That’s the question I found myself talking with Phil Bronstein of the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this week. He’d gotten in touch to talk about what tools are available to help newspaper editors track audience and reach for their stories, hoping that I’d have some insights on “cutting edge” techniques to track the reach and impact of news stories posted online. We talked a bit about the challenges of social media tracking after the demise of Technorati, the possible benefits of bit.ly-type analytics, questions of influence and reach raised by Klout and similar systems. All well and good, but measuring how many people read a story is something any web administrator should be able to do. Audience doesn’t necessarily equal impact.
There may have been a day in the rosy past of newspapers when a wall between the publisher and the editor meant that newsrooms published only what was most newsworthy and civically important, without consideration of a given story’s appeal to their audience. In an age where editors can know instantly whether a story on a school council meeting is playing better than a story about a labor action, it’s hard to believe that access to analytics doesn’t shape coverage decisions. Some outlets, like the Huffington Post, have embraced this new world to the point where they are poster children for analytics-driven coverage, using feedback from Google Analytics to inform most if not all decisions about story placement and emphasis. This willingness to respond rapidly to market feedback has likely helped HuffPo’s rapid audience and market growth – whether or not AOL’s acquisition of the site was a wise move, most newspaper publishers would welcome ten-figure interest in their properties.
The danger of traffic-based analytics driving journalism is that you may end up with newspapers that look more like Demand Media-style content farms and less like the civic guardians we want and need them to be. It’s certainly fair to observe that newspapers have been audience driven, at least in part, since inception and that some of the shortcomings of contemporary papers, as well as local newscasts, derive from a focus on driving readership and viewership. But adding an analytics into the newsroom puts the question “Is this story reaching a broad audience?” front and center in a way that’s hard to ignore or avoid.
If an ideal editor is making decisions based on what’s newsworthy, and a realistic editor is civic and audience concerns, how do editors determine whether they’re successfully serving both masters? What are appropriate analytics for civic impact?
As Phil and I talked, I found myself thinking about the LA Times’s coverage of obscenely high government salaries in the city of Bell, CA. In depth, investigative reporting by Ruben Vives and Jeff Gottlieb led to fraud trials, a turnover of the city government, and ultimately to a Pulitzer for the pair of reporters. The reporting on Bell, CA suggests two ways newspapers might measure civic impact: the arrest of bad guys, and the praise of one’s peers and professional societies. But these aren’t exactly quick metrics, and not every worthwhile piece of civic journalism has this magnitude of impact.
Traffic doesn’t seem to be the right measure of civic impact. A story that gets lots of page views or is widely shared might be civically relevant, but might also be salacious – amusing and popular as much of the Anthony Weiner coverage has been, I’m not sure it’s been a positive contributor to our civic involvement. Phil suggested that comments aren’t an adequate metric either. Stories that garner long comment threads could suggest broad involvement, but also may suggest partisan controversy.
I mentioned an idea that I’ve been trying to pitch for a while: in an age of participatory media, news demands participation. Or to quote Benjamin Barber, “People are apathetic because they are powerless, not powerless because they are apathetic.” For people to pay attention to an important story, it’s possible that we need to work to make it possible for people to have an impact on the outcome of the story.
Ideally, we can find better ways to do this than turning our Twitter icons green in solidarity with Iranian activists. Reporting on local civic issues offers the possibility of connecting people to opportunities for action in their own communities. And if newspaper web sites start trying to broker these connections, we gain another possible metric – the efficacy of a story in connecting people to community organizations, volunteering opportunities, and other forms of civic engagement.
That’s not a comfortable role for newspapers to take, Phil reminds me – it smacks of advocacy journalism. But the Bell, CA story is another form of activist journalism: by relentlessly shining a light on political malfeasance, Vives and Gottlieb were demanding that someone take action against these corrupt officials. Eventually, both citizens and prosecutors did. The difference between what I’m proposing and what the Pulitzer winning reporters did is that I’m suggesting newspapers link to possible solutions and measure how effective at driving engagement they are.
This would be far from a perfect metric. It wouldn’t tell you how many people read a story on homelessness, and then sought out community organizations on their own to volunteer with… though adding a feedback cycle where local organizations could communicate changes in community involvement to newspapers might. And it wouldn’t track one of the most critical functions of investigate journalism: the fear it generates in politicians and corporate actors that they could end up on the front page of a newspaper if they break the law. Clay Shirky is worried that losing this deterrence effect is one of the dangers of losing “accountability journalism” in the transition from broadcast, offline models of journalism to participatory, digital ones.
My point is not that I’ve got good metrics for civic engagement for newspaper journalism… or any journalism. It’s that we need to be thinking about finding and developing them. What we measure, we become. If we measure only how many people view, like or tweet, but not how many people learn more, act or engage, we run the risk of serving only the market and forsaking our civic responsibilities, whether we’re editing a newspaper or writing a blog.
A devoted Netflix reviewer reflects on the company's decision to anonymize reviews and remove community features. Helpful meditation on what companies throw away when they serve broad demographic bases and deprioritize the needs of niche users.
Yes, it’s sad that I’m blogging a talk three days late. But these were really good presentations, and I wanted to get a record of what Joi and Mohamed both said. From Friday, at the Knight-MIT Civic Media conference, a morning panel on civic media, citizen science and international news.
Mohamed Nanabhay is the online editor of Al Jazeera English. He’s responsible for Al Jazeera’s English language website, which has risen to prominence during the Arab Spring. Mohamed tells us that he was the “scrappy new media guy”, a barbarian at the gates asking the company to take social media seriously. Now he oversees 70 reporters, and is discovering that it’s harder to be charged with making these changes than to demand those changes.
The protests in Tunisia were documented, Mohamed tells us, thanks to social media. Al Jazeera was banned from operating within Tunisia, so all footage was taken by the general public, uploaded to Facebook (because it was the only unblocked tool for video sharing). Al Jazeera worked to verify the videos, then amplified them, broadcasting them into Tunisia, where they were widely seen, as most Tunisians have satellite dishes. This amplification brought the protests in Sidi Bouzid to a vastly larger audience than would have seen them online, as only a fraction of Tunisians are on Facebook. “Video would be taken, diffused on social networks, broadcast in living rooms, and activists would shoot more video,” recognizing that they were reaching an audience.
Documenting protests became so widespread, it became less dangerous, Mohamed argues. In the past, secret police might have tracked you down to seize your camera or tried to block the service you were uploading to. But the practice, promoted by Al Jazeera, became so widespread, that the widespread adoption of the tactic provided cover.
Mohamed suggests that we’re moving from protest as spectacle to protest as spectacular. To illustrate the former, he shows the famous, disturbing image of Thích Quảng Đức’s self-immolation in protest of the Diệm regime in Vietnam. That image won Malcome Browne a Pulitzer, but it may also have contributed to form of media where protesters have felt compelled to go towards ever more violent extremes to communicate their distress. The shift to the spectacular begins with self-documentation – Mohamed Bouazizi (the Tunisian vegetable seller whose immolation started the Tunisian rebellion) wasn’t the first to set himself on fire in Tunisia, Mohamed reminds us. His was the first case documented, though. “We had a rock in one hand and a cellphone in the other,” a Tunisian protester told him.
People organizing demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt become increasingly smart about how they used the media and how they organized themselves. They used social media both to organize and to promote their events, ensuring a concentration of coverage. Once we reached Tahrir, we’ve moved from the spectacle to the spectacular: 18 days of people occupying Tahrir, with cameras rolling 24/7. What resulted wasn’t violent or extreme – it was a carnival atmosphere. And it was unavoidable: “You couldn’t miss it in Egypt unless you were watching state media,” Mohamed quips.
The widespread protest coverage helped Egyptians understand the movement was nonviolent and increased their willingness to participate. As the movement grew, the government tried to shut down the internet to slow the flow of messages. They tried older tactics, like imprisoning journalists and confiscating broadcast equipment. Ultimately, they tried to block Al Jazeera’s signal by broadcasting on the same frequency. In an amazing show of solidarity, 11 stations in the region began broadcasting Al Jazeera’s coverage verbatim. For him, Mohamed explains, that was “the moment you see this hegemonic discourse collapse”, where the government’s narrative dies and the spectacular has a life of its own.
To be clear, the success of the Egypt protests wasn’t just about social media and broadcast – “successful organizing is not just on the internet – it needs to be rooted in real world activism on the ground.” There’s a very long history of street protest in Egypt, and the veterans of pro-Labor, pro-Palestine or pro-Intifada protests were some of the key organizers in the Tahrir protests. But it’s important to consider the relevance of self-representation in media portrayals. The protesters in Tunisia and in Tahrir offered “a different image than the angry Arab burning flags and wanting to kill your children.” Dialog about the Middle East offered a choice between extremes – a hypersectarian dictatorship or Bin Laden-type extremism. “Instead, the people said there’s a third way, a path the majority of society is going for,” and civic media allowed for that sort of self representation.
Despite Al Jazeera’s role in helping the revolution spread in Egypt and throughout the region, Mohamed sees this as a victory primarily for decentralized media. He suggests we’re seeing what Castells predicted as a “reprogramming of communication networks.”
“What emerged in the last six months was crystalizing the move away from the hub and spoke of media networks,” Mohamed offers. “Anyone who thought that the rise of social media wasn’t fundamentally altering media: this has shown that vision was wrong.”
The shift to participatory media isn’t always easy for broadcast networks. Mohamed shows us a comedy clip from the BBC where a pair of presenters invite their audience to participate in a dialog, no matter how ignorant of the issues they are: “We know you might not know anything. Email us with what you reckon. Ignorance should not be a barrier.” The opportunity at Al Jazeera, Mohamed tells us, is to bring people into the conversation in a way that takes the story forward, building a narrative that provides context to complex issues.
All journalists at the network, including broadcast journalists, have gone through social media training, which includes finding stories on social media and verifying them. Al Jazeera’s focus is less on building the audience via social media, and more on “listening to a very wide variety of input media, and outputing onto any platform.” This shouldn’t be about cheap news gathering – it’s about building relationships and learning from people in new media as we would with more traditional sources. Al Jazeera was so well positioned in Tunisia and Egypt in part because Mohamed and others have had relationships with social media pioneers in those countries for years. “We disparage parachute journalism, and we know you can’t do that with social media either.”
The biggest sign that Al Jazeera is succeeding? Not the widespread coverage of Egypt or the movement in the US to get Al Jazeera available in cable packages. It’s the fact that the network’s web presence saw a bigger spike in traffic around the Japanese earthquake and tsunami than it did during Mubarak’s departure, indicating that the site is becoming a true source of international news for a broad audience.
Joi Ito, the incoming director of MIT’s Media Lab, and a man with his hand in many social media projects, explains that his first interview at MIT involved the earthquake. “It happened in the middle of the night between my two interviews.” And he shouts out to Mohamed and Al Jazeera. “The first media to interview the team we’ve built to document radiation was Al Jazeera.” Joi lives in Dubai and notes that “more Arabs talking about the earthquake than Japanese talking about Libya,” which suggests another market Al Jazeera may want to pursue.
In offering a reflection on the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, Joi offers the provocation, “Twitter beat the pants off mainstream media.” In the chaos and shock that followed the quake, “foreigners couldn’t get any news in Japan.” The best news was available online. Journalists covered press conferences using Ustream, which allowed Japanese around the world to tweet the Japanese press conferences in English, providing some information for English-speaking residents of Japan.
And social media was able to help correct some of the distortions that came from broadcast media. “At the point when the Prime Minister said the workers have evacuated to a safer place – meaning a safer place in the facility, but he said it in a very subtle way – foreign media covered it as ‘they ran away’ and English media amplified this as an echo chamber.” One guy offering one wire post got it wrong, Joi tells us, but it took hours to get it corrected. (Joi called Mohamed directly and had him talk to NHK, which meant that Al Jazeera was one of the first networks to make the correction.)
From early on in the earthquake recovery, Joi was involved with a project called Safecast, which began life with the name “RDTN”. It was inspired by a visualization from a graphic design studio in Portland, Oregon which offered a map with radiation readings. On a list Joi frequents, Vint Cerf asked whether the science behind the visualization was correct. Joi started reaching out to scientists and to the small clique of people who build Geiger counters.
Reporting on radiation and its effects on health is difficult. “Health physicists are generally funded by the nuclear industry, so they don’t like speaking about these issues,” he explains. “It’s hard to get any professional academic to take a position.” And lots of data that was supposed to be opened by the Japanese government has proven very difficult to get – Joi suggests that crises are an excellent time to check the effectiveness of open data implementations.
Safecast was born and evolved in a Skype channel, open to anyone who wanted to join the team. The project’s main output is a map that shows how radiation levels in different parts of Japan compare to readings before the Fukushima disaster. Green squares show the same readings, while grey shows readings that are higher than before. You can click and drill down into the data, including data from drivethroughts of heavily affected areas in instrumented cars.
This hasn’t been easy to do. It’s not all that easy to get a bunch of Geiger counters. Safecast raised $37,000 on Kickstarter to get counters, but quickly discovered that they’re “messy analog devices”. The good ones were designed many years ago, and they don’t have wifi, bluetooth, ethernet or other useful features. So Safecast is now designing their own, as well as building platforms like the 5 mobile “bGeigie” car-based units, which can drive through affected areas and record levels.
Most geiger counters, Joi tells us, don’t measure all three types of radiation – alpha, beta and gamma. They generally just measure gamma, which is the one most people care about, as it’s high energy and can penetrate clothes. But isotopes that throw off alpha and beta particles can be very dangerous when ingested. Japanese inspectors have taken to scanning bags of rice with gamma detectors and proudly announcing they’re gamma free. That’s irrelevant – the concern is that the food might have isotopes that give off alpha and beta particles. Joi suggests that the country is suffering from “radiation illiteracy”, which is particularly dangerous for children: “In the sand and dirt around elementary schools, we’ve found alpha and beta radiation off the charts. And the TV is showing mothers washing surfaces in the school with soap and water – they’d need to be sandblasting.”
Safecast has been a victory for international cooperation. Bunny Huang is working on new radiation sensors, and collaborating with hacker spaces, who are experimenting with Arduino-based trackers. Aston Martin and Tesla are offering cars as vehicles to collect data. They’re working with GIS folks to overlay readings on maps, and have sketched an iGeigie, a Geiger counter that sticks onto an iPhone. The reason for all of this is that radiation is very granular. Joi reveals that his house is okay… mostly – there’s a patch of the front yard that’s highly radioactive, and like many Japanese, he doesn’t know quite what to do. But in the meantime, he’s advocating for a simple idea: “We’re asking anyone who sells Geiger counter parts to sell only to people who will disclose data under a CC-0 license.” If we’re going to map and measure radiation, he tells us, we’re all in this together.
This notes are an inaccurate as any of my liveblogging, and they’re late to boot. :-) Here are notes from our session Thursday morning at the Knight-Civic Media Conference.
Chris Csikszentmihalyi introduces our panel as one that begins with him describing the past of the civic media center, and two speakers (Sasha Constansa Chock and myself) representing the future. He reminds us that we define civic media at MIT as “any sociotechnical system that can strengthen a geographic community.” When you say “community” at MIT, people are thinking of online communities. We had to work hard to reeducate ourselves around that transition. It turns out that within geographic communities, there are just as many communities of interest as on the internet.
Chris’s talk focuses on three themes: Production and distribution, Principles of Civic Media and Spinoffs from the Center. He reminds us that MIT works by discovering fundamental technologies and engineering principles, and they often work themselves out in startups that spin out of lab research.
Reacting to Baratunde’s talk from last night, Chris mentioned that when the Center began, he and the cofounder intentionally decided not to use the term “citizen journalism”. It’s a term that implies a transition that hasn’t been fully thought out, like “wireless remote” or “horseless carriage”. He points out that Baratunde is thinking from the perspective of the Onion, which models a news operation. When we view situations through that frame, we think in terms of crowd sourcing, asking “How do you get the crowd to help your media outlet?”
As we think about innovation around media, it’s useful to look at Eric Von Hippel’s work on single user versus collaborative innovation. Single user innovation is common when communication costs are high and design costs are low. Producer innovators like corporations reduce communication costs, usually by putting people together in a building (like the New York Times, Chris suggests…). Once communication costs drop far enough, we see models of open collaborative innovation, which makes possible stuff like Linux. There are at least three models for building innovation: a private investment model, a government model, and a collective action model, each of which could leverage different models of innovation.
In thinking through the work the Center has done thus far, Chris lists five principles that have governed design:
#1 – All technology is politics. Even an automatic door closer is political – it forces compliance through a combination of labor and capital.
#2 – Technology is personal and geopolitical at the same time.
#3 – Politics of most technologies are socially regressive, because they’re made by the most powerful entities in the world. As a result, technologies tend to reinforce north/south divides and other power divides.
In thinking through these three principles, Chris suggests that “the quickest way to not make social change is to develop technology the way it’s always been developed.”
#4 – The free software model has principles that offer significant new modes of production and distribution, making it possible for innovation to spread in unexpected ways.
#5 – Most technologies configure their user as a consumer, not as a citizen
Chris then outlines some of the projects that have spun off from the Center and the principles we’ve learned from that process. Some of the Center’s influence has been most powerful as a leader in shaping the thinking around Civic Media. The 2003 Total Information Awareness project inverted a model in which the US government spied on citizens through all possible channels and suggested ways to invert the model and all spy on the government. This work inspired Little Sis, which used code from the TIA project, and suggests that Wikileaks was also inspired by this effort. Tad Hirsh’s TXTMob project is acknowledged as a major influence on Twitter by three of that company’s founders, who looked closely at the code to design their system.
In considering the projects that have spun off, Chris identifies these themes:
- Social media is known for supporting weak ties – can we strengthen those ties?
Rick Borovoy’s work with the people who sold Spare Change, a newspaper designed to help the homeless, tried to build links by places stickers with links to a homepage for the vendor on each paper. When a vendor got sick, his page received a flood of comments. Charlie de Tar’s Between the Bars project allowed someone who was incarcerated to rebuild ties with someone he’d served in the military with.
- Public dialog and accountability
Projects like Sourcemap make it possible to consider the inputs into the products we buy, and have a dialog about the materials we consume and what they mean.
- Globalism inverted
How do we take the tools of the most powerful people and invert them? Projects like Wellwatch and extrACT leverage these technologies and that work will continue under the auspices of an NGO that tracks the extractive industry.
- Community Collective Action
Platforms to allow communities to work in conjunction. This includes platforms that leverage phones. Chris reminds us that “phones are a bear, and Asterisk is a bear” – Leo Burd’s VoIP Drupal makes it more possible for communities to use phones for change, and we can see the success of the tool through the interest of Twilio, Tropo and Plivo in the product.
- Generating evidence for change.
Projects like Cronicas de Heroes shows that there’s a narrative for Ciudad de Juarez that’s different from the narrative of violence that characterizes local news.
Sasha Costanza Chock appears remotely via Skype, and encourages us to think about the role of co-design in creating Civic Media. He’s helping organize the Allied Media Conference in Detroit, so isn’t able to join in person.
He suggests that we think about the distribution of technological innovation not just from the model of innovators to early adopters. Lead-user innovation as proposed by Eric Von Hippel shows that users can become creators, and Francois Bar’s vision of “technology appropriation” suggests that companies produce technology, users redesign and hack those technologies, and firms reclaim and develop new technologies around them. Mobile banking is a good example of this – firms produced prepaid phone cards for African markets, African innovators figured out how to cards to transfer money over long distances, and companies incorporated this technology into the building of mobile banking systems.
We want to get beyond user appropriation, which leads to firms telling users they’re doing it wrong, and towards co-design, where we work together on human centered design, appropriate technology design, and participatory design.
Participatory design helped lead toward the VozMob – Voices Mobiles – project. Collaborating with VoIP Drupal, the platform is designed to project immigrant voices using mobile communications. The participants in the design are from working class communities in LA. Groups of gardeners and house cleaners participated in design sessions at USC. Their motivation: to challenge the representation of day laborers in the digital world.
Sasha shows us that if you Google the phrase “Day Laborers”, the top result is a virulently anti-immigrant hate site whose description reads, “Some of the most violent murderers, rapists, and child molesters, are illegal aliens who work as day laborers.” It’s not hard to see why “laborers want to retake control over representation of their communities.” Most of the people who work as day laborers don’t have conventional access to the web – Sasha shows a map of a composite tech index that shows that access to computers and broadband is very weak in low-income and first-generation immigrant communities. But through research with these communities, Sasha and they were able to discover that the majority of day laborers have mobile phones. They use them mostly for work, to call friends and family. 30% send texts, 50% receive them, 47% take photos and 36% send photos from their phones. This suggested great potential to use the phones for storytelling.
Designing a project like VozMob creates some interesting challenges. “How do you do web development with people who don’t have web literacy?” You work with paper models, and you design for participation via SMS. The project has culminated in a system built around open source software, primarily Drupal, and content that’s licensed via Creative Commons.
Sasha offers a set of key takeaways in a format designed to make the Unix geeks in the audience smile – they end up spelling out “sudo apt-get”, which is a command designed to let you install new software through a package manager on many Unix systems. Inside the acronyms are:
Enabling conditions:
- strong connections to communities of practice – build with the communities you expect to be the users
- focus on the tools people have access to, people who don’t have universal (that’s where he gets the U) access to ICT
- diverse project teams
- open everything – access, standards, source, data, tools
Universal design goals: Accessible Para Todos (accessible for everyone)
could have done something clever around smartphones, but that’s not what this community has
A rigorous codesign philosophy:
Generate ideas, user stories and prototypes
Evaluate everything on an ongoing, iterative basis
conduct this work Together.
A note – I’m waaaay behind on liveblogging because I’ve been on stage throughout much of the Civic Media conference. But I promise to catch up and post a set of notes on sessions yesterday and today, though possibly not until Monday.
One of the signature events of the Knight-Civic Media Conference has become the “collaboration contest”. This is a chance for the folks attending the event to brainstorm innovative collaborations and allow the group to vote on their favorite ideas. Knight provides microgrants (from $1000 – $3000) for the most innovative and promising ideas, as judged by the group.
In third this year is VOMU, the Vehicle of Many Uses – the idea of turning a truck like the Clover Food Van into a system for collecting photos and stories while handing out ice cream. Streaming Screaming won the second prize with a project to use Public Laboratory’s balloon technoloogy to provide live video streaming of protests in Chile. And the big winner was Visual Voice, which wants to expand the trend of public radio programming taking on a video component.
Michael Maness, Knight’s VP of Journalism and Media Innovation, offers his summaries of two days of talks and presentations. His themes include:
Single versus scaling: We’ve seen a lot of one shot case studies, but rarely a path to scale.
Virtually lame: Meeting in the streets still beats online connections for action.
Making Audience a Community: Individuals think they’re alone until they meet like-minded others.
From Vote -> Fan -> Support: It’s not enough to “like”something – you need to move up the value chain to a position of more active support.
Social Media Theater: “Civic Fiction” can have value, but it depends on intention.
Media as a Mirror: The media often mirrors corroboration producing an echo chamber.
Desperately Seeking Sources: Developing unknown online voices is the new process for lead generation – we might need to cultivate communities of people who can help us understand and report certain stories.
Watching the Detectives: Distributed Investigative Reporting is impacting the media narrative.
“ATION Building”: Social media uncovers stories, and broadcast media gets involved with verification, curation and amplification
Hashtag Agreement: There’s a confusion over what hash tags to use, and then they get overloaded and contested
Event Literacy: When news breaks, there’s a need for context, definitions and background information to understanding breaking news.
Twitter’s fast, broadcast is context: Michael shows a graph that suggests the utility of participatory media like Twitter is very high early on, and lower as there’s more curation and context, at which point broadcast seems to be increasingly valuable.
We open the discussion to the room, both for identifying themes and getting feedback on the conference.
Alex Howard sees the conference as a celebration of the toolmakers, hope that comes from the idea that there’s a group of people excited to build the new tools. Jonathan Stray wonders if we’re overfocusing on broad audiences and suggests that we need to think about finding the audiences for stories, rather than finding stories that reach a global audience. Dharmishta Rood observes that many of the people in the room are Bostonians and suggests that we need more fora to get together.
One of our guests praises the conference for having a sense of humor and a sense of fun and encourages us to continue in that vein. Another points out that we’re light on projects grounded in the developing world. Leo Burd encourages us to focus more on highly marginalized populations and populations that aren’t on the web. Someone suggests that we need an action plan, some sense of collective action as we work between conferences. Alex from Sochi Reporter proposes a union of civic media participants. Wendy from LinkTV encourages us to look for collaborations between journalists, technologists and end users.
Lexi, a documentary filmmaker from Indonesia, suggests we get a better understanding of the profit structure behind media. A participant suggests we need to open our community to scientists working with large data sets, and people who work within bureaucracies.
The weekend before MIT’s Center for Civic Media conference, I was at a family reunion with my wife’s family, in Bandera, Texas. And while my wife’s family was much more interested in our 18 month-old son than in my professional career, the fact that I was changing jobs was an opportunity for relatives to ask me what I’d be doing at MIT. Like a lot of folks in the audience, I don’t think most of my family has any idea what it is that I do for a living, aside from knowing it’s got something to do with computers. So I told people that I was coming to join the Center for Civic Media, which allowed them to ask the obvious – and excellent question – “What the @&#^$%! is civic media?” (If you’d like to get the full effect, imagine the question delivered with a Texas drawl, after the speaker removes a cigar from his mouth.)
I find that our field is often better defined by example than in abstractions. That’s one of the reasons that this conference is so helpful. We’ve got a room filled with people doing groundbreaking work in civic media, and in a very real sense, the best answer to that question is to take a look around the room and ask each other what we’re doing, individually and collectively.
But I couldn’t bring my family from South Texas to the conference, so I ended up relying on the story we’d just heard on the radio about women in Saudi Arabia driving and posting videos of their drives to YouTube, as a protest against the Kingdom’s laws preventing women from driving.
The protest wasn’t all that massive, because the organizers wanted to make sure only licensed drivers drove. That meant that the participants were limited to women who had licenses from another country, which gave a very small pool of potential protesters to choose from. And the Saudi reaction was pretty muted – one woman was ticketed, no arrests – and Global Voices has a story about Laila Sindi in Jeddah, who was detained while driving, but released by the officer after a complicated charade designed to allow him to respond to a complaint that had come in about women driving, but not arrest Sindi.
Despite the small scale, the protest got a great deal of attention, in part because of the novelty of the organizing media – US and European politicians tweeted their support, and a campaign to honk in support of Saudi women was launched to accompany the protests in the US and other countries. This may be because there’s a current fascination with the idea popular movements can be created using virtual tools. While there’s good reason to suspect that the role of Facebook has been overstated in the Arab spring, there’s also good reason to believe that the role was real and significant, especially as it came to documentation. At this conference we’ll hear about this from Mohamed Nanabhay of Al Jazeera about the role of participatory media and broadcast media in the Arab Spring, but we know that the use of Facebook to document protests in Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia was critical in helping protests spread beyond that small city throughout that nation and the whole region.
The women2drive protests illustrate at least three ideas that I’m seeing around many recent civic media efforts:
- Organizing in virtual as well as physical spaces, recognizing that online action alone doesn’t move most politicians
- Self documentation using participatory media – in this case, documentation as a form of protest in and of itself
- The use of broadcast media to amplify beyond the “some to some” space of social media.
So I offered this as an example to my father in law for the kinds of things we study at the Center for Civic Media and the sorts of movements and mobilization we’re interested in learning about and supporting. I thought I’d done a pretty good job, but a couple of hours later, I heard him tell one of my uncles that I’d landed a job as a driving instructor for Saudi women, which suggests that he might have missed a key point or two.
Trying to explain this field to family members led me first to conclude that “citizen media is complicated”. But that’s not really true – media as a whole is complicated, and media is especially complicated now, at a moment when changes in technology make it possible for hundreds of millions of people to share their thoughts, perspectives and ideas and where some of the systems we had for aggregating and filtering people’s stories are facing challenges to their sustainability. It’s a space that’s moving incredibly quickly, where debates that would have occupied our time at this conference four years ago – Do blogs have a place in the newsroom? – are obviated by the reality that most major news outlets have made space at the table for different forms of civic media. We seem to be rapidly going beyond black and white questions of whether citizen media has legitimacy, or whether new media will crush old media and into the murky grey of discovering what’s actually going on in a world where the distinction between publisher and reader, broadcaster and audience is disappearing.
I’m coming to MIT because I’m obsessed with four big questions about civic media, and I’m looking to learn from the brilliant folks at the Media Lab and the Comparative Media Studies department, as well as from the folks we’re able to convene at events like this one, to address these questions. They’re not the only questions we’re going to be looking at, because one of the major reasons researchers work together in centers is that when we work in isolation, we often lack both the right answers and the right questions. My new colleagues Sasha Costanza-Chock, Mitch Resnick, Leo Burd, Rick Borovoy, Lorrie LeJeune and others at the Center are surely going to bring more and better questions to the table – these are just the four I’ve thought about enough to feel able to bring to this audience.
The first comes from this realization that we’re at an extremely confusing moment in the media space. Debates over whether Facebook can topple governments or whether dictators love social media point to a simple truth: we don’t understand the media ecosystem very well. How do we map and understand media ecosystems?
We can start by mapping who reports about what and where, with tools like Newsflow from Civic’s Jeffrey Warren and David Small. We can start understanding who amplifies whom, with analysis like the Egypt Twitter influence map from Kovas Boguta at Infoharmoni, or Gilad Lotan’s analysis of how a single tweet from Keith Urbahn, a defense analyst, turned into a cascade of speculation about Bin Laden’s arrest. (Deep in Gilad’s data is the story of how Sohaib Athar, a Pakistani IT consultant inadvertently live-tweeted the raid, and how social media friends connected his account to the rumors and media stories.)
To do this, we need lots of data, and new ways to look at it. The project I’ve been working on at the Berkman Center, and which will continue as a joint project between MIT and Harvard, is Media Cloud, which indexes hundreds of thousands of newspaper articles and blogposts and allows us to look at what language is used by different corners of the mediasphere. One of the goals of the work is to be able to track how stories go viral, and what stories die on the vine – a more general goal is moving from a world where we talk about how the media works in terms of anecdotes towards one where we can root our conversations in data. In the long term, I’d like to be able to talk about media in the ways we talk about complex systems like traffic and weather – something we can’t fully predict, but can model and understand.
Understanding how media ecosystems work is more than an academic question – it’s critically important for activists. I mentioned that the Saudi protests gained a significant amount of US media attention. I found it very interesting that the technique of video civil disobedience used by the Saudi women directly parallels a technique used by Dream Act advocates in the US. (The Dream Act would allow undocumented youth who’ve served in the armed forces or completed higher education to seek permanent residency.) Dream Activists have been using the language of the gay rights movement, “coming out” as undocumented in YouTube videos, and using this online statement to complement offline marches and activism. While this tactic has become widespread, it hasn’t received the same sort of media attention the Saudi protests have – I just did a quick Nexus search and found nine stories on the New York Times searching for “YouTube” and “Saudi Women”… none for “YouTube” and “Dream Act”. It may be that the Saudi activism is leveraging patterns of connection and amplification that the Dream Activists are not, or that a story about defying theocracy is easier for people to amplify than the deeply divisive issue of immigration in the US.
My hope is that understanding who speaks, who amplifies and who listens will help us address the second question I’m obsessed with: “How do we help marginal and rarely-heard voices find an audience?” While the promise of digital media is that everyone can share their story, we’re a long way from realizing that potential. Projects like Charlie deTar’s Between the Bars, which invites the roughly 1% of Americans who are incarcerated to blog by sending paper letters which are scanned and posted online, or Sasha Costanza-Chock’s VozMob, which allows immigrant and low wage workers to blog from mobile phones, invite us to pay attention to communities we rarely encounter in new or old media. Bringing people into the conversation sometimes requires new tools, like Leo Burd’s VoIPDrupal, which brings the power of Voice over IP – critical to reaching populations who don’t have regular internet access – into the participatory media conversation.
My work at Global Voices has shown me that the question of finding an audience for marginal voices can’t end with helping people publish. We’ve run tens of thousands of stories that unlock social media conversations taking place in different corners of the world. At moments when a dramatic natural disaster takes place, or a revolution comes into international media focus, there’s tremendous interest in our content. But we’ve written about dozens of revolutions that got almost no mainstream media attention – which included Tunisia up to the day before Ben Ali stepped down – and we’ve begun to realize that increasing the supply of media from underrepresented voices isn’t enough: we’ve got to increase demand.
Global Voices tries to work on the demand problem using three tools: images, narrative, and human connection. It’s our hope that by giving you glimpses of other parts of the world, by telling compelling stories and by giving you the chance to connect to individual bloggers, you can connect to stories you otherwise might have ignored. But I’m increasingly convinced that there’s another factor we need to consider: participation.
When people hear about stories that they connect to emotionally, they want to find ways to be part of them. Confronted by injustice or tragedy that you’re powerless in the face of is an extremely frustrating and alienating prospect. In a participatory age, people look for ways they can help out, and may follow stories more closely when they can.
That helps explain why more than 160,000 Twitter users turned their profile pictures green in solidarity with protesters in Iran, an action that had little impact beyond the symbolic… or took actions that were probably in the long run unhelpful, like changing their Twitter location to Tehran, making it even harder to find the very few people actually tweeting from within Iran. It’s the logic that led people around the world to send pizzas to pro-labor protesters in Madison, and might be the logic that led people to join Anonymous and to mount a denial of service attack on Egyptian government sites (which may have worsened the internet connectivity situation in Egypt for those using the one ISP that remained online during the shutdown.)
I believe that participation is a key factor in getting people to pay attention to stories locally and globally, and so I’m interested in this question: How do we encourage productive participation? Often, what people need is just a small amount of guidance as to what would be helpful. Last summer, a group of bloggers in Moscow used the Ushahidi platform to collect data on what people affected by wildfires needed after they’d fled the fires – they collected the information on russian-fires.ru and organized donations within Moscow and cars to drive donated food, clothing, tents and other supplies to people in villages.
Sometimes we can participate by sharing information rather than physical goods. Chris Csikszentmihalyi’s Landman Report Card encourages people who have been approached to purchase mineral extraction rights to their land to document and share their experiences with other citizens facing similar offers, which can include deceptive and harassing tactics from landmen. And participating by sharing good news can be a powerful force as well, as we’ve seen in Cronicás de Héroes, which is helping change the dialog about Ciudad Juarez to include stories about local heroes as well as stories about violence and the drug war.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many of the most interesting projects encouraging participation involve maps. By inviting people to contribute to a map, you’re inviting people to leave their mark on the spaces they care about. And maps are one of ensuring that media connects with physical communities, and helps people understand the points of conflict and of consonance in their communities.
I was in New York City a few weeks ago having lunch with a friend who’s a labor activist. He took me on a walking tour of his neighborhood, pointing out otherwise nondescript buildings and telling me about the unions that had built them and the activists who’d lived there – this is something he does regularly for union leaders and activists who visit New York. We made our way to a thoroughly anonymous building on 23rd street, which turns out to be the headquarters of the Communist Party in the US, and as my friend began giving me a history of the Communist party, I noticed a man on the other side of the street, talking to a small group of tourists and gesturing. Across the street is the Chelsea Hotel, and the man was offering a walking tour of rock and roll sites in New York City. So while he talked about Sid Vicious and the death of Nancy Spungen, my friend starting telling me about Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Abbie Hoffman and their stays at the Chelsea.
The dueling walking tours made me think about layers of data atop the physical world. As I was walking with my friend, I was thinking about how I could design a system that would record his narration, record GPS locations and create a walking map that could be viewed on the web or heard as a podcast while physically touring the city.
Of course, the real challenge isn’t just doing this – it’s making it possible for everyone to add layers of meaning and history to physical space, and to find ways to navigate through those layers. How do we help communities annotate physical spaces? How do we make civic maps?
We’re seeing some basic tools available within Google Maps and other platforms that allow users to build their own maps, offering alternate paths through a city like this walking tour of New York City’s independent bookstores. And we’re seeing some very creative ideas like Mapping Main Street, which invites people to document Main Streets in cities across America by tagging photos and aggregating them into a data layer atop maps. But there’s lots more we can do, making it easier for people to build these maps individually and collaboratively, and to sort through the different types of data that exists on top of physical spaces.
Before we deal with dueling data layers, we’ve got some concrete challenges to take on. Just because data exists to annotate a physical place doesn’t mean it’s accessible. Rick Borovoy’s Lost in Boston realtime project is encouraging business owners to put up smart LED signs that receive information from Boston’s mass transit system and can tell you “You have 13 minutes before the bus arrives – come in for a cup of coffee.” Information that might have been accessible to an intrepid user with a mobile phone and browser is embedded in the space in a way that’s practical and useful.
Sometimes we need the maps themselves. Jeffrey Warren’s Grassroots Mapping work is encouraging people to put digital cameras on helium balloons and make their own community maps. I’m hoping we’re heading towards a future where we’ve got a wealth of maps – from satellite imagery, to homemade aerial maps, to photo collages made by people of their neighborhoods – and a rich set of tools that allow people to annotate these maps with their discoveries, their concerns, their challenges to friends, neighbors, businesses and politicians.
Those are my four questions. They’re not the only questions we should be asking about civic media, and they’re more or less guaranteed to change and morph with everyone who comes into the Center as a student, a researcher, a guest speaker. I’m interested in answering these question, both in theory and in practice, but I’m at least as interested in seeing what other questions everyone who’s involved with the civic media movement, which includes everyone in this room, brings to the table.
I’m very excited to have the opportunity to work with the brilliant folks at MIT Media Lab and Comparative Media Studies, particularly my friend Sasha Constanza Chock, one of the three principal investigators for the center along with me and Mitch Resnick. I’m honored to be continuing the work pioneered by Henry Jenkins, Mitch Resnick and especially Chris Csikszentmihalyi, whose leadership has made the center what it is today. I’m very grateful to the Knight Foundation for giving us the chance to continue this work, to explore new directions, and to continue bringing together a set of the best thinkers in civic media to work on the task of understanding and building this field. And I’m very grateful to you for your patience in listening to me puzzle out these questions and change my view of the field with the wealth of ideas presented at this conference.
Baratunde Thurston, digital editor for The Onion, offers his advice on “How to Save the World With Satire”, a talk he encourages us to tag #civitunde. Before explaining his work as a civic media actor, he offers us a portrait of his background. His great grandfather Benjamin Lonesome was born a slave, taught himself to read and moved to Washington DC. One of his daughters was the first black female employee at the Supreme Court. She sent her daughter, Baratunde’s mother, to a private boarding school in rural Pennsylvania in 1948, “full of trees and white people, neither of which my mother was very familiar with.”
Baratunde’s mother wasn’t very pleased by this development and sent her mother a letter which read, in part, “I am having fun but I don’t like it here. I am mad with you.” At the bottom of the letter, in another hand, was the word “over” and on the back the message, “If your little girl is dissatisfied, we would be happy to have her bed for girls who would like to come.” This, Baratunde tells us, was the story that made him an advocate for net neutrality, because it’s pretty obvious some packets were being intercepted and expected.
His love for journalism comes honestly – his mother became the features editor of the high school newspaper, and later became deeply involved in the civil rights movement. His older sister is the digital news editor for the Lansing, MI newspaper. Baratunde tells us that she’s got his job, only he gets to be more honest. When he was celebrating the success of the Onion’s iphone ap (which is vastly more popular than iPhone aps for most “serious” newspapers), his sister got deeply upset. “You’re not real news!” she complained. “Now you’re just mincing words,” he responded.
Baratunde’s experiments in satire started early. He describes himself as a “muckracking honors student”, busted for seeking sources in the teachers lounge. When his Quaker high school (which also educated Chelsea Clinton, who he assures us got on well with the black students, perhaps due to her father’s saxophone prowess) began expelling students (tough for Quakers because each of us is the manifestation of God and expelling God from your school is hard to do), he created wanted posters demanding the arrest of the dean and the principal.
His time in Boston led to a career in standup comedy, and to his experiments with online media. (Baratunde tells us that he loves Boston but that it’s “rare to be in a place that so effectively hides its black population – I think the underground railroad is still operating.”) He had a show on Allston Brighton Free Radio, a community radio station with a broadcast radius of about a mile. “I would beg people who were listening to the show to call, just to see if anyone was out there. Eventually, I’d tell people that there was an emergency and I needed them to call and help me out.” But even with such light listenership in the Boston area, he began recording the broadcast from the sound board, converted it into an mp3 and put it on the internet as a rudimentary podcast.
Experiments online also led him into the world of political blogging. Jack and Jill Politics is a thriving “black oriented civic blog”, which found itself credentialed to cover the 2008 democratic national convention, which let Baratunde experiment with live streaming video from a mobile phone, taking questions for Van Jones and Gwen Ifill from the audience via SMS.
Somewhere his work moved from the deeply serious – a wiki to document instances of voter suppression – to the deeply silly. When swine flu “hit the media harder than it hit the human population, especially in early days”, Baratunde realized that there were three swine flu twiter accounts, “doing boring work, disseminating actual information.” His account, The Swine Flu, announced its location as “Fucking EVERYWHERE” and offered as a bio: “Bird flu ain’t got shit on me.” Combined with a catchy profile picture and a rich Facebook presence, and The Swine Flu really took off online. Soon his character was hosting “face licking” parties on Facebook and finding other ways to spread the viral message of swine flu, and inviting others to record audio for the page with their experiences of Swine Flu Face Licking gatherings. The peak of the Swine Flu’s success was a Huffington Post interview, in character.
Some of Baratunde’s best work is done under his own imprimatur, like his “live hate-tweeting”. He’s got some deeply personal reasons to hate the Twilight series of books and movies. “I read the first two books, as audio books, on a road trip with my wife. Shortly after, she was not my wife. I’m not going to say twilight ended my marriage, but I am going to say there’s a correlation.” Now when Twilight films premiere, he shares his hate with the world. “I sit in the back row of the theatre with a laptop and a wireless card and live tweet my hate.” This includes sharing pertinent questions about the series, just as a responsible media professional should: “If Bella has sex with Jacob, is that bestiality and can that be prosecuted in Washington state law?” The goal of the project is simple: “If I can reach one kid, get one kid off crack, get one kid to go to college…” And we see a tweet of a teenager telling Baratunde that based on his review, he’s not going to see the film.
This spirit of participatory parody doesn’t just extend into online space. Baratunde is a regular at Delicatessen in Soho, and when Foursquare entered the scene, rapidly became mayor. While most of his reign has been peaceful and unchallenged, a friend dared to question his rightful mayorship. They ended up agreeing to a month-long political campaign, which included a political rally, in which Baratunde extolled the restaurant’s virtues in the manner of a gospel preacher. “This went on for far longer than it should have” and led people to bring political posters, for and against his rule. One protester, an Onion coworker, stood on the corner with a sign that read “Jesus Hates #Baratunde”.
Not every project is fanciful – lately Baratunde has been traveling to the Republic of Georgia, learning about the governments’ plans to turn the country into an innovation and media hub. President Saakashvili has been bringing media innovators from around the world, and most of these visits end up with the President’s visitors drinking in Tblisi nightclubs and talking about media. That’s where Baratunde met the photographer who told him “Give me 50 Chechnyans and we can sort this whole thing out. These rebels have no discipline.” Baratunde points out that this is the sort of perspective that’s hard to get from television news. As a social media prankster, “It’s powerful to talk with people who are using YouTube not just because it’s funny, but because it’s the only way to get news out.”
Of course, what many of us wanted to hear Baratunde speak about was his work with The Onion, which he explains was established in 1756 in Boston as the Mercantile Onion. In 1783, it added the popular column, “Ben Franklin’s Inventions this week”. And he tours us through some of the paper’s journalistic milestones through headlines:
“Earthquake makes least gay day in San Francisco history”
“Kennedy slain by CIA, Mafia, Castro, LBJ, Teamsters, Freemasons”
and the recent headline celebrating Obama’s election, “Black Man Given America’s Worst Job”
Sometimes Onion stories react to the narrative in the media, and sometimes they help predict it. The Onion ran the headline, “Mitt Romney Haunted By Past of Trying to Help Uninsured Sick People” about two weeks before Romney’s work on health insurance in Massachusetts was linked to “Obamacare” and became an issue in the Republican primaries.
And sometimes the Onion takes on the media directly. Baratunde shows us a wonderful video story about the Boston Globe revamping their paper to serve their remaining three readers. A dorm fire at NYU is easily traced to a dropped cigarette, because the fire investigators have 2,400 Facebook photographs taken by 25 iphones and 16 Blackberries to reconstruct the scene from.
Baratune’s department focuses on “Web, mocial and tablet things”. That often means that his team is responding to real, breaking news, launching stories that don’t go through the normal (painstaking) Onion editorial process. Some of these are big winners, like the reaction to Obama sharing his long-form birth certificate: “Trump Unable To Produce Certificate Proving He’s Not A Festering Pile Of Shit“. Others are the product of advance preparation, lines readied in advance for events like the Oscars or the Superbowl.
While he doesn’t use the Henry Jenkins term “transmedia storytelling”, recent Onion projects focus on creating online buzz for stories released on cable television. A campaign to promote a story about capturing the semen of a dying racehorse led to the Twitter tag #horsemasturbation becoming a trending topic, a proud moment for Baratunde. Other viral campaigns have included #cutepiglet, a campaign associated with the story “Al Qaeda Attacks Internet with Photo of Adorable Piglet”, and the #500ftbinladen campaign, where the Onion’s reporting was quickly complemented by people’s own photos of a 500 foot monster undead Bin Laden attacking their cities. The triumph of this may be the Yelp review page, where 294 individuals have posted their reviews of the (fictional, Onion-created) $8 billion Planned Parenthood Abortionplex. The reviews are painfully funny, written in the character of the story, and generally too lewd for my blog.
Baratunde offers his comprehensive theory of how traditional media is encountering social media. The stages have “a” and “b” sections – what the mainstream media and the new media do at each point:
Phase 1a – the Pandering phase, where Rick Sanchez begs you to follow him and tell him what you think!
Phase 1b – the calling them out phase, where social media engages in heavy grassroots criticism of the mainstream media
Phase 2a – Crowdsourcing, where mainstream media demands you send in your photos of breaking news
Phase 2b – The realization that while having a flipcam doesn’t make you a journalist, it may make you someone who commits acts of journalism
Phase 3a – Recruiting the next media stars from the online space
Phase 3b – the Advanced Lab Work phase, using social media to share not just stories but the raw info and data.
This is all heading towards a world of networked storytelling, where peer to peer relationships between mainstream and new media organizations lead to something entirely new. This should be a rich space for satire, which Baratunde tells us, is key because when you make fun of power, you encourage power to behave in ways that are more legitimate. “That leads to better democracy, which leads to better humans, which leads to better sex.”
He closes with the current campaign – the demand for an #OnionPulitzer. “I know civic media is all about breaking down the walls of traditional media, but it’s still insulting that we’re celebrating our thousandth issue and we haven’t been graced with the Pulitzer.” He’s not alone – there’s an active campaign at Americans for Fairness in Awarding Journalism Prizes, where media heroes including Brooke Gladstone and Ira Glass advocate for the Pulitzer committee to recognize the important work the Onion does.
For the next three days, MIT is hosting the 2011 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference. The event showcases the recipients of Knight’s annual News Challenge, and this year, it’s the opportunity for a slate of announcements and introductions. It’s one of Joi Ito’s first public events as the head of MIT’s Media Lab (he tells us that, since he’s not formally started the job yet, he’s a volunteer). Knight today announced the relaunch of the MIT Center for Civic Media and my hire as director of that Center. Chris Csikszentmihayli is stepping down from his leadership of the Center. Alberto Ibarguen, the president of the Knight Foundation, encourages people to read John Palfrey’s report evaluating the first years of the Center for Future Civic Media, which takes a hard look at the project and offers some exciting challenges for future directions. Alberto acknowledges the challenge of studying and building tools and projects focused on communities in the context of a university focused on pure research and recognizes Chris Csikszentmihayli’s role in bridging that gap.
This is the final year of the Knight News Challenge five year experiment. For the first time, there’s sponsorship beyond the Knight Foundation – Google has contributed $2 million towards the challenge and is applying half of it towards this year’s contest winners. Alberto explains that Google has been looking for ways to get into the field, and that they’re thrilled to have Google’s support and partnership in pushing these ideas forward.
Knight’s support of the News Challenge comes from at least three values. Alberto reminds us that the Knight brothers were fully dedicated to a search for truth. While no one at the foundation believes in pure objectivity, that search for journalistic truth informs the work Knight does across all projects. Working closely with Tim Berners-Lee, Alberto reminds us that access to media – and particularly digital media – remains an unsolved problem. “If you don’t have access, you’re a second class citizen socially and economically.” Ultimately, the goal is not just to build tools, but to build informed and engaged communities.
The News Challenge will continue, though perhaps in new forms. The long timeline that currently faces News Challenge entrants is too long for some of the most innovative projects. The future of the contest will involve four cycles per year, allowing for faster decisionmaking. Alberto is rethinking the open source requirements for the projects, because that’s proven to be a very difficult constraint for projects. And Knight has discovered that many groups have difficulty building the teams they need to carry out projects, particularly in finding technical talent. In the future, grants may come with training and technical support.
Alberto introduces the 16 grants with a ten second video for each project. But the next two hours are spend on ignite-style talks for all winners. I’ll try to blog each of those in turn. (And full disclosure – I was on the team that evaluated these projects, so I share some credit/blame for the projects selected… :-)
Josh Benton of Nieman Lab has done at least as good a job as I can of explaining these projects – please see his excellent post.
Brian Boyer of PANDA, a project launched by the Chicago Tribune, tells us that Excel sucks, databases are weird, and that we need a better toolkit for dealing with data. You can use the tool to search and compare data, and the project urges anyone with data to put it online and share it. ($150,000 in funding.)
Waldo Jaqith’s “The State Decoded” is trying to make state codes understandable to humans. State codes have basically been scanned and posted online, and there’s been no work done to make them understandable. There are few bulk downloads, the design is awful, and we could do ever so much better. The project has started with Virginia’s state code, and the project will now parse and import codes from throughout the US, integrate laws with court decisions and generally make this aspect of open government less lame. ($165,000 in funding.)
Jon Vidar of the Tiziano Project works on new media in post-conflict areas. In his work as an archeologist, he’s taken thousands of pictures documenting Kurdish culture. This led to the Tiziano project, which combined images and stories from media professionals and amateurs to offer a rich picture of life in other countries. Knight’s funding will allow other organizations to produce “360s”, collections of media that document regions around the world. ($200,000 in funding.)
Miguel Paz of Poderpedia (Power Pedia) is worried about the concentration of power in a very few hands in his native Chile. He shows us a picture of the Chilean President, sharing a helicopter with a powerful businessman who works on government… we walk quickly through the halls of power in Chile, looking at institutions like the Universidad Catholica, which educated 16 of 22 of the government’s ministers. Poderpedia will document these sorts of ties, using crowdsourced information vetted by professional journalists. ($200,000 in funding)
Christina Xu from the Awesome Foundation (disclosure: I’ve just joined their board) shows us some awesome things – a hammock that seats 20, a set of inks that are grown, not manufactured, and a boat that tows remediating plants through polluted waters. What do these projects have in common? They’re awesome. And the Awesome Foundation funds small projects with $1000, donated by a network of contributors. Started in Boston, the Foundation has now spread throughout the developed world. The Institute On Higher Awesome Studies is now trying to take this model – which has had great success thus far – and try it in places often considered “less awesome”, starting with Detroit. In Detroit, the project will build an incubator to bring new trustees into the process and make a new set of grants. ($244,000 in funding.)
Jon Gosier is the creator of Swift River, a project that’s grown out of community mapping platform Ushahidi (disclosure: I’m on their board, too.) Swift River focuses on the problems of verification in the world of civic media. The system builds profiles of trust to evaluate future data that’s published, using a model of “subjective veracity”. “You construct your own construct of truth and we match online data to it. ($250,000 in funding.)
Sean McDonald of FrontlineSMS explains that we have to take mobile phones seriously if we want to consider information needs in the developing world. Frontline uses little more than cheap phones, a USB modem and a computer program to deliver information over mobile nextowkrs. Rien que la Vérité, a TV program in DRC, uses Frontline to collect comments and feedback on their programming. Kubatana, a Zimbabwean human rights organization, uses Kubatana to poll their community about key issues. The Knight News challenge works focuses on helping news organizations communicate with their audiences, especially at community radio stations.
Matin Keegan of the Open Knowledge Foundation introduces Open Spending. It’s a platform that allows you to submit government budgets and expenditure and visualize how government spending interfaces with household finances – what do your taxes actually support? How can we think of those amounts in understandable terms? Open Spending also links these data sets and visualizations to news stories, both heuristically and using crowdsourcing. ($250,000 in funding)
Ryan Thornburg of UNC Chapel Hill is building Openblock Rural, based on Openblock, software designed to unlock civic information. The goal is to provide a tool that helps small town newspapers generate revenue, while testing whether open government data systems can work in rural communities. There’s lots of hard work we need to get from paper files to structured data, so there’s lots to overcome both in creating this data, sharing it and creating a business model around it. ($275,000 in funding.)
Francis Irving of ScraperWiki tells us the story of a hacker in Scotland and a beat blogger in Edinburgh. The two decided to tackle a complex database of building permit data. It’s hard to scrape, but with ScraperWiki, they created an API to the data, as well as an Excel dump of the data. That turned into a map, and into a lead on a story about a paintball facility being planned for a residential neighborhood. ScraperWiki encourages you to do data journalism with other people, and the Knight funding is going to allow for the development of new features and convenings of geeks and journalists. ($250,000 in funding.)
Aaron Pilhofer, an interactive editor at the New York Times, has been building Document Cloud for two years. It now is used in 240 newsrooms and has more than a million documents in it. You can put documents into the cloud, make them searchable using OCR, do entity extraction using OpenCalais, and do some simple visualization. In this next tranche of funding ($320,000), they’re going to support user annotation, making it a tool for crowdsourced analysis and publishing.
Jesse James Garrett is a user experience designer for Adaptive Path. He asks us what makes great reporting? Information, perspective, and the ability to transport us to the time and place where a news event occurred. These first person accounts are a key part of great reporting. Mobile technology has allowed hundreds of millions of people to make these first-person reports. But it’s very hard to surface the relevant content from the people who were actually there. iWitness is designed to surface these reports from citizen media and help you feel like you were a witness to the event. ($360,000 in funding.)
Anu Sridharan of NextDrop wants us to think differently about news – it’s not just the morning LA Times or NPR – it’s Gchat updates, SMS, tweets. The mobile phone is the revolutionary device here, and the 1 billion people who have mobiles but no internet, are a critical constituency for news. NextDrop uses the mobile phone and IVR to crowdsource information about water availability, and to share it with users of the system. ($375,000 in funding)
Kara Oehler of Zeega tells us she wants everyone to be able to create online works of documentary. This idea started from Mapping Main Street, a project to document Main Streets around the country. People could participate in the process by taking photos, posting them on various social media sites with tags, and have them appear on the site. Zeega is a platform designed to make it easier to build these sort of rich online documentaries. ($420,000 in funding.)
Jonathan Stray of the AP tells us about three technologies journalism hasn’t coped well with:
Cheap translation, through machine translation and volunteer efforts. Will international news continue through foreign correspondents or in translation?
Computer question answering. Stray doesn’t think IBM’s Jeopardy-winning computer wasn’t a stunt. Watson is able to digest huge amounts of unstructured text, much like a journalist does. Stray wants one for the newsroom and wants us to have one too.
Community Visualization, like John Kelley’s map of the Iranian blogosphere.
We’re heading towards a public information ecosystem – Stray tells us that it’s bigger than journalism… and evidently bigger than his news challenge project, Overview, which received $475,000 in funding.
Jeffrey Warren, a veteran of the Center for Future Civic Media, tells us about the project he launched at the Center to use helium balloons to take aerial imagery of sites like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The maps are 50-100x better than other imagery that’s available. Public Laboratory, funded with $500,000 from Knight, is about more than expanding that project – it’s about building resources, toolkits and communities that make public science more broadly accessible. In the immediate future, we’re going to see grassroots maps that shoot in infrared, which can tell us about crop growth or biological recovery from oil spills.
As of September, I’ll be based at the MIT Media Lab as a principal research scientist and director of the Center for Civic Media. The Center is the next generation of the “Center for Future Civic Media” founded by Henry Jenkins, Mitch Resnick and Chris Csikszentmihályi in 2007, supported by the Knight Foundation, to explore the opportunities, challenges and questions that surround communities, news and information in a digital age. The Knight Foundation announced a renewal of their support for the Center today, and we’re relaunching as the Center for Civic Media this fall. The press release announcing these changes is here, and Harvard’s Nieman Lab has an interview with me discussing about the new position.
I’m very excited about this. I’ve had the chance to be a fellow at the Center twice now, once early in the lifespan of the project, and again over the past few months, and it’s been a great opportunity to get to know people doing some amazing work at the frontiers of digital media. The Center is housed between MIT’s Media Lab and the Comparative Media Studies department, which puts an interesting challenge in front of researchers: work both to create new tools and to develop the thinking and theory behind the civic media field. I’m particularly excited by the fact that MIT’s also hired my friend Sasha Costanza-Chock, who will be co-principal investigator (along with me and Mitch Resnick) – Sasha’s done amazing work both on the theory of civic media and on projects like VozMob, a platform that lets low-income and migrant workers in LA share their stories via mobile phones.
While I’m stepping down from some of my responsibilities at the Berkman Center, I’m going to continue to be on Berkman’s Fellows Advisory Board, the group that helps put together Berkman’s incredible fellows program. And my work with Hal Roberts and the Berkman team on Media Cloud will continue as a collaboration between Berkman and Center for Civic Media.
For me, the fun really starts in the fall – for the summer, I’m holed up in western Massachusetts, working on my book. Looking forward to seeing friends at the Civic Media conference this week, and many more once I’m at the Center in the fall. Many thanks to the folks at MIT and at Knight for making this possible.
Smart piece from Henry Farrell argues that increased participation in politics via the internet is likely to be highly partisan, more polarized than previous engagement.
