shanytowns") -- of the Villa Maria district in Lima. These are some of the fastest-growing districts in the city, absorbing new migrations from the surrounding rural provinces. "These results significantly change and update the data represented in Google Earth/Maps, which are about 2 years old, and don't represent any of the local roads, homes, and facilities that have appeared since the images were last captured," she said. "This was done in collaboration with local residents of the shantytown, indigenous youth, engineers who hail from rural provinces, and of course, the larger Public Lab community."

In the Gowanus canal in Brooklyn, N.Y., Diegel, who is a community organizer and active advocate for environmental remediation at the Superfund site, commented, "We have the ability as local residents to contribute specialized local knowledge to the planning and decision-making process, and Public Lab gives me the tools to reconnect the state and its agencies of change to Grassroots local insights -- which makes for better solutions through better fact finding. Because Public Lab uses innovative low-cost tools from the everyday consumer digital and scientific technology revolution, it sets up a process whereby an individual 'this would be a fun way to do this!' can create better quality data and solutions when and where we need them."

Using Grassroots Mapping, Diegel has been able to create bridges between the community around the Gowanus Canal Superfund site and authorities responsible for cleanup. "The high resolution of the balloon and kite pictures, coupled with my interest in historical maps of the Canal have allowed us to use Grassroots Mapping images as credible evidence of historic streams that will affect decisions about how the Superfund cleanup program will have to proceed," he said.

Contributions to Social Media and Outreach

Outreach efforts in Public Lab happen both online and offline. Online outreach depends largely on efforts from within the extended Public Lab community to generate active discussions around tool design and use, ethics, site development and topics related to Public Lab activities such as the currently popular conversation on drones.

As Public Lab is partially an online community, outreach for the development of the non-profit arm involves making use of the myriad of social media tools currently in circulation, from Facebook to Twitter and Kickstarter. Creating social media buzz about Public Lab is a vital aspect of growing the community in an online environment.

Members of Public Lab, such as Manpriya Samra, take an interest in designing the future direction of social media and communications at Public Lab because, as she sees it: "Public Lab is a truly collaborative organization that brings together everything I'm passionate about: the environment, empowering every citizen with the tools they need to accomplish their goals, and open-source invention of technology that can change people's lives ... I dream that everyone who may not think of themselves as technically savvy will learn how to use tools so that we can all be empowered citizens."

Offline, outreach is localized. In New York City, for instance, Public Lab planning meetings happen in the way a traditional community meeting would take place; in New Orleans, training sessions happen in public spaces that are accessible for anyone to participate in. Key to the success of each of these localized efforts is the ease of access to the training process and the way in which it can be transferred and reinterpreted for local uses.

With the "March Mapping Madness" aerial mapping meet-ups currently being conducted, the extended team has become core in organizing efforts across the country with different individuals agreeing to host meet-ups in either cities that they are from or where they will be traveling. Jen Hudon from Boston was the primary person organizing a Public Lab panel and meet-up for SXSW in Austin, while Samra has taken on organizing efforts in New York for the mapping meet-up.

Hudon began aerial mapping in New York and then started mapping with students from New School in New Jersey to "study the use of collaborative mapping for community development in an ongoing city park project." She's continuing work with Public Lab in the hopes that going forward Public Lab tools could be used for large-scale collaborative projects with government agencies. "Public Lab continues to inspire me," she said. "It's a forum (and workspace) for students, technologists, environmentalists, public servants, geographers, scientists, journalists and a host of other professionals and non-professionals alike to find a common, DIY open-sourced ground for learning and doing."

Contributions to Web Development and Web Design

The Public Lab website is based on the Drupal platform, allowing for a collaborative, open approach to development. We started, as many online collaborations do, as a mailing list. As our mailing list grew and the projects being discussed diverged, the list started to become unwieldy. Important ideas were buried deep in conversation threads, and the flood of messages was overwhelming for all but our hardcore contributors. We discussed moving to a forum or a wiki, but felt that a forum had the same organizational problems of our list, while a wiki lacks the spontaneity of posting a quick message to the list.

Our solution is somewhere in the middle -- we have a wiki, but also use a Drupal-based system to receive quick research notes that don't have to be integrated into other content. Our mailing list is still active, providing a place for coordination and requests for help.

One of the main contributing developers on the website has been R.J. Steinert, who commented that the "biggest driver for me to fix something is when I'm using something on the site that I find frustrating; it's very rewarding to be able to fix the issue causing me grief." He went onto explain his motivations for creating new website components. "We are presented with an opportunity to reinvent the creative process of inventing from a cloistered activity to a social one. In doing so, we have the power to influence what is invented and whom it benefits. As someone who seeks social, environmental, and economic justice, I see no more powerful way to work towards those ends than building tools that will help people reinvent the world around them."

Becoming a household name

We hope these examples give you a sense of the wide array of ways in which Public Lab members have contributed, are contributing, and could in the future shape the development of this unique public space for environmentally and socially oriented grassroots scientific research and technology development.

As Tobias put it: "I'd love to see Public Lab become more of a household name. What we do is so important, particularly in this political climate where secrecy is common and money is lacking. I'd like to see more people using the tools and contributing." Samra echoed, "I would love to see Public Lab become a worldwide movement and a household name. Every time someone has a problem to solve -- how do I prove that heat is not being turned on in my building or how do I map clear cutting in the forest adjacent to my home -- they'll think 'Public Lab has exactly the tool I need and will teach me how to build it myself!'"

What Will Bring More Attention to the Civic Value of Journalism?

dcohn1@gmail.com (David Cohn) — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 12:00:31 -0500

For this month's Carnival of Journalism I am going to invoke the rule of "no apologies" and change the question a bit. Host Steve Outing asks: "What emerging technology or digital trend do you think will have a significant impact on journalism in the year or two ahead?"

I don't think it will be a technology, but an experience. And what will "save" journalism might not be the experience of consuming journalism.

This is an ongoing thought that comes from the second (or third) time I met Michael Maness when he was at Gannett and he talked about human-centered design and the way people relate to their communities. In short -- people relate more to the local businesses they frequent than they do the civic institutions nearby.

If you asked me where I lived in Oakland, I would tell you, "I live across the street from Bakesale Betty's." If you lived anywhere in Oakland then you knew exactly where I lived based on this reference. Everybody knows Bakesale Betty's.

The irony, however, is that I also lived across the street from the Temescal Library. Not just any library, but a Carnegie library. This is a building designed to be communal and civic. I tested this: If I told you I lived by the Temescal library, I'd get stares and a request for further information. "You know, right by Bakesale Betty's" --_ AHHH, I know where you live_, they'd respond.

This is not a good or bad thing. It's just the thing. But this has consequences. I suspect if Bakesale Betty and the library had competing fundraisers, Betty would outperform the library tenfold.*

A few years later, I've moved to Berkeley.

I now live by a Thai Temple. One would think this would suffer the same fate of the library. It is a communal building, a civic building. Its appeal is seemingly narrow.

But every Sunday the Thai Temple serves brunch. Not just a lame brunch. We are talking a four-star Yelp brunch (474 reviews!). The first sentence of the first review nails it: "There are no words to describe the sense of community you feel when you go to the Thai Buddhist temple for brunch." Come for the brunch -- be nourished by the sense of community. Civic mission accomplished!

When I tell people I live by the Thai Temple they know exactly where I live (although I often have to say "Thai Brunch" for them to really know what I'm talking about).

What is saving the Thai Temple isn't the "Temple" but the experience the community has with it that centers around purchasing food. If that Thai Temple were in peril, people would rally behind it, Buddhist or otherwise.

Local news organizations need to find their Thai Brunch -- so do libraries. In fact, libraries have their "brunch." What I neglected to mention is that the Temescal library (and the new library I live by in Berkeley) both have extensions that are "tool lending libraries." In my experiments telling people I lived by the library, if I focused on the "tool lending" library, people were more likely to know where I lived. It might not be serving their direct "library" mission -- but by creating a tool lending center, both libraries are more central in the community.

So back to Steve's question: "What emerging technology or digital trend do you think will have a significant impact on journalism in the year or two ahead?"

Journalism has a value just as libraries do. But that inherent value doesn't have mass appeal. The question is: Can we find something, a game, an experience, a product whose value proposition draws people in and, as a result, brings more attention to the civic value of journalism? Meanwhile -- can that game/experience/product create money both to sustain itself and perhaps flow into the journalism?

We are still in the early stages of the Spot.Us/Public Insight Network merger, but increasingly this is on my mind. It's great that people will contribute to specific reporting endeavors. But those who are doing this are perhaps narrow. They are the same people who might give to NPR or any other nonprofit news organization. We want to create an experience that draws people in for something different.

It's an experience that will have a significant impact on journalism. That experience will be enabled by technology, true, but that's not what people will remember or why they'll get hooked. I don't know if it'll come in the next two years, and I don't know 100% what it will look like. But I do think that's how we'll define it.

*This is not to pick on Betty who everyone knows is awesome, lets people sell the Street Sheet and/or panhandle right in front of her store. She also gives away free ice lemonade sometimes. So don't think I'm trying to pick on you, Betty -- and please continue to hook it up!

A version of this post first appeared here.

Is There a Media Obesity Problem in America? Should News Have Labels?

natematias@gmail.com (J. Nathan Matias) — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 09:00:50 -0500

A version of this post first appeared on the Center for Civic Media blog.

Is our appetite for tasty celebrity news and comfortable opinions creating a toxically polarized society? What should our information diet be, and how would we measure it? Who's responsible for changing the media?

At the Center for Civic Media, Clay Johnson, Sean Cash and Ethan Zuckerman recently debated whether the metaphor of media nutrition could help us improve American media. Clay's recent book, "The Information Diet," encourages us to apply the nutrition metaphor to how we produce and consume information. Sean is a nutritional economist and a leading expert on food labeling. Ethan is the director of the Center for Civic Media, where we are developing "MediaMeter," a set of metrics to help companies and consumers understand what's in our media.

IMPROVING NEWS WITH CONSUMER INFOVEGANISM

In his opening talk, Clay argued that online advertising is "killing America." If media companies derive revenue from clicks, won't they publish unhealthy, sensationalist, bias-confirming articles rather than high-quality reporting? Clay drew a parallel to the food industry, where consumers' desires for high-calorie, tasty foods leads companies to create things like this:

We like pizza more than broccoli because our physiology is wired for a scarcity of food rather than a land of abundance. Cheese is great when you don't have enough food to last the winter, but that's no longer our situation. Unfortunately, corporations make the products we like, which leads to junk food and hot dog cheese pizzas, covered in sausage patties and honey.

Media companies have the same problems as food companies, according to Clay. Cheap, sensational media is easier to make and more popular and profitable than high-quality journalism. It's this formula of advertising profit, sensationalism, and confirmation bias that drives priorities at companies like Fox and MSNBC, as well as independent producers like Glenn Beck. Readership data shows that opinion tastes better than the news and that it pays to tell us stories that make us feel good. To illustrate this, Clay showed us how Fox News edits an AP story into a sensationalist article. The original story was a report from a public opinion poll on the economy. Fox News cut out around 70% of the content and republished it with the headline, "Obama Has a Big Problem With White Women," even though the article contained no comments on the president's views on women.

Clay Johnson, author of "The Information Diet," says we should apply the nutrition metaphor to how we produce and consume information.

Sensationalism sells, and news companies naturally shape their business to make money. Clay claims that Fox spends 75% of its budget on personalities and only 25% on the newsroom. CNN, on the other hand, spends 80% on its newsroom, which is five times larger than Fox's. That, Clay says, is why Fox is more profitable than all of the news broadcasters combined. It simply can produce popular media more quickly and cheaply.

But Fox is not alone. Clay showed us The AOL Way, the recently leaked internal AOL content business plan. This plan lists revenue and speed as the factors to decide what AOL should cover -- completely leaving out values like relevance, importance or fact.

Clay said this focus on advertising will cause American democracy to fall apart because most of all, we like to read things we agree with. "Who wants to hear the truth when they can hear they're right?" he asked us. He played Robert Vanderbei's animated gif of "The Changing Colors of America," which shows a shift from a generally purple America into one 50 years later which is geographically separated into distinct Democrat and Republican regions.

How do we change this? Clay thinks we need to get a small number of elite media consumers to choose their diet more carefully. If we do that, then maybe we can influence media organizations to provide better coverage to everyone. Failing that, we should commit to paying for better content behind a paywall, as the Boston Globe is asking readers to do.

Effectively, Clay wants to start a "slow news" movement in which "infovegans" commit to reading source material rather than the news. Clay showed us a trophic pyramid of media, in which the highest items have the least value, and the bottom item has the most nutrition. In this model, it's most virtuous to read the congressional record on OpenCongress, somewhat less virtuous to look at the Sunlight Foundation's website, and least virtuous of all to read the article on Fox News. The news site Politico is somewhere between Sunlight and Fox.

If enough of us become practicing infovegans as part of a Whole News movement, Clay argues, maybe the mainstream media will start producing better quality news.

CAN WE REALLY BECOME INFOVEGANS?

Sean, the nutritional economist on the panel, liked Clay's metaphor but expressed concerns about how easy it would be for people to become infovegans. He also pointed out the difficulties of nutritional labeling and wondered if news might be even harder. Finally, Sean discussed difficulty of change for consumers, producers and the government alike.

It's hard to get rid of our indulgences. Other ways of meeting those desires sneak up on us. People often try to get rid of red meat, but when we try, we can accidentally double our sodium intake. Healthy food is part of a healthy diet, but we need to leave room for our indulgences. By stigmatizing junk food, we can repress our love of pizza and cause cravings and binges. If someone tries to impose a diet on us, we tend to react against that. Sometimes we feel overly confident about our health and eat the nachos anyway.

Might going cold turkey on the Kardashians lead to strange obsessions, cravings and binges?

To have a healthy diet, we need to know what's in our food. This is incredibly hard, even for something like soft drinks, which many governments now want to tax. Should we tax diet sodas and juice drinks with only a small amount of juice? Is a bottled Frappuccino a soft drink? If we start adding nutrients, does something like Diet Coke with Bacon become acceptable?

If the quality of our media is a societal problem, should this be up to individuals or government? Sean pointed out that in the world of dietary policy, there's a lot of debate on the role of government, even as the public pressures governments to do more. We expect government intervention in cases of market failure (perhaps it's too costly to produce good media), the protection of children, and the belief that something is important for societal well-being. Is it really possible to solve the media diet problem with a grassroots infovegan movement? Or can government play a role?

Finally, Sean reminded us that overconsumption is only one problem. In the world of health, there's still a problem with "food insecurity," people's real hunger and fears of hunger. Sean encouraged us to ask if some people are under-consuming information, and how we can support them.

LABELING THE MEDIA WITH DATA

To answer these questions, we need to get better data, Ethan argued. Otherwise, we'll spend all our time debating a metaphor. Ethan thinks the nutritional metaphor is a good one, made popular by Alisa Miller in her TED Talk on how the news shapes the way we see the world. Alisa's talk shows a skewed map to illustrate how TV coverage can shape the public's awareness of the world. At the Center for Civic Media, we're developing tools to make it easier for individuals and media companies to track these things in real time.

This is important because not everyone cares about the same things. Clay really cares about in-depth political journalism and escaping confirmation bias. Ethan really wants to know world news, and to be confident he's not missing anything. Other people want to surround themselves with news from their home country, or get away from their computer by listening to the radio.

Even if we accept Clay's media priorities, Ethan thinks infoveganism is where Clay's metaphor breaks down. Is the continuum from Congress to Fox news really the information pyramid? If Clay left the Sunlight Foundation because data wasn't persuading the public, can we really try to create a movement around reading the data? Ethan argued that journalism helps us by going through that raw data and adding context to it. Instead of stripping away value, don't media organizations add value by checking facts and adding context?

Clay disagreed. He said he has never seen a single article which links to a data source. When Ethan asked if he was being dismissive of journalism, Clay said that he found it more dismissive when journalists didn't link to their sources. Ethan said it was probably unrealistic to ask people to go to the raw data. Clay thinks we should be skeptical of journalists because they don't give us the whole story.

Ethan then asked Sean, "Why are we fat?" Should we blame ourselves or the system? Sean thinks we should blame technology, which has made consumption and production cheaper, while packaging it in a more concentrated fashion. It's far easier to buy prepackaged food than make it ourselves.

WHO'S RESPONSIBLE FOR CHANGE?

Clay thinks that if 2% of elite readers become infovegans and pay for their news, we can change what the media industry shows the other 98%. Sean disagreed. He pointed out that people will always go for the cheaper product. Ethan pointed out that The Economist, The New York Times, and now the Boston Globe all seem to be doing fairly well with paywalls.

From left to right, Sean Cash, Ethan Zuckerman and Clay Johnson debate media health.

Ethan asked us if there were a way to construct independent public media with state subsidy, perhaps like the Japanese model or the BBC? Can't we solve this for everyone in a systemic way? Why should we blame ourselves? Clay disagreed, arguing that it's easier to change consumer behavior than to create state-supported media.

Perhaps we could put labels on our media, Ethan suggested. At this point, Sean listed the difficulties the government has faced with nutritional labels. People don't like the government telling them what to do. Companies are hesitant to use labels which they think will hurt business. If companies are given flexibility with labeling, they tend to create misleading labels. And even when labels are mandated by government, as Canada has done with cigarette cartons, people will cover up the labels or choose some other harmful product. Despite this, Ethan hoped that quantitative labels on the news might help us call out companies for producing "large amounts of news-like product" and encourage them to change.

Why Collaborative Development Works in a Proprietary World

jywarren@gmail.com (Jeffrey Warren) — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 09:00:52 -0500

Public Laboratory is made up of a diverse group of contributors, some working from their homes or garages, some from their workplaces or even university labs. What brings us together is the idea that open-source, collaborative development can result in inexpensive and accessible environmental sensing.

But to many, the way our community operates can be disorienting. We've approached these unique challenges in several ways.

Most people are familiar with collaborative development of textual works, such as co-authorship, or even mass co-authorship in projects such as Wikipedia. Software development is textual as well, and such communities are made possible by carefully tailored open-source licenses, which effectively stop any individual or organization from controlling the whole project.

By contributing to these works -- say, an open-source web browser or an article on gumdrops -- authors are assured attribution but cannot stop others from building upon their work, improving or adapting it for new uses. This works in part because each time programmers or Wikipedians contribute, their name is explicitly entered in a registry of sorts. By publishing their contributions, they give up a certain amount of control -- of course, they'd almost certainly built upon the prior contributions of others who made the same choice.

Now imagine applying that system to non-textual works, such as a new kind of camera or a tool for detecting air pollution. The way Public Laboratory works, these designs are developed, tested and improved slowly through dozens of meet-ups, workshops, field events, and brainstorming sessions. At each meeting, participants agree to share their contributions in an open-source manner -- but there is typically no explicit record of every contribution.

To compound this, journalists (not to mention partners and even funders) prefer hierarchical organizations so they can say things like "developed at MIT," and they really love citing individuals, not nebulous groups of "contributors." We've often had to insist on group attribution in the media, and developing a so-called "attribution infrastructure" is a major focus on our website.

Design for attribution

We recently launched a small set of new features on our website, PublicLaboratory.org, to address these challenges. While many people make use of our tools, as a community we'd like to highlight those who contribute improvements and share their knowledge with others. With that in mind, we've come up with some ways to track when Public Laboratory contributors actually post about their work on the PLOTS website.

Taking a cue from socially oriented open-source website Github.com, we've posted small graphs of the amount of activity on a given project over the past year. A quick look at these graphs shows how much activity they've seen in recent weeks, and gives visitors a sense of how dynamic a research community is involved in a particular project.

Above that graph, we've listed contributors and the number of posts they've made (which are tagged with the tool, i.e. "thermal-photography". The intent here is not to make things competitive (though that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing) but to give people a sense of satisfaction that they've been a part of a communal effort, and a glimpse (to outsiders) of the number of people who have made the project happen.

By placing emphasis on the posting of content, we hope to highlight attribution for those who do good documentation and share it in a public venue -- though anyone is welcome to use, adapt, repurpose, and improve upon Public Laboratory projects.

In order to be an active participant in our grassroots research efforts, you've got to reach out to others and share your work. This may not be natural for many people; contributors from many backgrounds are often accustomed to sole authorship credit, while others wonder who will care whether they publish or not. In a collaborative effort such as ours, however, success is gauged by how many others are able to leverage your work and reproduce or improve upon a set of tools you have contributed to. In an open-source context, seeing someone else replicate or adapt your work is a gratifying affirmation that your documentation and development work have resulted in legibility and accessibility for a potential collaborator, not an instance of plagiarism or infringement.

ShareAlike and Free Hardware

"Open source" means different things to different people, and with the above challenges in mind, it's important to make some distinctions. Strictly speaking, open source just means that you publish the source files of your work -- and in the case of hardware, the associated design files. A good open-source project will provide legible documentation and support for others who wish to read and understand those files. If you've heard of "free software" (we'll invoke the refrain "free as in freedom, not as in beer" here), you might be familiar with its more stringent requirement that users have the right to "run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve" the software. This is the basis of our approach to open source, public, civic science -- and it underlies our community's aversion to proprietary non-free (in both senses of the word) software such as Photoshop or Google Earth.

The noted lack of such freedoms in the area of scientific equipment and instrumentation -- and the barriers that creates for a more legible and participatory approach to science -- is a major motivation for our work.

Finally (for now) there is the idea of requiring anyone who takes advantage of these freedoms (by downloading, adapting, modifying and improving) to share their work in turn, under the same license. This requirement, known variously as a "sharealike" or "copyleft" clause, can be controversial, as it explicitly requires people (and companies) to become producers, and not just users, of open-source works. With some exceptions for datasets and privacy considerations, we have adopted sharealike licenses across all Public Laboratory content, and are in the process of releasing even our hardware designs under a sharealike license, the CERN Open Hardware License.

While these ideas may be unfamiliar for many, they make it possible for diverse communities such as ours to develop complex technical systems in a way which attributes and protects contributors' work, and ensures that these shared efforts remain public, accountable, and open to newcomers. They allow anyone to use PLOTS tools and techniques without needing to seek permission, while encouraging newcomers to contribute just as they benefit. They offer a public and grassroots alternative to closed, expensive, and proprietary systems of technology production which have resulted in a science that serves powerful and wealthy corporations above local communities and the underprivileged.

Such considerations are an important part of the PLOTS approach to building participatory environmental science collaborations. Ideally, our community's works will inspire readers or viewers to apply civic science ideas to their own lives -- adapting tools to local issues -- and with luck, they will become active participants in our research community by sharing their work publicly. In time, some may go on to organize local civic science groups, further the development of PLOTS' open-source tools, innovate new technologies or approaches to environmental monitoring, and challenge and refigure the very structure of participation.

Video Volunteers Makes an Impact in India with Incentives for Media Makers

jessica@videovolunteers.org (Jessica Mayberry) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 09:00:05 -0500

As part of a 4-part series, Video Volunteers is sharing what we've done over the last year, our experiences, and what we've learned. Part 1, which you can read here, was a basic introduction to IndiaUnheard, our flagship rural feature service.

Part 2 outlines new ideas we implemented into our training programs in 2011. For instance, we set incentives for our community correspondents in India. This triggered a series of valuable positive changes for the communities concerned.

Incentives work

In October, we held an advanced training session for our strongest community correspondents which focused on activism and getting "impact." (To us, "impact" means that the community correspondent is able to resolve the problem the video addresses.) We told them we had decided to incentivize impact.

They would be paid 5,000 rupees (approximately $100) -- more than twice the regular stipend -- for an "impact video," which means they would make a video; show it locally to get the issue solved; and make another documenting that process and proving the impact actually took place -- and for that second video, they would get the 5,000 rupees.

Some amazing impacts happened this year: In Orissa, illegal timber smugglers were stopped by local villagers. In Mumbai, a factory was forced to clean its pollution. In Assam, politicians released desperately needed water to villagers. Rather than be turned away, Dalit children got help in village child centers. Expectant mothers received folic acid which had previously been withheld. And, in one area, some 600 women for the first time were paid minimum wage.

These are just some of our stories. You can watch our impact videos here.

Recruitment is challenging

Our goal is to have 645 community correspondents, or one in every district of India. We had to think hard about how we could quickly scale up if we needed to.

Our first two rounds of recruitment for IndiaUnheard was through our existing network. We sent emails asking people to nominate someone from the villages they work in and then to help them fill out the online application. We got a few hundred applications that way and thought we could keep doing it like that. But when we tried for the third round, the number of eligible applications was low (though the overall applications were higher than previous years). Maybe we had tapped out our existing network.

So how could we quickly scale up? Possibly through big non-profit institutions (like microfinance). We are reaching out to them now.

Choose the right geographies

For our first two rounds, our goal was to get one or two people in every state. Now that we've almost done that, we're going to focus on key regions we feel are "unheard."

Last month, we took about 20 new community correspondents from Jharkhand. We chose Jharkhand because it is part of the so-called Red Corridor where there is a Maoist insurgency taking place. In the future, we'll look at the North East where other separatist movements are taking place, and Kashmir. (Those two areas were out of our budget this year.)

My colleagues Kamini Menon and Stalin K. spent two weeks traveling around this area meeting the activists and doing the recruitment; this live recruitment is making recruitment easier and will also make retention higher because the 13 new correspondents, each representing one district in the same state, can support each other.

Partnerships are challenging

Two years ago, when our Community Video Units were our primary focus, we felt that we could scale this network through investments from NGOs (non-governmental organizations). We've realized that co-ownership is very difficult and can at times be a hindrance to innovation.

We now feel that we can scale better through partnerships with the mainstream media, rather than NGOs, and so for that reason, a huge focus this year has been on ensuring the content can work for both a local community and outside audience.

From our Community Video Units, we've learned a few other things: One is that a model where people are paid only when they perform is better than the Community Video Units model, in which the six or seven people who work together on a film are given a monthly wage.

Women produce more

Two observations we are thrilled to see: Women produce more, and retention is higher with the underprivileged. It suggests that journalism really is an appropriate livelihood for the poor. We started to see that with online recruitment, we had selected certain people whose incomes were clearly higher than they had told us on the phone. Live recruitment in extremely remote areas of Jharkhand will help get the correct balance.

The amount they can produce is low

We ask correspondents to produce two videos a month. They produce on average one or less. One reason is that being a journalist is difficult; it takes a lot of personal courage to confront officials and ask people private questions. They can spend a whole day on a bus getting to an official who then won't see them. They have to take care of their families, too.

I learned this year about the concept of "businesses in a box" and franchises, such as rural women selling solar lamps or soap sachets, and I discovered that we should make the process as simple and step-by-step as possible.

But journalism is simply harder than selling soap. We also ask them to produce tough stories that they have to research and which take time, unlike stringers, who are told to "go film this event and send us the footage." This means that our "cost per story" is higher than we would like. But we also aren't taking huge steps to increase their productivity right now, because we don't yet have enough buyers to support a huge level of production.

Choose the right people to train

The fact that we put such effort in selecting interesting people to train is a huge asset for us. Our new batch of correspondents includes people whose personal stories are, in some ways, the story. We have two boys from Kashmir who have seen the insurgency; a young man whose sister was the first dowry death in his state; women who have experienced sexual violence and have the courage to speak about it; and a good representation from the North East, including one young man who got the first footage of a particular insurgent camp because he's from that area.

In our training, we teach them that their power as a community correspondent will come through using their personal experiences and connections to the issues. This is what they have that no professional, no outsider, can ever replicate. They learn that they themselves must speak out, and speak personally, if they want their communities to do so, too.

Good training is not necessarily scalable. (That's another thing that we learned in 2011 -- that the training aspects of our work will always be expensive because education doesn't have a lot of economies of scale.) But it is the most valuable investment.

You can watch a video from our trainings here:

Stay tuned for Part 3 of this series, which will focus on our modes of online and offline distribution and our experience with earning income from partners and the mainstream media.

The Other Side of Entrepreneurial Journalism

dcohn1@gmail.com (David Cohn) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:00:31 -0500

A version of this post first appeared here.

It is yet another Carnival of Journalism (our one-year anniversary). The Carnival is a network of bloggers I reinvigorated who all write a response to a different question every month. This month's question comes from Michael Rosenblum: "Can a good journalist also be a good capitalist?"

A few weeks ago, I was invited to speak at the Cronkite School of Journalism in Arizona by my friend and mentor Dan Gillmor. It was a gathering of journalism professors from around the country who are going to build their own curriculum to teach entrepreneurial journalism. Dan asked me and Mark Luckie to come speak about our experience going from J-school to startup. It's a different career path from many, and the point is to show professors that it's a viable path.

Without a doubt it is a real path. I've been living it for so long (even before Spot.Us I had been working on "experimental projects") it doesn't even seem like a question to me. Sometimes I am seen as a poster-boy for entrepreneurial journalism. And on those occasions I'm happy to evangelize what is a totally viable path.

But one of the professors at the Cronkite J-school gathering asked a very important and a totally fair question. I'm paraphrasing here: "I know it's a real path, but it can't be all butterflies and kittens. What are the tradeoffs? What are the hard parts of going down this route? I don't want to send off students without a healthy dose of reality."

Sometimes those of us who have drank the entrepreneurial Kool-Aid like to point out success stories and perks without mentioning just what you have to give up to go this route.

I wouldn't change a thing about the career path I've chosen. It has absolutely worked out for me. But if I were to advise a younger me -- I would be remiss in my egoistic duties if I didn't convey both sides of the question "should you go out on a different kind of career path." There are plenty of positive things I would say. I often shout out about how awesome it is to start your own project, blog, company, nonprofit, etc. But that's not the purpose of this blog post. I'm playing the contrarian so that our Carnival isn't one big "yes we can"-fest. With that in mind, there are three big areas that somebody who is thinking of going out on this path should keep in mind.

1. There is a time burden

I used to joke "that the Internet doesn't sleep and so neither can I." I've gained some wisdom on how to balance certain aspects of work/life but if you have gone out on your own to start something up it is not a 9-5 job. It is not a Monday-Friday job. "What you gain in freedom, you lose in free time."

2. There is a mental burden

The buck stops with you. There is no "boss" to complain about. If things have taken a turn for the worse, the only person you can blame is yourself. In fact, as other people start to rely on you for a paycheck it becomes an even bigger mental burden. You don't want to let anybody down. You must learn to live with that mental pressure. What you gain in potential reward you lose in mental security.

3. There is a path burden

It is a career path. Once you start walking down that road, it is difficult to go back. When I made the choice to go down this path I was a hardworking tech reporter. I have followed some of my tech-reporting peers and admired their careers. In fact, my replacement at Wired is still there holding down a solid job. It is a path I could have gone. If I wanted, I could still go back to being a reporter/writer -- but after several years being out of that game, I'd have to do some backtracking. I'd have to work underneath that guy at Wired (ironically enough, I interviewed/hired him). I'd have to sharpen my skills again. It is difficult to go back. Moreover -- you might not want to go back. There is a bit of the "take the blue pill or the red pill" aspect to striking it out on your own.

As you probably picked up -- there is an upside to all of these downsides. As with most things in life it isn't black/white. There are shades of grey and you have to be prepared to paint with those shades. It's amazing what you can do with only a few colors.

Image courtesy of Flickr user ConnectIrmeli.

Zeega + Localore = Innovative Local Storytelling for Public Media

karaoehler@gmail.com (Kara Oehler) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 09:00:51 -0500

Last week, I sat in a conference room in Dorchester, Mass., with some of the great minds of public media to recommend which 10 producers and public media stations should be supported for year-long projects to transform the industry.

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

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

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

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

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

Don't have iframes? Visit http://airmediaworks.org instead to see the Localore Station Runway.

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

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

If We Were Starting NPR's Project Argo in 2012

MThompson@npr.org (Matt Thompson) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:20:50 -0500

For the past two years, I've been working on Project Argo -- a collaboration among NPR and 12 member stations in which the stations launched 12 niche websites on a platform we developed (built on WordPress), each putting their own spin on a common editorial model. As the pilot phase of Argo comes to a close, and we turn our attention to spreading and operationalizing what we've learned more broadly throughout the public media system, the question I get more than any other is, "If you were to start back at the beginning, what would you do differently?"

I'd reframe the question slightly. If you work in digital media, you know how much this world is still in flux. The pace of change means that trends, tenets and ideas can spring up, calcify into conventional wisdom, and fade away all in the span of two years or less. So instead, I'll lay out a few things we might change if we were starting the pilot in January 2012, and some of the ideas that we hope to push on in our work with stations over the next year.
1. PLAY MORE WITH LENGTH AND FREQUENCY
Although we emphasized the importance of a considered take from the get-go with Argo, we also stressed that the bread-and-butter of blogging is writing short and often. But as many have remarked, the quickest of quick takes have migrated into status updates on Facebook and Twitter, or blips on Tumblr. And alongside that migration, we've seen blogs become less about the instant and more about the Instapaper. A steady rise in popularity for Argo's highest-trafficked site, MindShift, accompanied its move to less-frequent, longer-form blogging. CommonHealth, another of the network's most popular sites, has scored some of its biggest audience hits with 4,000-word opuses like this one.
2. FIND PARTNERS AND BUILD TEAMS
Part of the Argo team's aim was to replicate a pattern we'd seen again and again in our combined decades of working in independent and commercial news organizations: A single person with a singular vision builds a sizable community around a topic from the ground up. And we saw plenty of that this year. But several of our stations also tweaked the model of the single, full-time blogger that we began with, splitting the position between two part-time bloggers, or augmenting the site with contributions from freelancers. And by and large, this has worked quite well for the stations that have taken this approach. In the meantime, we've seen several popular veteran bloggers expand their operations into teams. Ezra Klein's eponymous one-man operation at the Washington Post became the four-person micro-site Wonkblog. Politico's legendary Ben Smith added Dylan Byers to his roster (very shortly before announcing a move to Buzzfeed). And, of course, "Andrew Sullivan" has been the euphemism for a multi-headed team of collaborators for some years now.
That single person with a singular vision can still make a hell of a splash, of course. (Obligatory year-end reflection shoutout to my colleague @acarvin and my daily inspiration, Maria Popova.) And it's easy to convince yourself you're actually collaborating when all you're doing is sharing one another's widgets. But among the things we'll be looking for in 2012 are opportunities to foment genuine, effective partnerships.
3. LOOK FOR EDITORS
When we were hiring our set of reporter-bloggers for Argo, we stressed that it was vital to hire rock stars to helm these sites. In their quest to find rock stars, hiring managers asked variants on one question over and over -- "Is it more important to hire someone with strong, proven reporting chops, or native bloggers who live and breathe the medium?" (Understanding, of course, that it's not a dichotomy. Plenty of folks have both traits.) Today, though, the advice I'd give is, "Find folks who could be awesome editors." As I told Andrew Phelps at the Nieman Journalism Lab, I shifted from calling our site hosts "reporter-bloggers" at the outset of the project to calling them "reporter-editors."* They do have to be strong, speedy writers. And they must be able to report. But the qualities that lift the best blogs to a higher plane are news judgment, pattern recognition, and an instinct for planning and programming -- the hallmarks, in short, of terrific editors.
When I look at the amazing strides the Atlantic has accomplished online over the last few years, I suspect that much of it comes from having a masthead of double-threats who edit as well as they write -- folks like Alexis Madrigal (and very soon -- permit me a squeal -- Megan Garber).**
4. TREAT CONTEXT AS CONTENT
The three people who paid attention to what I was writing and thinking about just before I started working on Argo probably got some severe whiplash as I took on this role. One of my passions in journalism as far back as I can remember -- the thing I spent a year at the Reynolds Journalism Institute studying -- has been context. For years, I'd been writing about the need to invent a timeless journalism, deeply embedded in context, that eschewed the hyperactive, short-term-obsessed imperatives of news and took advantage of the web's capacity to unite episodic and systemic information. Suddenly, these lofty thoughts gave way to paeans to the listicle and headline-writing tips. I'm happy to trace for you how this effort relates to that larger quest, but I can't deny that the future-of-context mantra has been on the back burner during this effort to build successful niche communities.
This is why it makes me so thrilled to see Argo's sister project, StateImpact, double down on context in their approach to blogging. They are proving that marrying well-tended topic page overviews with regular blog posts can be a formula for success. While Argo's prominent "skybox" promotion modules highlight blog posts, a similar convention in the StateImpact design is engineered to highlight topic pages instead. StateImpact reporters take care in producing these pages, writing authoritative, attention-grabbing headlines for them, promoting them with strong thumbnail images, and treating them, generally, as content (not merely as archives, sidebars, or after-matter for users who want to know more). Partly as a result, the topic pages have become some of the most popular material on the StateImpact sites. And instead of fading away once the initial rush of interest in a story is over, these pages grow more valuable over time.
StateImpact joins sites like Salon and SBNation in starting to blur the line between stories and topic pages. And I like it. I don't think we have a silver-bullet successor to "the article" yet, but I'm eager to move this vein of experimentation forward.
5. THINK BEYOND THE RIGHT RAIL
The "right rail" or "sidebar" has been a mainstay of the news story page for years. Often-automated, haphazardly programmed, it tends to be the dumping ground for material that organizational politics and wishful thinking deem to be essential. Over the years, that space has gotten freighted with more and more stuff -- random widgets, text ads, house promos -- further subdividing the thin trickle of attention that usually accrues to it.
When we started the Argo sites, we tried to keep the right rail on our pages fairly tight. But as time went on, that space began to sprawl (as it's wont to do on every website). We stuck widgets there; stations added their own widgets; partnerships yielded new widgets; all despite scant evidence that the space was capturing much user interest.
Now, with mobile devices on the uptick, we can no longer take for granted that the right rail gets even a token eye fixation from users. And designers have been quietly snuffing it out. When NPR redesigned its Shots blog earlier in 2011, the right rail became a much more minimalist enterprise, both on the front page and on story pages. (The redesign has correlated with a healthy uptick in all our favorite metrics for the blog.) Adweek's gorgeous story page design integrates sidebar material much more organically throughout the page. Recently launched tech site The Verge is doing something altogether different with the concept of the story page, and the right rail is not a part of it.
CONCLUSION
Again, not all of these thoughts would have led us down a different path in 2010, when we launched Argo. But they point towards some differences in the type of project we'd launch today. I ran this list by my confreres Joel Sucherman and Wes Lindamood, and they liked it, but I'm sure they'd each pick a different set of points.
A consistently astonishing aspect of working in digital journalism is that you always feel like you're at the beginning of something. And in a way, you always are. May our world shift even more in the year to come.
* Yes. I know. And I agree. "Reporter-bloggers" pains me as a term; it risks reinforcing the false dichotomy between "bloggers" and "journalists" that drives all sensible people crazy. But many folks still need reassurances that even we Micro-Aggregated Cyberpeople place great value on reporting, and if a little hyphenation can spare me from having to engage with a 12-year-old stereotype involving pajamas, so be it.
** Alexis himself reminds us all once a week on Twitter that the secret sauce behind the Atlantic's steady march of awesomeness online is actually J.J. Gould and Bob Cohn.

Trust Me: Credibility Is the Future of Journalism

dschultz@andrew.cmu.edu (Dan Schultz) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 10:20:31 -0500

My colleague Matt Stempeck said it best: "Dan, I know that your life has been a tornado wrapped in a hurricane wrapped up in a whole box of tsunamis this week, but you really need to start wearing pants to work."

It turns out only part of that quote is accurate, but you'll never know which one for sure! This is why, before I can graduate from MIT, I have to create an automated bullshit detector. The basic premise is that we, as readers, are inherently lazy. It isn't just that we'll believe almost anything. (Remember that time in 1938 when we believed aliens were invading the planet just because someone on the radio said so? Yeah. That happened.) The real problem is that we'll often believe what we want to believe (or disbelieve what we don't want to believe).

It's hard to blame us. Just look at the amount of information flying around every which way. Who has time to think carefully about everything? Not me. This is why I'm working on a tool called Truth Goggles that will help hone our critical abilities -- and help us identify pieces of information that are worth inspecting a little more before deciding how it fits into our world views.

Thesis Goggles

When I wrote "before I can graduate from MIT" earlier in this post I wasn't lying; I have decided to pursue Truth Goggles for my thesis. I'm definitely not the first person to explore this problem space, but there's lots of room to contribute. New technology has opened up new possibilities; needs have become clearer; and there is a wide variety of possible solutions and unanswered questions just sitting around waiting to be explored.

In November, I presented the idea to the Media Lab community using the following slides:

Crit Day Presentation (Truth Goggles)
View more presentations from Daniel Schultz.

The feedback I got was mixed, but what can you expect from a day called "Crit Day," which is short for "Critically Injure Pride, Hopes, and Dreams of Graduating Day." Here were the main questions asked:

This doesn't seem like it will scale considering Politifact only has a few thousand fact-checked claims. Why aren't you using the crowd to fact check?

My time at MIT will be spent focusing on the interface and user interaction rather than the generation and aggregation of source information. There are enough difficult questions surrounding the interaction layer. I don't think it is worth complicating things further by trying to create a crowd-based journalism platform (which is essentially what crowdsourced fact checking amounts to).

Isn't this just a mashup of technologies and data sets? How is what you are doing novel?

It's true that I'm not inventing new algorithms. I'm applying existing algorithms in novel ways. Credibility layers aren't robust right now, and they come with their own sets of interesting questions in terms of user experience and system design. My contribution will be to frame those questions, answer some of them, create a prototype, and test that prototype. This won't be as trivial as just throwing more information on a screen and calling it a day -- the interface has to be designed with care.

Do you expect to incorporate primary source data?

My initial prototype probably won't pull from sources other than Politifact and other fact-checking services, but I will definitely be thinking about ways to use other sources of data. Primary source content will eventually help with information scalability since raw footage and raw data could help computers find potentially dubious claims (and help readers make determinations about those claims).

Bullshit, This is Clearly Science Fiction

There are a lot of hard questions lurking behind corners here. In fact, most of them aren't even trying to hide; they're just sitting obnoxiously in the middle of the room. Some are technical. Some are philosophical. But all of them need to be addressed intelligently for something like Truth Goggles to actually have a chance of working. I'll rattle off a few of them.

Who determines the truth? Journalists? Experts? Crowds? Individuals? Algorithms?

Sometimes there is a right answer, and sometimes there is room for debate. Can you tell which is which? How do you reflect the difference?

How does the tool account for bias in sources?

How does the tool account for bias in users?

Will the system actually know enough to be regularly useful?

This could easily just make consumers more lazy. How do you prevent that?

What happens when the tool is wrong?

How will this change the way people produce content?

Where do journalists fit into the picture?

As I've pondered these questions, I've come to the following absolute conclusion: Credibility layers need to empower critical ability. I've also decided that it's OK for the system to make mistakes, but it is never allowed to lie. This means the interface should be less focused on telling the reader what to think and much more honed in on reminding (and helping) the reader to think at times when thinking is most important.

I've also come up with a list of weaker claims to throw out there for discussion:

Credibility layers don't have to speak to everyone, but they need to empower the open-minded.

Journalists are our best bet for deep analysis and identifying truth that requires lots of time and effort (e.g., investigation and concept synthesis).

Algorithms are our best bet for identifying contextual evidence (e.g., data, trends, and sources of sound bytes).

Mobs can't be trusted to decide what is true and false, but they are the key to figuring out what is worth thinking about.

Over the coming months, I'll be cranking out interfaces, prototypes, and eventually some good old-fashioned, boring academic papers about this idea. In the meantime, if you're interested in Truth Goggles, I'll be trying to post updates as regularly as possible on my blog, on Twitter (@slifty), and eventually on the newly registered truthgoggl.es.

This post has been cross posted on slifty.com

Too Big to Be Awesome: Big Giving and Its Discontents

tim.r.hwang@gmail.com (Tim Hwang) — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 07:20:02 -0500

At the Institute for Higher Awesome Studies, our latest research has focused on thinking about the origins of awesome ideas, and how organizations and institutions play a role in supporting (or inhibiting) the implementation of those projects in reality. The big, looming question in this work is simple: What does the current social infrastructure supporting awesomeness look like? And, how could we tweak it to make it better (or in the very least, suck less)?

Obviously, the classic piece of social infrastructure that casts the longest shadow (and the biggest piles of money) over this discussion is the arena of Big Giving. This is a place familiar to anyone who has ever filled out a grant application, tried to get money for a community project, or otherwise interacted with a foundation or other non-profit.

There are a few classic and well-tread problems in this traditional arena of philanthropy that are worth reviewing in thinking about the ecosystem of awesomeness. This is particularly true for thinking about the characteristics of projects that are likely to be systematically unsupported.

The Challenges for Big Giving

Big Giving is slow. This is partially legal, and partially a matter of organizational design. Where organizations are global, and with multiple layers of management, the processing of support to a project can take months, if not more than a year. Where needs are immediate, opportunity is temporary, and enthusiasm is high, the long latency of getting support to projects can grind the momentum of that project to a halt. Given a long enough time-frame, the window of opportunity might even close, making that support moot. The liquidity of money is important here: In certain cases, the $1 million that is impossible to actually access will be worth less than $10,000 you can use freely and immediately.

Big Giving is risk-adverse. And who could blame them? The amounts given out are substantial, and non-profits are forced to answer to boards and donors that want to be satisfied that their money is going to a good cause. But that conservationism comes at a cost. Projects that are risky, that take a chance at something new, that are proposed by independent and unknown quantities, are less likely to be supported in such an environment.

Big Giving is costly. Supporting staff and constant efforts to raise funds means that getting a grant from submission to actual funding results in large expenditures. Thus, evaluation of the quality of a grant tends to be invariant to the size of the amount requested. Whether $10,000 or $100,000 is to be given out, each entails similar processing costs. This tends, paradoxically, to mean that projects requesting resources below a certain scale (and thus less expensive) will systematically not be worth it for organizations to fund.

However, even with all these weaknesses, it's important to recognize that traditional non-profit work is an effective tool in its particular context. With massive resources to bring to bear on global problems, the 800-pound gorillas of the giving world can effect some significant changes. For the right project, having this type of institutional backing is a powerful and great thing.

But the key concept is appropriate funding. By all means, not all projects require $100,000-plus level funding to make an impact. In point of fact, it'd be wrong to think that even the majority of insanely great ideas need that much money to be effective. Moreover, when you start to account for the fact that grants of money beyond a certain scale also begin to entail ever-increasing numbers of strings and red tape, it's even possible that certain classes of projects are actually actively hindered from making a relevant impact as the size of the chunks of support they receive increases.

Furthermore, even if a project eventually needs the level of support and funding that Big Giving can provide, it does not necessarily follow that it needs that level of funding right now! It's wrong to think that great ideas (and the people that make them happen) appear instantaneously from the ether. Starting small and permitting organic growth gives a chance for a critical level of expertise and experience to congeal on a team, and gives breathing room to those projects to quickly try out many different things to see what works.

Awesome is a lifecycle, not just a end goal. Correspondingly, support should be tailored for where in the lifecycle a project or an idea is, not necessarily where the granting organization imagines it to be.

sustainable and innovative is tastier

Like the movement around Slow Food is driving for a more careful consideration of agricultural cultivation -- I think it behooves organizations to also think about Slow Funding, a more careful consideration of idea cultivation that eschews the forcing of engineered growth on great things. Organically grown awesome is more sustainable, more innovative, and is often tastier, to boot.

What we need to do is think more precisely about the broader ecosystem and how the pieces fit together. Some of the rhetoric around the New Giving online platforms that have emerged in recent years -- DonorsChoose, Kickstarter, Kiva, and so on -- has been framed in confrontational terms.

Big Giving is something that's going to be rendered irrelevant by the rise of these new, distributed platforms, we might think. But that isn't quite right. These platforms are funding projects that have systematically been unable to get funding from Big Giving in the past. Some of these projects will happily exist for their entire lifecycle within this new ecosystem of platforms; others will need a bridge to get them to the land of traditional Big Giving to scale ever larger. The important thing is that institutional and social links exist to allow this bridging to happen (and for big funding projects to cross seamlessly back into the land of New Giving as well).

A focus on "slow funding" suggests that different projects will need different packages of support as they grow. What we're hoping to do at the Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences is to build precisely this locus of support. Beyond the $1,000 that chapters give out monthly in flexible, informal ways, we've increasingly seen those same chapters start funding at the very beginning -- and to be a partner that continues to help support their projects as they grow by providing the link to supportive social infrastructure, both old and new.

Image courtesy of flickr user CafeYak.com.

How Tiziano Project Beat CNN and NPR in the New Journalism Paradigm

jvidar@tizianoproject.org (Jon Vidar) — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 07:20:48 -0500

"The next category is Community Collaboration," says the emcee as we slowly sink down in our seats at the Online Journalism Awards. We're resigned to defeat against our formidable competition, which includes both CNN and Andy Carvin for his social media-infused orchestration of NPR's coverage of the Arab Spring. No way are we going to win this category.

"And the winner is ... The Tiziano Project!"

Cue music scratching to a stop. Wait. What?

I'm still processing. How did our tiny organization complete a project in Iraqi Kurdistan, with an all-volunteer team, that actually beat both CNN and NPR?

The Tiziano Project | 360º Kurdistan has been a testament to what a small organization with a good idea and a talented, dedicated team can accomplish.

We have received a Gracie for our coverage of women's issues, a Knight News Challenge grant to further develop the platform, and two Webby Award honors (we lost to National Geographic for "Best Use of Photography," a feat that I still consider a win).

But in addition to these highly regarded journalism-centric recognitions, we have now received both the Community Collaboration Award from the Online News Association and SXSW Interactive's Award for Activism.

Activism. Intriguing.

Activism is defined as the policy or action of using vigorous campaigning to bring about political or social change -- not something that is generally associated with traditional journalism.

Where we fit in

So it brings me to question just where The Tiziano Project, whose mission is to empower local communities through journalism, fits in in the new media journalism landscape.

Does collaboration between journalists and those who have long been reported on from a distance introduce a level of activism at the core of this new paradigm?

To answer that, I think we have to consider the broader state of journalism. Reporting has for a long time had an activism component, or at least been driven by the desire to not just express, but actively promote, certain ideas -- often the ideas of those with means. Just look at Fox News.

And as the 24-hour news cycle continues its digression to a 24-second information stream, traditional media will be forced to proceed down the path of higher levels of sensationalism. The result will be that the humanistic focus of reporting will continue to suffer, as the qualifier for publication turns more and more towards driving traffic and increasing sales.

At a crossroads

So we are at an interesting crossroads in journalism at many levels.

News consumers are finding their information through non-traditional means, forcing many mainstream media organizations to over-sensationalize reporting as a means of driving traffic. This sensationalization of the news causes local stories, the ones that do not involve death tolls of economic impact (or the other 99 percent to tie it into the Occupy Wall Street headlines), to go underreported, if reported at all.

That is where The Tiziano Project comes in.

To answer the question that I posed earlier about where we fit into the new media journalism landscape, I think that the easiest and most accurate answer (albeit admittedly a bit narcissistic) is to say that we are at the bleeding edge of what the future of journalism could be.

The future of journalism is collaboration -- collaboration as a means of presenting all sides of a story and providing every individual, whether in a conflict zone or on Wall Street, with the ability to present their voice to the world.

In the most connected era of human history, it is a return to the humanization of the events surrounding us. Iraq is no longer a war thousands of miles away, but the story of a girl who is learning how to drive or the fastest go-kart racer in the country, who has no arms.

It's not that we are merging activism with journalism; in many ways, that was done long ago. What we are doing is spreading the opportunity for communities to share in the global conversation about their own societies and to help shape perceptions about the world in which they live.

If you want to help us achieve this goal, you can support The Tiziano Project here: http://www.tizianoproject.org/get-involved