Center for Citizen Media

Ethan Zuckerman writes:

Tim Lord, the managing editor of Slashdot, is happy that Slashdot is no longer the most anarchic news source on the Internet – he gives that honor to Digg.com. But Slashdot is still, joyfully, one of the net’s most open news sites – certainly more so than ohmynews or Global Voices. Slashdot uses two or three editors on any given day, who choose the stories that appear on the site and start conversations. While 300-400 submissions to Slashdot each day turn into only a few dozen stories, 5 to 6,000 comments get posted on every given day.

As a comment-driven site, Tim reports they’ve learned three things about people who participate: – People are curious. They want to know about the world, even with situations that don’t effect them directly. – People contentious – people like to argue and sway people to their point of view. – People are surprisingly helpful. When they find disinformation on the net, they will often work to debunk it and report the real story.

Slashdot works primarily by posting summaries of interesting stories from other sources – Wired, The New York Times – then inviting discussion on them. Many of the most interesting contributions are comments, or comments on comments. To filter through the thousands of comments a day, some readers are given moderation points – randomly asigned – which they can apply to comments to help them rise above the noise. Editors have super-moderative powers to pull the best comments out, and also summarize some of the most interesting comments in a section called Backslash.

In a community where comments are key, editors must be readers first, editors second. Tim became an editor by sending in some “grammar flames”, then getting hired to improve the quality of the site. While Slashdot is open and participatory – to the point of bringing in flamers as editors – it’s not wide open. Other sites, like Kuro5hin, have “open queues” of potential stories – Slashdot doesn’t do this for fear of being spammed, or because “there are things in the queue we don’t want our mothers to see.” At the same time, Slashdot takes anonymity very seriously – the “Slash” system the site uses may or may not be appropriate as a CMS because it goes to such a great degree to protect reader anonymity, to the point of hashing IP addresses rather than logging them unencrypted.

Ethan Zuckerman writes:

Craig Newmark, the founder and chief customer support person for Craigslist, is an awfully busy guy for someone who describes himself as “tremendously lazy”. His laziness around citizen’s media comes from the fact that he wants to change the world, but is working by ” help other people help other people change the world,” cheerleading and featuring the best efforts in citizen’s media, not involving Craigslist proper in the citizen’s media movement.

But there are some distinct lessons from Craiglist that are useful for Citizen’s media – Craig sees Craigslist as a victory of “wisdom of the crowds” over “tragedy of the commons”. He’s inspired by Wikipedia, where history is written not by the victors of battles, but by anyone who can access the medium. The tools of citizen’s media allow people to “speak truth to power”, but Craig questions whether this works in the contemporary media universe. He quotes Oscar Wilde: “If you want to tell people the truth, make themn laugh; otherwise they’ll kill you.” This suggests that John Stewart and Stephen Colbert may have more traction in today’s media universe than Edward Murrow or Helen Thomas.

Craig is interested in projects like Congresspedia, a project by the Sunlight foundation, which let citizens build and edit articles on their elected representatives. He plugs Dan Gillmor’s citmedia.org, and Jeff Jarvis’s soon to be released Daylife, a “news and trust aggregator”, designed to help you find global news. And he lets us know that BBC’s World Service Trust is now working to train citizen journalists around the world.

JD Lasica, like Dan Gillmor a seasoned journalist who has moved into new media, offers an overview of the shift between “legacy media” and new media. A video of Bill O’Reilly telling people to shut up outlines some of the worst of legacy media: top-down, one-way, centralized closed, imperious, heavily filtered. This sort of media can feel like media that’s “something done to you”.

As an alternative, JD is interested in the explosion of personal media, especially hyperlocal citizen’s media: Baristanet, iBrattleboro, Coastsider, H@Otown, Benicia News, Muncie Free Press, Free New Mexicans. Quoting Gordon Borrell, “the deer now have guns.”

His site, ourmedia.org, features the best of citizen’s media around the world, though with a heavy US focus. (JD would clearly like to change this, and broaden his moderation team from people from 14 countries to a much larger community.) The site includes the Personal Media Learning Center, which includes content to teach you to build video blogs, podcasts and other types of online media. The site also features an Open Media Directory, which includes music, audio and video which are all legal to share and use online.

JD is especially inspired by the role of open tools and open standards in the world of personal media. He’s especially interested in dotSub.com, a great new tool that lets people add subtitles to video in their own languages, localizing this content for different audiences.

Brian Nunez, technology manager for WITNESS, explains that he feels a bit awkward being on a technology panel, as WITNESS doesn’t think of itself as a technology organization. Instead, WITNESS is about “old school citizen journalism”, helping people produce video that talks about the issues in their communities. This is changing, though, with the WITNESS video hub, a project Brian is a key mover behind

Historically, WITNESS began by giving video cameras to human rights activists in the developing world. Unfortunately, almost all the footage their produced was unusable. Learning from this, WITNESS began a process where they gave cameras, training and strategic guidance for their partners. This requires a 1-3 year commitment to a partner, with periodic assesments – it’s not very scaleable, and only allows WITNESS to work with 10 to 15 groups a year.

To scale up video advocacy, address a wider audience and increase expectations for how video can be used for social justice, WITNESS is expanding into the realm of citizen journalism and participatory media. This is a complement to the existing models, and builds on some of the backend technology they’ve been using for a while – videos linked to online petitions, for example. But now individuals will be able to create and upload video, and WITNESS will point to the best pieces of content, contextualizing and featuring it.

There are major difficulties doing this in the human rights video space. People in the north tend to be spoiled by pervasive broadband – in the south, it’s very important that people be able to upload media from mobile devices. Security and privacy is a major issue – uploading video could be dangerous for activists, and WITNESS needs to think through the implications of letting people transmit this video.

WITNESS will be piloting a video project in cooperation with Global Voices and OneWorldTV. Brian tells us that the experiment will focus on aggregation, pointing to video that’s uploaded to other hosting sites, and allowing networking and discussion around those videos. To make the process as transparent as possible, Brian and his team are blogging the process, inviting people in their community to help them design the tool that works best to unite video activism and citizen journalism. Quoting Mr. Oh’s vision of “every citizen a journalist”, he ends with the hope that soon we’ll see “every citizen a human rights advocate.”

Ethan Zuckerman writes from the OhmyNews citizen-journalism event:

Dan Gillmor leads off the conference in Seoul with an overview of some of the high points of Web 2.0, including the Bush/Blair lipsynch video, which always gets a good laugh. (What’s Dan going to do if Blair resigns, I wonder?) His point is that audio and video are put together and remixed in ways that seem deeply foriegn to people who haven’t grown up with digital media. (Dan seems to be navigating quite well for someone who’s worked for as many mainstream newspapers as he has…)

He showcases some fascinating new tools which we can imagine helping us navigate the new landscape of participatory media. One of the most interesting is screencasting, a technology pioneered by John Udell, which lets an author walk someone through a set of webpages while playing an audio commentary track. Dan shows off a movie about the Wikipeda “heavy metal umlaut” article, which does a brilliant job of helping explain how Wikipedia articles grow and get corrected.

Cool tech aside, Dan’s point is that “technology is the least important part of what’s going on – it’s about journalistic principles.” Specifically, Dan believes that citizen journalists need to practice thoroughness, accuracy, fairness, independence and transparency, acknowledging that mainstream journalists need to get better about being more transparent as well. The tools we have – RSS, OPML, easy publishing technologies – enable us to about leverage the wisdom of the crowds, roll our own media, and to collect, upload, blog, show video, annotate and argue…

But while the technology is not the core problem of citizen journalism, the technology can get much better, Dan argues. Assuming that Moore’s law continues progressing, that devices to create content get smaller, more pervasive and easier to use, Dan believes we need – and may see – better conversation tools, news finding and reading tools, content creation tools, and pervasive metadata. Dan’s Center for Citizen Media – allied with UC Berkeley’s Journalism school as well as with the Berkman Center – will help outline the need for some of these tools. But his core goals, as he suggests from his comments on technology and principles, are to ensure that the people building and using these new tools take the core principles that make journalism work.

The network and its affiliate, at a PR event for the new evening news anchor person (dubbed “Couric’s Twin Cities visit a well-oiled machine” by the Minneapolis Star Tribune), didn’t allow actual reporting and felt threatened by a blogger:

Matt Bartel, owner of the popular MNSpeak blog also was issued an invitation by WCCO, although the station apparently didn’t recognize the name Bartel (ubiquitous in Twin Cities publishing circles) or his business, until the event was about to start.

“They pulled me out of the auditorium and told me that they’d become aware of the fact that I had a blog,” Bartel said. “They said, ‘We don’t want you to participate,’ ” then offered him a choice: surrender his notebook or leave the event.

CBS, get a clue. Someday.

I’m at the OhmyNews International Citizen Reporters’ Forum for the next two days, speaking later this morning, and enjoying the chance to meet citizen reporters from around the world. Our hosts – Oh Yeon Ho and his team – have invited great speakers to join us and ensured that the audience is at least as interesting as the speakers, which is always a recipe for a good conference. I’m especially grateful that OhmyNews has made it possible for three other members of the Global Voices team to attend the conference… giving me a chance to meet them for the first time!

You can follow along via a webcast and chat – I’ll do my best to summarize the talks as they go by, beginning with Dan Gillmor’s keynote…

Reuters reports that Wu Hao, a Chinese film maker and blogger and now a U.S resident, has been freed after a months-long imprisonment in China. This case has been one of the clearest examples of the Chinese regime’s loathing of truly free speech, and his release is good news.

Kudos to all those who raised a ruckus. A special cheer for my colleagues and friends at Global Voices, for whom Wu’s cause has been especially important, but most of all to his sister, Nina, who has been tireless in her work to get him freed.

I’m heading to Seoul today for the OhmyNews International citizen-journalism conference, where I’ll be a speaker (and an avid listener, too).

More (much) later…

Here are a few more details about the one-day gathering we’re planning for August 7 at Harvard Law School, the day after the Wikimania conference ends. I’m speaking at Wikimania, and hope to see some of you there as well as at our event.

The purpose is to brainstorm some key aspects of citizen journalism, including principles, techniques, tools, business models and more.

The conference will be in the “unconference” format. That is, the audience will be the experts — no formal panels, but rather excellent moderators drawing out what we collectively know — and the idea is to learn from each other.

Moderators so far include (in alphabetical order):

— Jeff Jarvis, author of the BuzzMachine blog and head of the new-media program at the City University of New York’s new School of Journalism.

— Andrew Lih, former Columbia and Hong Kong University new media professor, on on what would be the ideal toolset for citizen journalism, and what’s still missing from the toolset.

— Lisa Williams, who runs the H2otown blog covering Watertown, Mass., on local sites and how they work best.

Others TBA.

The gathering will take place at Harvard Law School‘s Pound Hall, beginning at 9 a.m. and finishing at 4 p.m. We’ll also have bird-of-feather dinners in Cambridge, most likely hosted by several speakers, for those who want to stick around.

The event will either be free to attend or very, very inexpensive. A signup page will be posted soon.

If you have ideas for discussions, please post them below, send e-mail or fill out the form below.

The San Jose Mercury News, as part of an investigative report on researcher-industry conflicts of interest at Stanford University, has created a clever animated board game entitled “You be the researcher.” The animation shows how easy it is to get into situations that are borderline (or worse) unethical.

I’d have done the animation somewhat differently (including making the type easier to read in a normal browser window), but overall it’s a terrific visual aid to the series. It would have been even better if it had been more interactive: offering real choices that let people make their own decisions, and see what the consequences would be.

I was overheard at the recent Fortune magazine Brainstorm conference making this observation, which I stand behind:

The next conference I go to that has a consistent WiFi signal will be my first.