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Citizen Journalism, Day 1: Toolset

 Intro 

 Andrew Lih, professor of comumbia j school, hong kong u. http://andrewlih.com/blog

 Dan... andrew will talk about the tools we have, and especially need.

 Andrew: 

 Dan and I have been teaching together for many years; good to do this too.

 On business card, put my wikipedia username.

 background.

 columbia, online ...

 Wikipedia admin

 wikipedia book

 chinese firewall (research from behind, base in Beijing)

 Leonard Witt, PJNet, AEJMC, Toronto, 2004... but not doing it this year. So that's one reason we're havingh one at wikimania.

 Wikimania examples

 wkihihow, others, netscape, benkeler.

 Last year during WTO conf, wanted to see if we could get press pass for wikinews. Got one.

 Slide, continuum, left to right

 traditional news

 civic j

 meta moderation

 user orignated articles

 BBSs

 Wikis

 Falling under the above, sorting out digg, others, both domestic and in Asia, filling areas. But an empty spot in the middle.

 Big slide.. citimedia tech zeitgeist. random flow of what's in the the tech environment... radical inclusion... rsss and tagging. solid state recording (video recording married to an ipod, with an editable index)... skypecasting... security.. tor... vpns, encryption... blogs, podcasting, vblogging, p2p, bitorrent... live torrent... peopole downloading a chinese client to watch hbo and espn... drupal, skoop, joomla, higher-res cameras...

 Open the floor... what's important? What can't you do today that you;d like to do tomorrow?

 

 Fill in chart 

 today

 news/media gathering

 content editing/filter

 distribution

 tomorrow

 news media gathering

 content editing/filter

 distributio

 From Tor.eff.org. allows people who can't afford to have their identity revealed to contribute 

 Dan Bricklin:  

 one of the reasons that Aldus was named that, was that a guy by that name invented dimentions and standareds that make the book work.

 we had personal websites for many years, then things like blog authoring tools and standards (e.g. rss, permalinking) made blogging possible

 wikis, similarly, kept history. organically grow website.

 with citizen J, in order to do the things you need, what primitives do we need to make sure we have...

 Some of it is very bursty. If you're in the presence of sometnhing newsy, you become a citizen j. How do we make it easy for people who find themselves in that position?

 doesn't have to be built out of a wiki or a blogging tool Just remember that the earliest stuff is simple.

 Ethan Zuckerman: 

 build on this idea of how we build toolsets.

 the folks involved in this movement, and the peoploe who most need it aren't involved yet. Those people may not have broadband or laptops or...

 The peploe who are going to be using the tools and building out are not the ones doing it now.

 We think about the laptop, the leading edge, the camera, the upload conveniences...

 Need to transform lives for people outside the devoloped world. How do we get into the devices or paradigms for peoploe outside the develped world?

 How about telephojnes? Stuff with Asterisk? (an open source phone solution...complicaqted, multifunctional, powerful... build what people call interactive voice response applicaitons.. stuff you used to do on the web now can do by if/then statements and voice calls). How about radio? that's the broadband delivery medium for most of the developing world.

 What do we do with our own stuff that gets slower and more primitive.

 Andrew: Ethan is a voice of reason...  

 Lisa: There aren't a lot of people doing audio stuff. would love to see more ordinary folks broadcasting stuff. 

 Isabel: I specialize in community building and online mkgg. think of things from the user's POV. single most important thing is a good search and filtering method for blogs. Where do you go? To an editor's pick site? Do you use google, technorati, bloglines? setting up rss feed readers of keywords? 

 Doc: feeds of keyword searches by technorati and google.blogsearch.com into aggregators. Subscribinjg to searches. tag everything. 

 Dan: pimitives are the simple buildijng tools. Tags are a primitive. replace the assignment editor with tags. 

 __: different than what a traditional news editor does. ? licensed and chaperoned by the defense dept. you never saw anything in the mainstream media. none of us got the whole story. we were all there at different times and limited in resources. i was there, steve was there, I came back after lunch... only people there when people ghot arrested were indimedia folks... I tried to put together an anthology. need tools that are much smarter than RSS and technorati and  

 Micah Sifry, Sunlight Foundation: interested in using tech and the social web to shine more light on the dark corners of congress. e.g. through congresspedia. Want everyone's ideas about what we should be doing. Such as access to information that's hidden in plain view. e.g. financial disclosures on paper. Have to wade through 535 .pdfs. Are digitizing these to make them searchable. can't get in a unified way contracts and other layouts. that will be up in a month too. What other kinds of content would people like to have at their fingertips? Want help in building the apis for mashing things up. Sunlight labs is working on tools tohelp bloggers and CJs do what they do. The pop-up politician, for example. If yoiu mention a representative, mouseover and a pic of the person pops up, and links out to various databases are there. make stuff available where people are looking rather than forcing the reader to look everywhere. We are deliberately a half-baked operation. 

 Frank Moretti, Columbia... my first exposure.. observation... Ethan had a value proposition for enfranchising people. Is that the agenda? Do CJs have an agenda having to do with social equality for example? 

 Eric ? WikiNews? Distinciont between notions... from my POV. First is gathering of facts. Lots of people can contribute. Actual editing, facts into stories... these people need different tools. One tool is collaboriateive editing. subethaedit, moonedit... in real time. color coding the personal edits and differences. Other thing... video aggregation... process by which video streams come together.. segment them into pieces to be aggregated into larger story. Metavid(?). not just the resources themselves, but the integration of them. Also, investigative journalism... if I want to spend two months to research a topic, I also need to pay the rent. Need distributed funding,... Highest reputation have highest potential to gather funding. 

 Dan: JayRosen has NewAssignment.net. Looks injto paying journalist 

 Andy Carvin, digitaldivide network. lots of poeple upload taggijng. SMS gets overlooked. after the tsunamis, set up internet retrieval cache... send sms messages based on tags. similarly, set up sms relay thorugh google groups.  

 Steve Garfield: for online vid editing... Jumpcut, ispot. Dabble.  

 Chris Messina: DemocracyPlayer. Mozes sms/slashroups... cool stuff. Used to work at civicspace. tools for creating online are limited and limiting. Flock can be used as a CJ toolkit, in effect. A way for people to easily blog and synchronize tagging... tagspace.. upllad rich content, podcasts,... content of people into browsers. making the web more of a read/write space. Need to look in to CJ workflows. How do you mak,e something living and breating like a wiki is? Push on the flock folks to continue doing that for a larger audience. Not just the myspace crowd. Castlife, a mac program. Also interesting. 

 ___: want to see translation tools, other languages. 

 ___: how do you get to critical mass at the local level when locals can't find or afford or know these resources... 

 Dan: Civic space is build on Drupal, the most annoying best thing out there. 

 ___: accessibilty issues. transcribing podcasts, for exasmple. 

 Keith Hopper: need tools to make tools. Ruby on Rails, et. al. We should see the tools coming from the people using them. Not jsut from compusci geeks. 

 ___: an IM exchange... there is a real issue with real-time communication. Email is aysnch. there are a bunch of scattered tools for instant comms. ranging from text messaing to IM.  

 Dan: If only the IM folks would cooperate, we'd be in better shape. 

 ___: In a place like India, $200 or $500 is a lot of money. If there is a way to use that sort of power in places that are underwpoered but have access to broadband... 

 Dan: Transcription services from India are really cheap. 

 Chris: Ken ? is doing ... echochamberproject.com. works with quicktime... using community people to do lots of stuff. Vision by RogueAmoeba. Sean Coons had PeopleYes.pbwiki.com. he's addressing the issue head-on, with kiosks, etc.  


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Last update: Monday, August 07, 2006 at 10:53:36 AM Eastern. Number of updates: 8.