What is Content Co-creation?

Fascinating paper by Michel Bauwens from the Foundation fro Peer-to-Peer Alternatives and Institute for Distributed Creativity, published in the Fibreculture journal, on the layers of content co-creation:

Albert Boswijk, of the Amsterdam-based Center for the Experience Economy, asked me a set of interesting questions:

What is the reality behind so called best practice co-creation concepts? Are these lipservice to co-creative approaches? Are you really in the driver's seat or are you just being made to believe that you have influence on the outcome? What are the building blocks of co-creation? Which conditions are required? Are organisations really prepared to allow customers to influence and control their organisation and therefore become a co-creative organisation?

To understand the reality or illusion behind projects claiming to practice co-creation or co-design, one must look at the polarities of power and control that determine the context in which the co-creative processes take place, with on the one hand the communities of external collaborators, and on the other hand the corporate entities. But before tackling this issue in particular, it may be useful to see the emerging new paradigm of production that is arising out of the new participative processes.

The new institutional reality could be described as follows.

The First Layer: Collaborative Platforms

At the core are the enabling collaborative socio-technological platforms that allow knowledge workers, software developers and open design communities to collaborate on joint projects, outside of the direct control of corporate entities.

Interesting questions already arise here. These concern who or what is the driving force behind the creation and development of such platforms? They can be initiated by developing communities, managed and maintained by a new type of non-profit institution (like the FLOSS Foundations), or they can be corporate platforms that have been opened up to external participants.

The Second Layer: Open Design Commons/Communities and Physical Infrastructure

Around the corporate platform is the open design community and the knowledge/software/design commons ruled by a set of licenses which determine the particular nature of the property.

Interesting questions arise here. Is it a true commons license like the GPL? Or a sharing license like the Creative Commons, where the stress is on the individual sovereignity in determining the level of sharing that is allowed? Or is it a corporate license, giving very limited rights, or even with outright digital sharecropping, i.e. with the expropriation of the totality of the creative output reserved for usage by the organizing corporation?

It is important to see the open design commons not just as a collaborative community or a new type of 'intellectual property' depository, but also as a fundamentally new type of manufacturing infrastructure. Open design communities have different priorities and constraints than proprietary IP, and naturally design for modularity, lower threshold capital requirements, sustainability, etc. Thus, we are talking about the seeding of a new physical productive infrastructure as well.

The Third Layer: Entrepreneurial Coalitions

Around the commons are the entrepreneurial coalitions that benefit and sustain the design commons, create added value on top of it, and sell this as products or services to the market.

Important questions raised here are as follows. How is the coalition itself organized? Do all parties have equal say, as in the Linux Foundation, or does one big party dominate, as in the Eclipse Foundation and IBM. How does the business ecology relate to the community? Is is nothing but a corporate commons?

The Fourth Layer: Funding Ecologies

In addition, there is a funding infrastructure.

What is the process governing the stream of returns from the monetized market sphere; to the commons, its community, and the infrastructure of cooperation? Do businesses support the community directly, through the foundations? Is the government or a set of public authorities involved? Are there crowdfunding mechanisms?

The Fifth Layer: The Partner State as Orchestrator?

Finally, there is the role of public authorities and governments in orchestrating the public-private-common triad in order to benefit from the local effects of the new networked coopetition between entrepreneurial coalitions and their linked communities.

In the not so far future, wealth building or sustaining capacity will be determined to a large degree by the capacity of cities, regions and states to insert themselves within the global coopetition between different enterpreneurial coalitions (think Drupal vs Joomla, but on a much larger scale).

Overview of the Main Models Emerging So Far

When we via these layers through an interlocking triad (community—foundation—business) or quaternary structure (if public authorities are involved), we can now distinguish at least three main models:

— In commons-centred peer production, like Linux, the community is at the core, and a real commons operates, with the community strong enough to sustain its own infrastructure, and cooperating with market players.

— In a sharing environment, where individuals share their creative endeavour, it is the corporate third party platform which monetizes the attention space, and may control the platform to a significant degree; the community does not control its own platform, but is not without power of influence, since quick and massive mobilizations are always possible.

— In a crowdsourced environment, participant producers are even more isolated from each other, and the corporation integrates them into the value chain which they control. Since individuals are here competing for market value themselves, solidarity is more difficult to obtain, giving corporate platform owners more influence.

A good illustration of the various possibilities is Lego. Lego still operates as a classical producer of toys, selling to consumers. In Lego Factory, it provides a crowdsourced environment, where co-designers can take a cut of the kits they succeed in selling; the new Lego World virtual environment is a sharing environment; finally, Lugnet is true commons-oriented peer production, happening outside the control of the company altogether.

The Ladder of Participation: The Gradation of Control on Community/Corporate Polarity

Here are ten different co-creation modalities, depending on the polarity of control between peer producers and the corporate entities:

1. Consumers: you make, they consume. The classic model.

2. Self-service: you make, they go get it themselves. This is where consumers start becoming prosumers, but the parameters of the cooperation are totally set by the producing corporation. It's really not much more than a strategy of externalization of costs. Think of ATM's and gas stations. We could call it simple externalization.

3. Do-it-yourself: you design, they make it themselves. One step further, pioneered by the likes of Ikea, where the consumers re-assemble the product themselves. There is a complex externalization of business processes.

4. Company-based Crowdsourcing: the company organizes a value chain which lets the wider public produce the value, but under the control of the company.

5. Co-design: you set the parameters, but you design it together. For examples, see here: http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Co-Design.

6. Co-creativity: you both create cooperatively. In this stage, the corporation does not even set the parameters, the prosumer is an equal partner in the development of new products. Perhaps the industrial model of the adventure sports material makers would fit here. For examples, see here: http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Co-Creation.

7. Sharing communities create the value: Web 2.0 proprietary platforms attempt to monetize participation.

8. Peer production proper: communities create the value, using a Commons, with assistance from corporations who attempt to create derivative streams of value. Linux is the paradigmatic example.

9. Peer production with cooperative production: peer producers create their own vehicles for monetization. The OS Alliance is an example of this.

10. Peer production communities or sharing communities place themselves explicitly outside of the monetary economy.

A diagram that mindmaps the possibilities of the open is found here.

The Economist viral marketing campaign

Interesting developments in market testing. A personal email that I received from Chris McCrudden from Speed Communication to gauge my response to a new campaign being launched for The Economist. The email read:

I’m getting in touch with you on behalf of The Economist in the UK as I notice that you’ve written about the magazine before on your blog.

The Economist has just launched a new cinema ad campaign which it hopes will help attract a new generation of readers. We’re very interested in hearing your thoughts about it as it’s very different to the ‘white out of red’ posters it’s used for over 20 years. It’s intended to grab the attention of the “intellectually curious”, the estimated 3m+ people in the UK who, thanks to the expansion in university education, care about the range of big global issues that The Economist covers every week.

You can see the video here at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Esx57x7CtZo

It uses the image of a wire-jumper (Florent Blondeau) walking through a city on a series of red wires and the strapline “Let your mind wander” as a metaphor for the pleasure we get from connecting different ideas, suggesting that you can get a similar experience from reading a copy of the magazine.

I hope you enjoy the ad. If you’d like any more info on the thinking that went into the campaign please let me know.

Best regards, Chris

Note both the personal turn and the feedback loop between my use of The Economist in my blog and an email back about their new marketing campaign.

The video is here.

"Best Job in the World" as successful social media

Interesting discussion today in The Australian about Tourism Queensland's "Best Job in the World" campaign for Hamilton Island, and how to get value for money for promotional campaigns using social media.

TOURISM Queensland has massively outstripped the performance of Tourism Australia's $40million sponsorship of Baz Lurhman's movie Australia, despite being run on a budget of just $1.7m, according to the chairman of Tourism Queensland.

The Best Job in the World advertising campaign set a new record at the Cannes International Advertising Festival last week when it took an unprecedented three Grand Prixs for public relations, direct advertising and cyber websites.

Tourism Queensland chairman Don Morris said the campaign had evolved into a case study on how to use emerging social media and keep taxpayer funding of such campaigns to a minimum.

"No one has done this as a simple business story," Mr Morris told Media. "This is a seriously interesting case study of how to use social media.

"Tourism Australia put $40m into the Australia movie and it is ranked something like 469. The Queensland government put $1m and partners another $700,000 into the Best Job campaign."

By the end of the campaign last month, when 34-year-old charity events organiser Ben Southall was named the winner, the campaign had outstripped Tourism Queensland's wildest expectations.

More than 34,000 entries from almost 200 countries were submitted and media coverage about the campaign has been valued at more than $200m. At the same time, an estimated three billion people have been exposed to the campaign.

The campaign, which began with simple press ads in newspaper classifieds looking for applicants for The Best Job in the World -- being a caretaker on Hamilton Island for six months -- used websites, YouTube and was an extension of the government's existing Islands of the Barrier Reef campaign.

Mr Morris said that the campaign had attracted attention by offering an experience money can't buy. "It was a hook to gain media and consumer interest," he said.

Mr Morris said while the campaign had been launched in one of Tourism Queensland's core target markets, the UK, it has transcended international boundaries by bringing a massive return on investment in Europe, North America and south east Asia where travel partners such as airlines offered special deals linked to the campaign.

Hamilton Island has already benefited with increased tourist numbers and Amway Australia choosing it as the destination for its 2010 conference.

Last month, Amway Australia general manager Michial Coldwell said publicity surrounding Best Job had tipped the balance in Hamilton Island's favour.

Mr Morris said interest in the outcome of the promotion was so high 22 international and domestic media crews attended the announcement of the winner on Hamilton Island.

He said one of the reasons the campaign attracted so much attention was the simplicity of the core message.

"The whole world gets obsessed about segmentation with tourism," he said. "But you just have to find the right button to press. It hit that button with the universal appeal of The Best Job in the World.

"It trebled the press coverage of the G20 conference in Sydney and the only comparable reference point online was day one of the soccer World Cup. This is really about how to be smart with taxpayers' money."

For information about how Tourism Queensland did it, see here.

Social Media and Journalism in Iran

Interesting piece by Brian McNair on social media and journalism in post-election Iran:

Current events in Iran exemplify what I called in a 2006 book, ‘cultural chaos’. A ruling authoritarian elite struggles to maintain control of information and political dominance in a world where online media and satellite news threaten to make everything it does visible to a global audience.

Internally, Iran’s protesters Google, Twitter and Facebook around the censorship, countering the propaganda which fills state media coverage and organising their opposition. The oppressive order of Islamic fundamentalism becomes the dynamic chaos of emerging democracy, and culture - communication - is the catalyst for that phase change.

As I write, the outcome of the protests is uncertain. But there is no doubt that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hold on power has never been more fragile. The Iranian state tries to disrupt email and social networking sites. Mobile phone networks are blocked and satellite dishes confiscated, but those attempts merely add more fuel to the story as reported by a globalised, always-on media, stirring up further revulsion and anger at home and abroad.

In this sense, the globalisation of news media, and the explosion of online means of communication which are, by design, very difficult for authoritarian regimes to control or destroy, is a democratising force. It erodes the barriers which those regimes erect around their countries, breaks their quarantine, raises the global political cost of their behaviour. It brings chaos, but in a good way, the way that leads to the birth of something better.

The presence of new kinds of media is not enough in itself to guarantee progressive change, or to create the public mood which demands it. In the case of Iran, the arrival of Barack Obama and his conciliatory overtures appears to have strengthened the opposition. The parlous state of the Iranian economy has been a domestic issue for a long time, and the sheer extremism of Ahmadinejad’s version of Islam can only provoke resistance in a country with Iran’s cosmopolitan history.

But the impact of these underlying factors is amplified by the globalised media, which give them heightened visibility and force. Everything plays out before a global audience, in BBC and CNN bulletins, or on Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera. Iranians themselves, many of them, are part of that audience, and take strength from the knowledge that the eyes of the world are upon them as they fight for personal freedom and human rights.

This is what happened in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago, when Kate Adie and her media colleagues covered first the pro-democacy protests, then the massacre which followed. The Chinese communists won that battle, but they lost the war, and to this day are still shamed by their actions.

The global media were in Eastern Europe in the velvet revolutions, and in Moscow during the failed coup of 1991, lending their publicity to popular uprisings.

But in Iran, two decades on, there is another factor at work. Alongside the professional journalists and foreign correspondents are armies of ordinary people, armed only with mobile phones and digital cameras, Twitter and Skype accounts, Facebook and MySpace profiles.

While John Simpson and the rest are locked in their hotels, effectively prisoners of the regime, young Iranians keep a flow of uncensored news pouring out of the country – citizen journalists if you like. They are connected to the world beyond, in a way that previous generations of protesters have not been.

Brian McNair is Professor of Journalism & Communication at the University of Strathclyde.

How reliable is the information from Iran?

Good article from The Guardian about the issues arising about how to determine the reliability of information coming through from Iran via social media sites.

The internet is a brilliant machine for spreading information. Data shoots across the network at the speed of light, passing from one node to another. It's unmotivated by fear or repression or greed, and can shine a torch into the darkest corners to help bring what was hidden to the world.

The uprising in Iran has been a perfect case in point - despite state censorship, the suppression of journalists and the shutdown of communications - the story has been covered from almost every angle: and the internet - as I've written before this week - has played a vital part in getting the information out.

(Some of the public nature of the information has been sparked in part, it seems, by the surprisingly robust design of Twitter and the fact that instant messaging services from Google, Microsoft and AOL have been turned off in Iran as part of US sanctions. Would an uprising have commanded so much of the internet's attention if conversations were happening privately, between Iranians, in Farsi?)

For more read here.

Innovative blogging on the Iranian election

I am pleased to see that Aussie expat Craig Bellamy has put together an as it happens blog on the events in Iran in the aftermath of the disputed elections. I noted yesterday the minute by minute reportage coming from Andrew Sullivan's blog, and The Guardian has put together an excellent news blog on this.

In Australia, the bloggers themselves can be their own worst enemies. In a generally self-congratulatory discussion on Larvatus Prodeo about what a fool Christian Kerr from The Australian was, I put up this post:

Just to take the conversation out of the realms of the Canberra cognoscenti for a moment, I can agree with all of this about the likes of Christian Kerr and David Penberthy BUT…

At the moment I think what is happening in Iran is very interesting. It confirms that social media is not just apolitical fluff and chasing around Ashton Kutcher, but may have a political significance at certain moments. At the same time, I am quite glad that there are “journos as hard men of the streets” like John Simpson, who are employed by places like the BBC, and who have a very clear understanding of how to cover events like those currently happening in places like Teheran.

I’ve been following Andrew Sullivan’s blog, among other things, on this, and his observation on the MSM and the blogosphere and MSM-bashing is interesting in relation to these events:

Some of it is overblown. The NYT’s Lede blog has been outstanding, as I’ve said for the past several days. PBS and NPR are doing important work. Many MSM reporters are risking their lives to report this story from within Iran and we bloggers should honor their courage and work. Most of the photos I’ve published come from Getty and the remarkable Olivier Laban-Mattei. Cable news is useless, but we knew that already. But the future is a fusion of MSM tradition and new media open-source news gathering, aggregating, editing, filtering.

While some responses were well thought through, others were of the stock standard "You can't trust the mainstream media" stuff:

Terry yes, there are plenty of journalists still out there gathering primary data and reporting it, which is what I think we would all like journalists to do. However an increasing number of these ‘news’ stories consist of little more than summaries of what various anonymous people allegedly said, all written to support the journo’s evaluative opinion piece … one usually presented in the context of an argument full of assumptions about causation and implications for a particular interpretation of likely future developments.

Ken Lovell - well said. I also note that these unsourced reports are usually chockablock full of loaded epithets, of which my particular fave is ‘moderate’, closely followed by ‘reformist’. Both are usual in discussions of ‘hot spots’ in foreign correspondentdom and denote, if not actually paid agents of the CIA, at least willing Quislings.

As there is little point in being poster #60 responding to poster #40 responding to poster #25, I thought I'd reiterate a few points about what seems to be happening in Teheran:

1. The West is not behind these protests. Iranians are making their own judgements, and taking matters into their own hands. Barack Obama's foreign policy strategy in the region was premised upon the idea that he would still be dealing with Ahmadinejad after the election, who was the devil they knew. The U.S and others like Britain are basically playing catch up, and decidedly unsure on whether to support the uprising;
2. Blogging, You Tube, Twitter and other social media have been central to getting the messgae out to the wider world. The idea that this is all apolitical fluff that is about following Ashton Kulcher around and "are not terms that signal any form of collective intelligence, creativity or networked socialism [but] are directives from the Central Software Committee" (to quote a recent pooh-poohing manifesto from the land of Digital Media High Theory) is actually being exposed in a sharp light on the streets of Teheran right now;
3. The mainstream media are not a monolith in relation to these matters. Several people have commented on the appalling lack of coverage on the U.S. cable networks, the BBC has been great, as has The Guardian and the New York Times news blog The Lede. Moral: don't write off media outlets that invest in serious coverage of international affairs. Bloggers are not filling this gap at this stage.
   

Twitter blocked in China before June 4

There are a range of news stories about (here and here and here) about how the Chinese authorities have blocked access to social media sites including Twitter, You Tube, Flickr and MSN Hotmail prior to the 20th anniversary of the Tiannemen Square crackdown on June 4, 2009. This story won't be blocked, as my understanding is that Blogger is always blocked in China.

New York Times Creates Social Media Editor

Jennifer Preston, the former editor of the New York Times regional sections, has been appointed as the paper’s first social media editor. Preston will not be handling a new section. The job, which entails coordinating the newsroom’s use of social media, sounds similar to the one Shirley Brady was hired to do when BusinessWeek Online tapped her as its first engagement editor last year. Among other things, Brady has helped the edit staff become more conversant with using Twitter and blogging, as well as working with readers on blog posts for the site. (On Twitter, Brady also pointed to other social media editors, such as LATimes.com’s Andrew Nystrom and Mathew Ingram, who is the communities editor at The Globe and Mail, as other examples of how pubs have been carving out new newsroom duties.)

The New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) flagship is full of very active Twitter users. Interestingly enough, the news of Preston’s appointment was first publicly conveyed by NYT deputy managing editor Jon Landman on Twitter. Incidentally, Valleywag pointed out that Preston’s own Twitter updates are private.

I spoke to Landman briefly, and he denied Valleywag’s speculation that Preston’s role will be to clamp down on the newsroom’s after several reporters revealed the details of an editorial meeting a few weeks ago using the microblogging site.

“This isn’t about policing, although that is a small function [of the social editor’s role], but as only as a matter of making things consistent. It’s not the main purpose at all,” Landman told paidContent. “It’s really just the opposite of policing. it’s about helping everybody figure out how to use social media as a tool for journalists. A number of people have discovered social media a form for marketing and promotion, but it’s also got explicitly journalistic uses. Some people in our newsroom know and use it to their advantage. Some don’t and could use that know-how.” (Landman’s staff memo on Preston’s promotion is here, via Nieman Labs)

Preston, a reporter and editor for New York newspapers for close to 25 years, is charged with developing new initiatives for the reporters to use, in terms of sharing information and reporting it. This comes as the NYT has been ramping up its social media offerings for its readers, such as the Times Wire, which provides links to the paper’s online articles and blog posts in a headline-based reverse chronological feed that updates every minute, and the second version of its Times Reader e-paper.

Link here. Thanks to Anna Daniel for pointing this out to me.

The ABC - and SBS - of Social Innovation

Public service broadcasting was one of the great 20th century social innovations in media. The aim of public service broadcasters (PSBs) was to seek to harness the new mass media towards social purposes. These included nation-building, mass education, strengthening the information base of democracies, and broadly-based cultural improvement, particularly in areas such as documentaries, news and current affairs and children’s programming.

Public service broadcasters have been major generators of social innovation. Social innovation refers to those forms of social and cultural value that are generated over and above commercial benefit to providers and the benefits to the users or audiences. Given that institutions that generate social innovation are often publicly funded, the tricky question is always to work out whether the less tangible social returns exceed the cost to taxpayers, and whether the value is maintained over time as cultural expectation and technological affordances change.

In the case of PSBs, three messages seem to come through. First, the key to the PSB model is not government funding per se – governments have funded broadcasters from Albania to Zimbabwe, with very mixed results – but the combination of public funding and a degree of independence and autonomy from the government of the day.

Second, a relationship with commercial broadcasters that is both complementary and competitive at some levels seems most conducive to innovation, as it forces PSBs to be more responsive to their audiences, and less inclined to adopt a ‘we know best’ mentality, while at the same time promoting their distinctiveness from the commercial sector.

Finally, the role played by Charter in making broadcasters such as the ABC and SBS accountable to Parliament is vital. Charters provide performance benchmarks that move the rationale for PSBs from market failure (providing what the commercial services don’t) to combining provision of specialist programming with the need to be innovative and responsive to community expectations.

The Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) recently called for public submissions into the future roles and responsibilities of the ABC and SBS as Australia’s national broadcasters. The DBCDE Review has been read at one level as a move by the Rudd government to draw a line under the ‘culture wars’ of the Howard years, where debates about perceived ideological bias were seen as permeating the relationship of government to the PSBs – especially the ABC – at all levels, from funding to Board appointments.

More generally, however, the Review of National Broadcasting is being undertaken at a time when the remit of public broadcasters worldwide is being looked at. In contrast to the 1990s, where much of the debate was about whether they are still needed as cable and satellite TV and the Internet lead us to a multi-channel universe, the debate is now about how best to reconfigure their mission in a media environment where users increasingly expect participation, interactivity, and content on demand from any digital media device at any time and place.

The ABC has been a national leader in the provision of online media, with its content-on-demand iView service attracting massive traffic for TV over the Internet, but this comes at a cost. In contrast to radio and television, where the cost of reaching each additional consumer is zero to the broadcaster once infrastructure is in place, the cost in terms of network time and capacity for allowing existing content to be accessed online increase with a growing number of consumer. This is before any consideration is given to committing resources for developing Web-only media content. Public service broadcasters do not have online provision within their Charter obligations, and are funded to only a limited extent – and in the SBS’s case not at all – to provide it to Australians.

In a submission that I co-authored with Stuart Cunningham, Axel Bruns and Jason Wilson for the Review of National Broadcasting, we propose that the ABC and SBS should be understood as public service media. This is not only an accommodation to the 21st century reality of media convergence, but it emphasizes how it is the services provided, rather than the delivery platforms on which they are carried, that is at the core of pubic support for the ABC and SBS today. It also indicates that the basis for supporting public service media is not simply that of market failure in a limited channel environment, but the capacity to promote innovative, engaging and inclusive Australian information and entertainment content in a world of seemingly limitless media choice.

This vision of public service media is framed by a larger understanding of social innovation in the 21t century. At the time when public service broadcasters were first established, social innovation was largely understood as something that came from the centre. Governments identified national priorities, and set up institutions to realise them.

The development of the Internet draws attention to a second vision of social innovation, where it comes from the margin and it built incrementally rather than being the product of large-scale, conscious organizational design. Whatever were the original intentions in developing the Internet, it has proved to be a radically decentralized informational and communications system, where innovation arises from the ad hoc and unco-ordinated actions of myriad individuals whose activities become interconnected in the complex networked ecology to a whole that is exponentially greater than the sum of its parts.

The ABC and SBS can effectively harness both of these models of social innovation. To do so, however, we would ague that there should be a substantial opening up of both organizations to user-created content. By becoming more participatory public service media organisations, there is the scope to stimulate more public participation, creative output, diversity of sources and, ultimately, more public support for both the ABC and the SBS.

In the case of the ABC, its national network of local news and media production bureaus provides considerable scope to develop hyper-local media content that directly communicates with its communities, particularly in non-metropolitan Australia. While the ABC has user-created content initiatives such as Radio National’s “Pool” project and ABC Online’s “Unleashed” section, these continue to be add-ons to a service which continue to emphasise a transmission model of communication, where it is the in-house media professional who decide what their audiences should receive.

We continue to be a central role for journalists and media professionals at the ABC, but it should increasingly be one of working with their audiences to better enable them to become content creators in an ongoing way, rather than periodically providing outlets where users are permitted to contribute. What New York University Professor Jay Rosen terms the ‘people formerly known as the audience’ are increasingly finding their own means of producing and distributing content. Th ABC can help to shape this activity in ways that generate greater quality, reach wider audiences, and enable more significant conversations among Australians about matters of shared local, national and international importance.

For the SBS, user-created content has the potential to promote a new relationship to Australia’s diverse ethnic, language and cultural communities. In news and current affairs in particular, SBS has been a leader in provision of international news and information, but this has largely been done off the backs of the big global news agencies. Material sourced and distributed through the Internet among different communities could provide new windows on world events, with SBS acting as a ‘meta-news-aggregator’, developing an informal network of specialist ‘reporters’ around particular topic areas and international events.

The ABC and SBS have long demonstrated their capacity to be social innovators in the provision of news, information and entertainment content to Australians. As public service media organizations, they are uniquely placed to enable new usr-created content opportunities in the online media space while also managing such content sourcing strategies with their policy, legal and Charter obligations. In doing so, they would not only play a pivotal role in international debates about the future of media and journalism in an environment where media consumers are participants and content co-creators, but also enhance the awareness of Australians of what is possible in the new media environment by drawing upon and renewing their sources of credibility and reputation in the community.

Corporate take-up of social media

Joanne Jacobs has recently posted on why "many executives are still uninformed and unconvinced about the benefits of social media as a mechanism for production efficiencies and improved performance". She puts it down to two main factors:

1. Mastery

People who master a skill often can’t easily describe the steps they go through to execute or perform that skill. So much of the process involved in performance has been absorbed into their understanding that they have trouble breaking down each step along the way, and assume knowledge where there is none. Indeed, they assume so much of the process is common sense that they focus on the higher techniques of execution rather than explaining how they got to focus on that technique.

...

2. Intangible benefits

Bring any group of social media advocates together and they’ll all want to talk about measuring the benefits of the technologies, but they’ll never actually come up with an agreed suite of methodologies to use to demonstrate measurable benefits. This is primarily because social media benefits are derived from sheer access to alternative sources. Any social media expert group will come up with numerous examples of how they crowd sourced the answer to an obscure question, or how they found someone with the skills they needed to solve a problem, but no-one can come up with a robust range of measures to convince executives that investment in social media (both financially and in terms of staff time and resources) is going to generate a return.

I would personally think that th second is more of an issue than the first. CEOs deal with all sorts of things they have little personal mastery of, from the Internet to how the finances operate. It is the difficulty in bringing tangibility to social media innovation, as compared to well established performance metrics for more established media channels.

In the conclusion to New Media: An Introduction I made the observation that social researchers should consider how one establishes empirical measures for identifying the significance of social media (p. 251). That was written in 2007, and I think that a threshold has since been crossed with the Barack Obama US Presidential campaign. That said, Joanne Jacobs' conclusion is worth noting that:

When it comes to social media, the benefits are more about ‘cultivating weak ties‘ or loose connections between people, and cutting down the time it takes for a problem to be solved, so articulating these benefits to corporates is particularly difficult - but it’s not impossible. Loose connections require actually less investment than strong ones to maintain, and acquiring loose connections through social media is actually quite simple. Because your connection to other users in a social media mean you have access to the trust networks of your connections, you can very quickly generate loose or parallel ties with other users. Furthermore, you can mobilise these loose connections to improve both the quality of communication between an organisation and its audience, as well as track the perceptions about an organisation’s goods and services.

In a recession, the reduction in gross product and reducing value of investment assets means that customers are more wary of their spending. Similarly organisations need to invest less in their goods/services whilst maintaining a good relationship with existing customers. Social media can be used by customers to gauge the relative value and reliability of goods/services, whilst organisations can use social media both to respond to customer needs in a more agile fashion as well as crowdsourcing new product development.

This all makes perfect sense to social media advocates. We just don’t have sufficient history and methodologies to demonstrate these opportunities.

Clay Shirky on Media in 2009

Digital media futurist Clay Shirky in conversation with The Guardian on what can be expected with newspapers, books, magazines and television in 2009:

Newspapers

The great misfortune of newspapers in this era is that they were such a good idea for such a long time that people felt the newspaper business model was part of a deep truth about the world, rather than just the way things happened to be. It's like the fall of communism, where a lot of the eastern European satellite states had an easier time because there were still people alive who remembered life before the Soviet Union - nobody in Russia remembered it. Newspaper people are like Russians, in a way.

Jeff Jarvis said it beautifully: "If you can't imagine anyone linking to what you're about to write, don't write it." The things that the Huffington Post or the Daily Beast have are good storytelling and low costs. Newspapers are going to get more elitist and less elitist. The elitist argument is: "Be the Economist or New Yorker, a small, niche publication that says: 'We're only opening our mouths when what we say is demonstrably superior to anything else on the subject.'" The populist model is: "We're going to take all the news pieces we get and have an enormous amount of commentary. It's whatever readers want to talk about." Finding the working business model between them in that expanded range is the new challenge.

Why pay for it at all? The steady loss of advertising revenue, accelerated by the recession, has normalised the idea that it's acceptable to move to the web. Even if we have the shallowest recession and advertising comes back as it inevitably does, more of it will go to the web. I think that's it for newspapers. What we saw happen to the Christian Science Monitor [the international paper shifted its daily news operation online] is going to happen three or four dozen times (globally) in the next year. The 500-year-old accident of economics occasioned by the printing press - high upfront cost and filtering happening at the source of publication - is over. But will the New York Times still exist on paper? Of course, because people will hit the print button.

Books and magazines

If you pick a magazine at random, it will not interest you. For people who care about quality, it's easier to find it online. If it's a highly qualified niche magazine, something aimed at surgeons or firefighters, it's going online. There's no reason those things should exist.

The great advantage magazines have is glossy pictures. It's better to read on paper than on the web but it's much better to look at pictures on paper than on the net. Brides magazine is going to be the last one standing.

The book world is more secure. I think the big revolution is going to be print on demand. Imagine only having one browsing copy of every book in a bookstore. You could say "Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers looks good", and out pops a brand new copy. Why does a bookstore or a publisher have to be in the shipping and warehousing business?

TV

The big fight will be between passion and mass appeal but I don't think it's a question of who will win. It's not a transition from A to B, it's one to many. The question is who figures out the business model that says it's better to have 6 million passionate fans than 7 million bored ones? That is going to be the transformation because what you see with these user groups, whether it's for reality TV or science fiction, is that people love the conversation around the shows. The renaissance of quality television is an indicator of what an increased number of distribution channels can do. It is no accident that this started with cable.

And the BBC iPlayer? That's a debacle. The digital rights management thing ...let's just pretend that it was a dream like on Dallas and start from scratch. The iPlayer is a back-to-the-future business model. It's a total subversion of Reithian values in favour of trying to create what had been an accidental monopoly as a kind of robust business model. The idea that the old geographical segmenting of terrestrial broadcasts is recreatable is a fantasy and a waste of time.

What does the next decade hold? Mobile tools will certainly change the landscape, open spectrum will unleash the kind of creativity we've seen on the wired internet, and of course there will be many more YouTube/Facebook-class applications. But the underlying change was the basic tools of the internet. The job of the next decade is mostly going to be taking the raw revolutionary capability that's now apparent and really seeing what we can do with it.

News and Information as Digital Media comes of age

The Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard University has published a series of papers, blogs, discussions, videos etc. around the theme of Media Re:Public: News and Information as Digital Media Comes of Age.

There are papers on international news, new media literacy, public broadcasting, digital media and democracy, mainstream news and the networked public sphere, as well as a series of case studies on the site. The underlying premises of Media Re:Public are:

• Public participation in the media, enabled by the Internet, is a burgeoning and evolving phenomenon that has both positive and negative effects.
• Dramatic changes in the traditional news media are occurring in parallel to the rise in participation, primarily due to the disruption of their business models by new distribution systems.
• Simple dichotomies—new vs. old, mainstream media vs. blogosphere—do not accurately describe the current environment, with its complex interdependencies among media entities with different structures and motivations. The distinctions between professional and amateur are blurring, and the definitions of commercial, public, and community media are shifting.

From the Overview paper, authored by Persephone Miel and Robert Faris, some key points are:

1. Under pressure from falling revenues and the disruption of their business model, traditional media outlets are reducing and shifting the scope of their original reporting.
2. Web-native media entities are not addressing all of the crucial reporting gaps left by traditional media. Current structures and mechanisms do not provide sufficient incentives for them to do so.
3. In the changing media environment, news consumers risk relying on news sources that are neither credible nor comprehensive.
4. Participation in the online media space is not evenly distributed; some populations and ideas remain underrepresented.
5. There are elements of critically important journalism that have not yet found reliable sustainability models in the online media environment.
6. Efforts to understand and address these issues are limited by a lack of solid empirical evidence, and must rely instead on incomplete information, anecdotes, and intuition.

For more read here.

Social Innovation, User-Created Content and the Future of Public Service Media: Submission to the ABC and SBS Review

Perhaps fittingly, my last required task of 2008 was for the Rudd Government. More precisely, it was preparing a submission for the Review of National Broadcasting being undertaken by the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.

The submission was co-authored by my colleagues Stuart Cunningham and Axel Bruns from QUT, and Jason Wilson, to commence at the University of Wollongong in 2009. It will appear on the DBCDE web site shortly, but it can be accessed here for those interested.

Key points of the submission were:

1. The question of how national public broadcasters respond to changes in the media environment arising from digitisation, convergence and changing societal needs and expectations can be best understood as a question of social innovation;

2. In the 21st century digital media environment, where all media outlets are multi-platform and digitised in their modes of content production and delivery, it is better to understand the ABC and SBS as public service media organizations, rather than public service broadcasters. This emphasises how it is the services provided, rather than the delivery platforms, that are at the core of rationales for public support of the ABC and SBS;

3. There is considerable scope for both ABC and SBS to enhance and renew their Charter obligation as and social innovation remit through public service media through user-created content strategies, particularly in their provision of online services;

4. For the ABC, UCC strategies can make a considerable contribution to its provision of Australian content in news and current affairs, localism and diversity of news and information, particularly through the development of hyper-local content that exploits its network of broadcast media outlets throughout Australia and its unique presence in non-metropolitan Australia;

5. For the SBS, UCC presents new opportunities to harness its unique relationship to Australia’s diverse ethnic, language and cultural communities and its central role in the provision of international news and information, by enabling it to diversify its sources of news and other informational content material by reaching beyond the international news agencies to draw upon material sourced from ‘pro-am’ contributors around the world, and accessed locally through the Internet;

6. The ABC and SBS have the potential to be content innovators in the provision of news and information in ways that utilise UCC strategies, and to play a key role in growing international debates about the future of journalism and news media in an environment where media consumers are participants and content co-creators and not simply passive recipients of news and information. As public service media organizations, they are uniquely placed to enable new UCC opportunities in the online media space while also managing such content sourcing strategies with their policy, legal and Charter obligations, as well as questions of the accuracy and relevance of information, quality and credibility of news content and sources, and identity as highly respected news brands.

Obama campaign and social media

Information from the Politics Online site about how the Barack Obama presidential campaign made use of social media to build its victorious momentum:

The Washington Post reports that in his 21 months of campaigning, Obama raised half a billion online. Equally impressive is Obama's online popularity within social networking sites.

Here is a breakdown of Obama's online operations stats:

• 3 million donors made a total of 6.5 million donations online adding up to more than $500 million.
• Of those 6.5 million donations, 6 million were in increments of $100 or less.
• Obama's e-mail list contains upwards of 13 million addresses.
• In total, more than 1 billion e-mails landed in inboxes....To put this in perspective, John Kerry's '04 campaign collected 3 million email addresses and Howard Dean had roughly 600,000 email addresses on his list.
• A million people signed up for Obama's text- messaging program.
• 2 million profiles were created on Obama's social network, MyBarackObama.com in addition to the 5 million supporters in other social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

User-generated Content and SBS

User-Generated Content and SBS

User-Generated Content and SBS

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: sbs ugc)

Presentation given by Georgie McClean, Heidi Lenffer and I on user-generated content strategies and issues for the Special Broadcasting Service. It is based on the research undertaken by Heidi Lenffer as part of an MA (Research) at QUT.

Paper presented to Centre for Media and Communications Law annual conference, "Media, Communications and Public Speech", University of Melbourne, 20-21 November, 2008.

SlideShare Link

Journalism as Social Networking

Jason Wilson and I have just completed a paper that has been sent to Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism titled "Journalism as Social Networking: The Australian youdecide2007 project and the 2007 Federal election." The paper is available here for downloading and comments would be welcome.

This paper considers through the youdecide2007 case study on the 2007 Australian Federal election some of the work issues involved in developing and managing a citizen journalism Web site. This includes a discussion on the limits of 'crowdsourcing', as well as discussion of:

• Content work - the role of being both a content producer and an editor of the content of others, or what we term a 'preditor';
• Networking - building sustained linkages and contacts between your site and others, including the mainstream media;
• Community work - how to bring people to the site as both users and contributors on a regular basis;
• Technical work - the management of on-site and off-site arrangements that facilitate a successful site.
  

We conclude that publicising case studies of this nature is important because:

• The merging of content origination and content organisation is now where journalism is at, as indicated in the Project for Excellence in Journalism study of U.S. newspapers;
• The relationships between mainstream news media and independent online media are a lot more permeable than either Web 2.0 enthusiasts or critics of blogging acknowledge;
• We learn from shared experiences and indeed from mistakes;
• Journalism education remains rooted to a 20th century news production model that has to all intents and purposes collapsed and there is a desperate need for a rethink in light of how the Internet is changing news.
  

ANZCA Conference - Day 2

Day 2 of ANZCA at the slightly warming up Wellington. As a member of the ANZCA Executive, and Vice-President-elect (which means hosting the conference at QUT in Brisbane next year), I have spent a lot of time in Executive meetings dealing with Constitutional changes. What fun! As I wryly observed, the Weimar Constitution of 1919 was considered the leading constitutional document of its time, yet didn't stop Hitler from coming to power in Germany 14 years later.

The keynote speaker was Professor Jennifer Craik, my PhD supervisor when at Griffith, and her presentation was titled "The Empresses' New Clothes: Dressing Women for Politics". I'm afraid to say it, but I was disappointed by Jenni's talk. It relied too much on the entertaining nature of the visuals, and the perceived frivolity of public discourse about women, power and fashion, ad in my view didn't engage with the material at a deeper level. I know that Jenni's work can do this - I just felt that the paper presented was a bit too easy to play to the punters and not intellectually tax people too much.

I caught a very good paper by Jim McNamara from the Australian Centre for Public Communication at UTS in Sydney, who did a study with his students of e-electioneering in the 2007 Australian Federal election. A lot of good stuff in this, and the report can be downloaded here.

Citizen Journalism paper at CCI Conference

The ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation has now completed its conference Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons. It was a very successful event, with over 180 delegates enjoying three days of lovely Brisbane winter sunshine and a very strong range of keynote presentations, papers and panels. If you want a blow by blow, panel by panel conference description, check out Axel Bruns' fabulous blog.

The paper that I presented was co-authored with Jason Wilson, and was titled "Citizen Journalism and Political Participation: The Youdecide project and the 2007 Australian Federal Election". It reported on the youdecide2007.org project, and the full paper can be found at the QUT ePrints site.

A summary of our main points in evaluating this project against the objectives set for it is:

1. Promoting citizen participation in Australian politics

• Good range of contributions, site visits (about 12-16,000 a week) across 50 electorates
• Biggest story was 'crate gate affair' concerning MP for Herbert, Peter Lindsay
• 40% of registrants were from Queensland
• Didn't get participants from some key electorates (e.g. Wentworth and Bennelong)
• Localism is a key issue to consider as Queensland Decides site attracted as much participation in early 2008
  

2. Promoting citizen engagement in the policy process

• Not really - it was more a news site than a deliberative site
• Context of a Federal election may have been a factor here
• Uneven buy-in from political organisations (Liberals did not get involved at all)
• Site design issues may have been a factor
  

3. Building top-down/bottom-up links between mainstream and online independent media

• Good range of references in mainstream media, both to stories and to project itself
• You Decide TV program on Briz 31 attracted about 16,000 viewers on a Friday night (can still be viewed on YouTube)
  
• Club Bloggery site established on ABC Online on back of collaborative Gatewatching site
  
• Didn't make link with SBS as project partner
  

4. Broadening base of political participation beyond the 'political junkies'

• Didn't happen - very much a site for the already politically engaged