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News from the Future of Public Media
Could “Social Media Innovation Camps” help power ground-up public media?
email discuss Posted by Jessica Clark on Oct 30, 2008 at 3:41 PM
Earlier this week, JD Lasica of OurMedia posted a request on our blog for accounts of how media makers and technologists are being trained to produce public-minded social media. He asked because there’s a gap—while there are lots of national conferences where researchers and media makers trade best practices, there aren’t many ways for that information to trickle down to communities.
So, we’ve been brainstorming a concept with Lasica and others: creating a series of traveling Social Media Innovation Camps—a nationwide series of educational bootcamps focused on increasing civic engagement through social media. The effort would be undergirded by an online community of social media mentors and a resource center for social media, online curricula and peer-to-peer learning.
Lasica describes the concept, which he has been developing since a conversation at the April NewsTools 2008 conference, organized by the Journalism That Matters project:
Why boot camps for social media? We believe a number of constituencies would benefit from bringing the power of these tools to local communities: community, independent and ethnic media makers; NGOs and nonprofits seeking to take up the tools of social media; publishers of citizen media and hyperlocal news sites; college and university educators; K-14 educators involved in traditional schools and in after-school programs; public broadcasters; newspapers and broadcast news organizations seeking to deploy tools that enable community participation; and citizens seeking to contribute to the community.
Innovation Camps would combine the best elements of both structured workshops and unstructured BarCamp-style “unconferences” where participants set the agenda. While Innovation Camps would borrow heavily from the ethos of participation and openness at BarCamps and PodCamps, they would offer more structure, a richer set of training tools, a vetted community of trainers and mentors and an approach that encourages sustained, ongoing discussion and collaboration in the weeks and months after a camp ends.
Innovation Camps would include general sessions and breakout tracks, with “trainers” leading track sessions while participating informally as members of the audience in other sessions. The host and community members would create a pool of experts to draw upon for each camp. Topics would include an introduction to key civic media concepts, group blogs, podcasting, videoblogging, tagging, social bookmarking, social news sites, social networks, wikis, legal rights and responsibilities and related topics.
The idea has tremendous potential to link currently siloed communities of media producers together on both local and national levels. Here at CSM we define “public media” broadly as “media for public knowledge and action.” These innovation camps could carry that expanded definition down into communities of citizen and new media producers who haven’t previously seen public broadcasters or educators as allies.
It could also be a real boon for researchers and funders seeking accounts of how media operates on the local level, like the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. I recently attended the Commission’s Community Forum in Philadelphia, and while the day was full of fascinating discussions, participants did not leave with tools or next steps that could help them collaborate. Social Media Innovation Camps would be designed to foster new projects, as well as to trickle up new stories of civic media innovation
Lasica’s idea has been gaining momentum—a Boston-based company, Acquia, which offers support services for open-source Drupal sites, has agreed to offer Innovation Camp registrants the chance to create their own citizen media site on the Drupal platform during the day’s training. The publishers could then transfer the installation to their own servers or continue to have Acquia host the site for a small fee; additional support and services would also be offered at discounted rates. According to Lasica, “The Drupal-Acquia partnership underlines the relationship between open source solutions and civic media goals.”
Responses like this suggest the power of the Social Media Innovation camp concept. It’s been exciting to work with Lasica to incubate this idea, and we look forward to seeing how it evolves. Interested in getting involved? Contact Lasica at jdlasica[at]gmail[.]com.
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