Center for Citizen Media

The annual Aspen Institute Conference on Communications Policy starts today, and I’m participating. The basic mission is to take note of huge changes in the way video will move around the world in coming years, and then consider how to create “a regulatory regime appropriate to the new world of video.”

Needless to say, one of the major topics will be what folks are calling “network neutrality,” which has become something of a hot-button issue in policy circles. Judging from the composition of the people attending this conference — folks from government, industry, academia and nonprofits considering such matters — the debate should be at least lively.

I continue to believe that it would be dangerous to innovation, and disastrous for citizen media, if we allow the cable and phone duopoly to have their regulatory way: They essentially want control over the speed and timing of what moves on what they call “their” lines (even though they got to be incumbents in the first place because of government-granted monopolies we gave them).

You can’t blame them for trying. After all, highly regulated industries tend to be most innovative in twisting legislative arms. And as the cable and phone incumbents smell a way to protect old business models while owning — or at least carving off a slice of — the ones that are coming, they are twisting mightily.

Pure neutrality is impossible, and we don’t have it now. The tech folks have built lots of performance tweaks into the networks that together comprise the Internet, and there always will need to do that. The network neutrality proposals now before Congress are flawed in their own way, because they don’t take some of this into account, but in their absence we could have much worse.

I hope to mention the fascinating conversation we had recently at the Berkman Center with Tom Evslin, who’s calling for a distributed application that will help determine whether the incumbents are gaming the networks for their own gain. (Listen to the MP3 audio here.)

I’ll post reports from the conference as time permits.

Cambridge Community Television (CCTV) of Cambridge, MA, has released the final version of their 15 minute short on citizen journalism online. It’s called “Citizen Journalism: From Pamphlet to Blog,” and it features interviews with Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices, videoblogger extraordinare Steve Garfield, and many others.

I was interviewed by Jason Crow with help from Mayana Leocadio and Jason Ong in his role as producer. I contributed a few comments, but more importantly, all the typing sounds come from audio they captured of me blogging away on my laptop.

Special to AudioBerkman : This podcast from the Center for Citizen Media features a conversation with Travis Henry of Yourhub.com. Yourhub allows residents of the Front Range region of Colorado to sign up to post their own news items and photos.

Travis also touches on efforts to syndicate the technology that powers Yourhub to other media organizations.

Download the MP3.
Produced by Lisa Williams for the Center for Citizen Media.
Attribution: Music from this episode of the Center for Citizen Media Podcast was sampled from a track by Revolution Void, titled “Accelerated Lifestyle“.
This podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons license. AudioBerkman is a production of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

Also posted at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society: If citizen journalism is to become a valuable part of the media ecosystem, citizen journalists will need help in navigating increasingly choppy legal waters — and the legal community will need better information on what’s happening in the citizen media arena as well.

Those are among the goals of a new collaboration, announced Monday at a citizen journalism gathering at Harvard Law School, between the Berkman Center’s Clinical Program in Cyberlaw and the Center for Citizen Media. Their new effort, which will be launched this fall, will provide information, education, resources and tools to help address the challenges faced by citizen journalists, said Clinical Program Director Phil Malone.

The project will be a cooperative one and will collaborate widely, noted Dan Gillmor, Director of the Center for Citizen Media. Potential allies include, among many, cyberlaw clinics at other law schools and groups that are already working to provide valuable resources in this arena, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Media Bloggers Association, ChillingEffects.org, and others.

The Center for Citizen Media, a project to enhance and expand grassroots media and its reach, is an affiliate of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

The Berkman Center’s Clinical Program in Cyberlaw provides high-quality, pro-bono legal services to appropriate individuals, small start-ups, non-profit groups and government entities regarding cutting-edge issues of the Internet, new technology and intellectual property.

Now the image I’m linking to here from the Flickr site, and the others in the sequence, aren’t earth-shaking. But they are the kinds of things that newspaper photographers feel fortunate to capture occasionally.

In this case, a man named David Newberger happened to be on the spot — in Tulsa on a business trip — when a commercial commuter plane was accidentally directed into a fuel truck. No explosion, thankfully, but a picture that speaks mini-volumes given the hassles that were sure to follow.

More and more, people are finding themselves on the spot in these situations, and they’re creating a public record of a kind. Most will never be “media” in the traditional, commercial sense. But it’s real media in its own right.

A group of organizations from the political left and right, including a media company, has launched a highly worthwhile project to expose the origin of earmarks — little (and not so little) spending items in legislation designed as a special favor to a district, campaign contributor and/or politician.

The idea is that the public will do the digging into over 1,800 such gifts and put them into a database. Some far-flung folks, politically, are involved. Notably, so are the Examiner newspapers.

Fantastic idea, and it could work to shame Congress people into at least telling the truth about their special favors, if not reconsider the public interest in all this.

Craig Newmark is intrigued by the idea of editors as “curators” of new journalism. Sound pretty high-brow, but the concept has some resonance. What happens, though, when the audience collectively does its own selection? Is that mass curator-ship?

(Note: Craig is an advisor and supporter of this center.)

As citizen journalism moves from an interesting concept to something more and more people will practice, we need to help would-be citizen journalists understand some fundamental principles of the craft.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, an organization that has been helping train journalists for decades, understands the need. We’re happy to announce that the foundation has awarded a grant to the Center for Citizen Media to create five online training modules for citizen journalists. Those modules will cover 1) thoroughness, 2) accuracy, 3) fairness, 4) transparency and 5) independence. We hope you’ll help us.

The foundation believes this kind of training will be increasingly important because a fast-growing way in which citizens influence public issues and affairs is through publishing their thoughts and observations on blogs. The number of online Americans who say they have read a blog, for exmaple, now is up to 39%, according to the Pew Internet and Public Life Project.

We’re fortunate to have as a project lead JD Lasica, a longtime journalist with special expertise in the online phenomenon. JD is co-founder of OurMedia.org, a site that helps people create and post media of various kinds. He’s also author of Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation.

Jan Schaffer, director of J-Lab at the University of Maryland and also director of New Voices, has years of experience creating online training modules. She will work with the Center to make sure that our observations work well as online training modules.

The modules will be available initially on the Knight Foundation site and here, and will also be available under a Creative Commons license.

We need your help. To that end, we’re creating discussion boards where we can have a conversation about the content and ideas behind these modules. Watch this space for more details.

Meanwhile, thanks to the Knight Foundation for its support.

Doc Searls: The Story of a Story. For what it’s worth, I didn’t think of myself as a reporter on the scene, even though, in a literal sense, I was. I thought of myself as a traveler blogging about being where news of some sort was going down, maybe. That’s not journalism as I’ve been taught to think about it over the last 40 years I’ve been doing it. But in a literal sense it was journalism. I was, after all, writing in a journal.

So I think the real story here is a slo-mo one that will go on for years. It’s the story of how journalism became a ordinary practice, rather than an exclusively professional one.

Exactly. Doc — who was heading home from Wikimania and our one-day citizen journalism unconference, performed an act of journalism. He witnessed something and told the rest of us what he was seeing.

It’s ordinary, but also extraordinary in the meaning for society in the long run.

Hartford Courant: Bloggers Deflect Political Credit. Tim Tagaris, Lamont’s Internet communications director, worked with bloggers in a way akin to how a traditional press secretary works with the media. He said he tried to provide them with information their readers wanted, while also focusing on fundraising and volunteer recruitment, which blogs can bolster through links on their websites.

In another election cycle, this kind of story won’t even be written. The integration of the Net into politics will be so thorough that no one will consider it remarkable.