I had thought about calling it “From Content Management to Community Management” or maybe “Content Management is Dead” but ended up instead with: “Upload, Tag, Share, Discuss: Content Management in the Age of Participation.”

Here are the slides – note that the last slide is full of credits for photos (creative commons via flickr) and links for sites referenced. Can be hard to see in small size so you’ll need to either full-screen it or download the file (which you can do at slideshare).

| View | Upload your own

Seth had some nice things to say about the presentation: Web Content 2008 Notes.

So did Deane at Web Content 2008: Day Two.

Thanks Guys!

It was really a great conference: not heavily vendor driven, no “expo floor” you have to walk through to get to the food, small enough that you could actually mingle with and talk to the attendees. My only wish would have been to have spoken earlier, maybe even Tuesday am, so that people interested in my talk could have known who I was before the conference was basically over. I also would have come in to Chicago Monday night to catch more of the opening keynotes.

Now (via LaughingSquid) you can watch the video. It’s Clay Shirky’s keynote at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week, on the “cognitive surplus” as a characteristic fueling mass collaboration.

Interestingly, this seems to break my facebook app. No longer resizes the iframe to the right size? Something is trying to call location.toString() and getting denied – my guess is that Blip.tv is trying to track where the video was embedded and facebook doesn’t allow apps inside iframes to access parent location.

You can see all the Web 2.0 Expo videos at Blip.tv or put this rss url into Miro and get a channel: http://web2expo.blip.tv/rss

I bookmarked it at the time, downloaded a copy to my “to read” folder (a dangerous thing to have) and then ignored it for the last month or so. You should not do the same. This may be your only chance to explain away the hours you wasted watching dramatic chipmonk videos as “work-related.”

The researchers looked at hundreds of user-generated videos, specifically focusing on those which “incorporate copyrighted works into new creations.”

They analyze the videos in terms of the uses to which the copyrighted material is put, and how those uses related to the “fair use” doctrine with respect to copyright. The types of uses they uncover include:

• Parody and satire
• Negative or critical commentary
• Positive commentary
• Quoting to trigger discussion
• Illustration or example
• Incidental use
• Personal reportage or diaries
• Archiving of vulnerable or revealing materials
• Pastiche or collage

It’s not only perfectly relevant analysis, it’s also a really good catalog of the best of user-generated videos.

My current favorite – too recent for inclusion in the report, but otherwise very much in line with the satire and critical commentary approaches is the Obama-supporting Yes We Can video and the corresponding parody of McCain: Like Hope, But Different.

The first half of the study results from qualitative interviews with “experts on the social, economic and legal aspects of user-led innovation”, specifically:

• Eric von Hippel
• Yochai Benkler
• Jimmy Wales
• Michel Bauwens
• Siva Vaidhyanathan
• John Howkins
• Mitch Kapor

The second half of the study focuses on Second Life as a case study or example of the impact of user-led innovation in actual practice.

I like the basic framing of the argument in the first section, which is that “user-generated content represents just the tip-of-the-iceberg”:

participatory culture . . . has the potential to reshape our economy and society. . . . user-led developments encompass a much wider field of collaborative practices and production processes. . . . other forms of ‘citizen product design’ are catering to people’s desire for personalised consumer goods.

They go on to suggest that “the blurring of producer and consumer roles is changing the way companies innovate and gives users a much greater say in product and service design.”

The most problematic part of the report for me is this description of Open Source:

One of the most important and successful forms of distributed capitalism in action is the Open Source software movement. The brainchild of Finnish university student Linus Torvalds, Open Source emerged out of his pioneering efforts to develop a sophisticated feedback system of network-enabled collaboration, culminating in the Linux operating system. Torvalds wrote the Linux code in conjunction with thousands of other keen codevelopers, laying the groundwork for future Open Source projects. This created an ingenious process for software development that utilised the ‘collective intelligence’ of other users, and harnessed the power of distributed knowledge production, transfer and exchange.

This wipes away with one rhetorical brush the Free Software Foundation and the GNU toolkit on which Linux relied and continues to rely, and basically credits Linus with inventing not just Linux but the whole movement. (Let alone any of the other precursors to Free software, among academics, in hobbyist communities, and so on – see the Wikipedia entry on the history of free software). A bit of editing and a footnote to the broader Free Software movement would go along way here.

The other issue with the report is that it is a bit like reading the condensed version of the thinkers identified above – which I guess is a by-product of the interview methodology.

But for those who have no intent of slogging through The Wealth of Networks or Democratizing Innovation (or, for that matter, the easier-going but still highly insightful Convergence Culture), the report does an excellent job of framing the major issues.

At MTV, we’re pretty psched – being our fans BFF has always been important to us as a company.

It’s no accident MTV started as a cable channel – youth were most open to the potential of cable.

Together, we define what MTV is – it is the world’s largest brand gallery.

What we’ve learned: Four Guiding Truths that burn in all of us at MTV

1. It’s not the medium, but the content that matters most.
2. Build an emotional relationship with the users based on content they find compelling.
3. Give your audience a place and mechanism to find each other.
4. You have to let your audience help you shape your brand.

Message over Medium

Create compelling content, then figure out the best screens and experiences through which to engage users.

MTV.com – 10,000 video library – let users play what they want when they want. It isn’t enough to just play what we want online. Also Rock Band, which will let people engage with music in a new and interactive way – but even this starts with the creative impulse and the emotional connection first, then the technology approach.

Tools make a great experience possible – but you have to have a great idea first. At heart, we’re a company of great ideas.

How do you make it stick?

Start with a foundation of great content – then build an emotional relationship on that content with which users want to engage.

52 bands. What if we took all the time we spend promoting our programming – 11.5 hours every week – and gave it to different artists. So we did. We gave that time to new bands – to connect users to new music and up and coming artists.

In an era in which the music video has become a commodity, 52 bands has been a great way for listeners and bands to find each other.

College students were the first to raise their voices about the genocide in Darfur – the MTVu college network creating programming, PSAs, campus events, and a viral video game.

(Christina masterfully transitions from genocide in Darfur to Jackass via George Bush.)

MTV JackassWorld – coming soon.

Let your consumers speak to each other

Give your audience ways to find each other.

Think.mtv.com – “the largest online activist community ever”

Find others who are passionate about the same things you are.

Also the You-R-Here area on MTV.com – MTV’s always covered lots of tours, but this year we’re allowing users to help report through You-R-Here.

Help your audience shape our brand

We want our audiences to feel ownership of the experiences we create, the brands around which we collect.

The MTV Tr3s network for hispanic youth in the US, in which the brand itself was created with deep participation with users.

Real World Online Casting site – tapping into people’s connection with the Real World experience.

Choose or Lose and the presidential election – engaging the audience in a new way, with an outlet specifically targeted to their needs.

Summary:

First, start with great ideas.

Next, add a strong emotional connection.

Let the audience find people like themselves.

Give them ways to let us know what they think – good and bad, and listen to what they say – co-create the brand.

—–

Q: What about the stormy side of the BFF relationship?

A: I’d rather have people be passionate and upset than not carrying. We get lots of positive and negative feedback, but that’s good – we want engagement. It’s ok if people say bad things.

Q: You have the perfect audience who wants to consume, produce, and even be in media – but what if you were in an insurance company, or a paper goods company. Do these principles apply?

A: I think they do. The principles should transfer – it is about putting the audience or consumer at the center of what you do – you’d have different users perhaps, but the point is to focus on the user before the technology and before the tool.

Q: Are the youth audiences of MTV beyond TV, and beyond advertising?

A: Television is important to them, but it is just one of many screens. So advertising has to adopt and change – but that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible. As an example, one of the “remixes” at the VMA was with Herbal Essences and sponsored – that is advertising, but in a different way. The key is an additive experience for the users – not a separate or extraneous piece – but a good show with good content in it. A great piece of entertainment, not an infomercial for Herbal Essences.

Q: Is the MTV brand splintering? How can you cover all these different needs and not lose brand focus?

A: The music industry isn’t splintering – it’s dying, or undergoing an immense change. But the audience isn’t splintering, they want different experiences and we provide multiple different experiences – if you’re giving the audiences what they want you stay relevant. We get lots of criticism on MTV for not showing videos like we did 20 years ago – but you have to evolve and grow as your audience does. Every year new people join the audience and bring new expectations and new experiences – you have to keep in tune with what they are interested in and looking for – that’s what keeps your brand relevant.

Key point: Objectives, not technology, need to lead your effort

Don’t build a community just because your competitors do. Don’t just try to “generate buzz” – what is the goal you hope that buzz will accomplish? Figuring out what you’re trying to achieve will let you then measure what you are doing.

It isn’t “how do we get involved in the groundswell” but what problem are we trying to solve or what opportunities are we trying to create.

These are the main objectives:

1. Listening
2. Talking
3. Energizing
4. Supporting
5. Embracing

Analogies to organizational roles:

Research -> Listening
Marketing -> Talking
Sales -> Energizing
Support -> Supporting
Development -> Embracing

In the groundswell (ie, in the web 2.0 era), each of these needs to be transformed a bit. He went through each of them with some examples, including vendors.

Unfortunately, I didn’t hear a single mention of the use of open source to help deliver on these objectives – each objective ended with a brief table listing approaches and vendors – but no mention of assembling your own solutions with open source frameworks, despite the reality that open source frameworks are often the best solutions in many of these spaces.

I know Forrester hasn’t historically focused on open source and I don’t expect them to – but buying product solutions from proprietary vendors isn’t the entire universe. He also didn’t really cover how you integrate these solutions together – so that you don’t end up with five siloed solutions but a cohesive strategy and integrated set of applications which exchange and share data. [Note: this did come up during the Q & A - see the end of the notes below.]

Listening

Listening – this is like your old research department, which is designed to get information from customers.

Example of Lynn Perry, cancer patient, on waiting for treatment at the treatment center – sitting in the waiting room, recognizing “my time is more precious than theirs” – the importance of scheduling and managing people’s tasks in that context – while spending tons on treatment equipment, don’t ignore the need to manage people’s time.

National Comprehensive Cancer Network forum – supporting patiences and caregivers everywhere (SPACE?) – built by Communispace.

This is an example of using a private community (he points to vendors like Communispace, MarketTools, Think Passenger) to create listening opportunities.

The other approach is monitoring buzz in the blogosphere, etc.

Talking

This isn’t just about talking – but it is about conversation, and building brand by participating in the conversation.

Adidas Soccer page on MySpace – when you friend this profile, you get graphics you can use in your own MySpace layouts.

4 million impressions for 100k. This is highly effective talking strategy.

Talking can also mean blogging, something Forrester gets lots of questions about.

Energizing

This is about helping your best customers recruit other customers.

Jim Noble and eBags – energizing with ratings and reviews. He wrote a good review. The zipper broke. He engaged with the head of design from eBags, who actually took his changes to the factory in HongKong where they implemented the suggestions he provided.

Use ratings and reviews (vendors like Bazaarvoice, PowerReviews)

Or designate lead customers to energize others – by creating a brand ambassador program.

Supporting

Dell Support Forum – Posts from predator – 20,452 since 1999.

“I actually enjoy helping people. That’s what got me hooked: when you help people and they say ‘Thank You’.”

The point is people will be willing to help each other. (Vendors: Lithium, Jive, Prospero)

Or, enable customers to build solutions together (Vendors: SocialText, Confluence, Wikia)

Embracing

Work with users to create and prioritize new features, new products.

Salesforce.com idea exchange as the primary example. (Vendors: Communispace, MarketTools)

What about objectives before technology?

Getting back to objectives, Bernoff went through some ROI calculations – cost of running a forum versus answering support calls, cost of corporate communications (in and outbound) versus blogging, etc.

But it isn’t just about ROI – as you start doing this it is a reformation in the way you do things – it will change the company in more profound ways than just the ROI calculation.

–
First question from the audience – is about “who can help us” – he mentions that there are many companies which “can help you build communities” (quick plug – mine not Bernoff’s – companies like Optaros).

Another question from the audience asked about “an integrated approach” – he cautions that companies shoudl start with one objective and then grow from there – integrated is good, but it should be integrated which grows from initial successes – know where you are going in being integrated, but don’t try to do everything all at once.

(Note: somewhere in between disclosure and a plug: Optaros‘ work with Swisscom Mobile Labs is a Groundswell Awards finalist).

• Don’t get caught up in the next shiny object: forcus on creating experiences for people
• People ask how much control to give customers – but customers have already taken control and we’ll never get it back
• Twitter (with friends)
• Flickr

Carrie Johnson and Christine Overby just finished the day 2 opening remarks, talking about things carried over from day one – Richard Edelman’s “Windy City Rules” and “Be It, Don’t Buy It” (see Jeremy Pepper’s notes); Christine Hefner on Playboy’s use of new media (myspace, Playboy U) and organizational change (as in, if you can’t change the organization you’re in, change organizations).

Next up Josh Bernoff keynote.

Unfortunately I missed the original broadcast, but I listed to the audio of it. It’s great to hear Carvin balancing between the “this is all just frivilous fun” and “this is radical revolutionary potential” campes – he manages to acknowledge the activities one might call frivilous but also point to the more significant impact these networks can have:

For a lot of people, social networks are just a place for socializing – catching up with friends, flirting and the like. But that’s just scratching the surface.

Some of the examples he mentions in passing:

• TakingITGlobal
• The Digital Divide Network
• The I Heart NPR Facebook Group

While you’re at it, check out Carvin’s blog or follow him on twitter.

Also on the show was Christine Rosen, author of “Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism” which was published in The New Atlantis. (Rosen’s a “fellow” at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which describes itself as having been created “clarify and reinforce the bond between the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the public debate over domestic and foreign policy issues” and which Right Web describes as “a leading player in the early effort to discredit the secular humanist tradition in the United States. The center is one of several institutes and programs established by neoconservatives to promote an increased role of religion in public policy.”)

She focuses on the collecting of friends for status as a problem – that we’ve turned cultivating friends into collecting friends. Carvin nicely handles the discussion, pointing out that this is just one aspect which a certain percentage of users latch onto, but it isn’t the primary goal.

On the topic of online communities undermining offline communities, Carvin also does a solid job – noting the evolution of online communities from some of the more locally oriented early communities (The Well, local BBS’s) into global internet based communities, but with a return visible at the edges in the direction of localism or communities of interest.

He also points out that the culture of narcisissm can hardly be blamed on online communities.

It’s worth a listen, even if some of the callers fall pretty squarely into the stereotypical NPR “these crazy kids today with their interweb tubes” demographic.

In the last segment, Rosen trots out a Brigham Young University study which found folks felt less connected to their communities when they were heavy users of online social networks – she’s careful to point out it was too small a study to be meaningful, but nevertheless draws the conclusion from it as though it were a truth.

Anyone know the study? I couldn’t find a good reference to it in a quick search – in the article cited above Rosen writes:

Researcher Rob Nyland at Brigham Young University recently surveyed 184 users of social networking sites and found that heavy users “feel less socially involved with the community around them.” He also found that “as individuals use social networking more for entertainment, their level of social involvement decreases.”

but there is no citation to the study – the only Rob Nyland I find is a recent graduate – maybe he did this survey while a student? Nothing wrong with a student doing a study, of course, but Rosen makes it sound like a formal study performed and published by the university not something an undergrad did while working on a paper.

I’ve left a brief comment there, but wanted to expand on it here. This isn’t just a question of two different approaches to delivering Internet TV – it’s a fundamental difference of passive consumption versus active participation.

The fundamental difference between Joost and Miro is seen in these two quotes.

From the Joost FAQ, section on “Content Related Questions, ” the question is “Can I upload my own videos?“:

Not at the moment. Right now, we’re concentrating on high-quality TV content from well-known TV brands, so that we can provide entertainment to the widest possible audience. Future versions of Joost may allow you to upload your own material, but we have no immediate plans for this.

As opposed to, on the GetMiro site, the entire first-level tab called create, where one reads:

How do I get my Videos on Miro?

Miro converts any media RSS feed into a channel. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of RSS — it’s an open distribution format that works with Miro, iTunes, and lots of other tools. Many blogs and video sharing services automatically generate an RSS feed. Once you have a feed that works in Miro (please test it first!), you can submit it to the Miro Guide.

With pointers to the Make Internet TV site, where you’ll find:

We have created a detailed set of guides for shooting, editing, publishing, and promoting internet video. We think it’s the best resource anywhere. If you are getting started with creating internet video or if you want to learn more about a specific topic, it’s the best place to start.

To me, this is the clear difference between Internet TV imagined as something brought to you by “well-known TV brands” (turning the internet into TV) versus Internet TV imagined as something inherently participatory (turning TV into the internet).

It shouldn’t be hard to tell which one runs on my machine(s).

Help spread the word:

ICanHasCheezburger, or at least sites like it, should have a place on your corporate intranet.

So Why should lolcats (pictures of cats with captions in the imagined/projected diction of a cat who uses IM/SMS a lot) belong in your Enterprise 2.0?

Developed by two individuals known as Cheezburger and Tofuburger, is best enjoyed without deep explanation – just start visiting the web site, subscribe to the RSS feed (this is the one which works best on my phone), or follow them on twitter. For those who need explanation, start here:

• ICanHasCheezburger/About
• I’M IN UR NEWSPAPER WRITIN MAH COLUM: Rapidly spreading Web photo-posting phenomenon centers on felines with poor spelling (Houston Chronicle article)
• im in mai blog, postin’ bout cats: The Cuteness of Grammatical errors
• im in ur programmz, codin in ur dialect: LOLCode and Feline Dialectology

Because your employees are people too. In fact they were people long before you made them employees. As people, they have interests which only partially (or maybe even not at all) overlap with whatever it is you pay them to do (gasp!).


Part of the disconnect between the fun people have using web 2.0 properties like YouTube, Flickr, LiveJournal, MySpace, and (the darling of the moment) Facebook is the fact that they get to talk about things that are not properly corporate. Some folks react to this by worrying about wasted time and lost productivity, but I think that is absolutely the wrong approach – at least if you want creativity, innovation, dedication, and loyalty from the people you employ.

Sometimes laughing out loud at a Lolcat from ICanHasCheezburger does more for my productivity than a week of intensive sessions on strategic planning.

To put it another way, and borrow from Dave Weinberger, your employees’ [interests] are miscellaneous. Or, looked at from the other side, the things your enterprise might be interested in are miscellaneous. Trying to decide definitively upfront what’s on topic and what’s off topic on your intranet will kill, or at least fatally wound, any potential innovation which might happen there.

A few recent examples of miscellany from Optaros’ own Intranet 2.0. (Ok, we don’t really call it that – it’s just our intranet, but it is Enterprise 2.0 enabled – every employee has an internal blog, in addition to forums and wikis for projects/topics of interest, etc.):

• And now for something completely different – a discussion from one of our user experience (UX) folks about Monty Python
• A post from a senior developer on foosball strategy, complete with diagrams of optimal bank shots against which defenses are inefficient and difficult to maintain
• Results of a cracker eating contest in the Austin office
• Photos from the Swiss offices’ joint (Geneva and Zurich) Tennis tournament – our own Swiss Open)

The PEW / Internet Project recently released a report on hobbyists, showing that:

83% of online Americans have used the internet to pursue their hobbies

and:

Relatively younger American adults are more likely than their elders to look for information about hobbies or interests online. Some 86% of internet users ages 18 to 29 and 88% of internet users ages 30 to 49 utilize the medium to pursue hobbies. By comparison, 77% of 50-64 year-old internet users and 62% of online Americans age 65 and older report using the internet to pursue hobbies.

So are these users, accustomed to researching online things of interest to them, going to be asked to stop cold and speak (and read) official corporate voice only when they hit your corporate intranet?

The study asked “How would citizens make up a front page differently than professional news people,” and found that:

If a new crop of user-news sites – and measures of user activity on mainstream news sites – are any indication, the news agenda will be more diverse, more transitory, and often draw on a very different and perhaps controversial list of sources

As the project report goes on to explain, there was a signficant difference betweem what was considered important in the “mainstream press” and the “news agenda” of the user-sites. Additionally, they note that the sources used are different – “Seven in ten stories (70%) on the user sites come from either blogs or Web sites such as YouTube and WebMd that do not focus mostly on news.”

They conclude:

In short, the user-news agenda, at least in this week snapshot, was more diverse, yet also more fragmented and transitory than that of the mainstream news media. This does not mean necessarily that users disapprove or reject the mainstream news agenda. These user sites may be supplemental for audiences. They may gravitate to them in addition to, rather than instead of, traditional venues. But the agenda they set is nonetheless quite different.

There are, I think, a number of problems with these conclusions.

First, there’s no real reason to call Del.icio.us, Reddit, and Digg “news” sites. They track popular items of interest, and I guess you could call that news, but their not focused on news the same way sites like newsvine, ohmynews, nowpublic, or even indymedia are.

I wouldn’t call any of the three sites they studied a news site. They cover things which are new, I suppose, or at least newly discovered by the users – but that isn’t the same thing as the news in the sense that people use it of the news media. Reddit, for example, says:

reddit is a source for what’s new and popular on the web — personalized for you. Your votes train a filter, so let reddit know what you liked and disliked, because you’ll begin to be recommended links filtered to your tastes. All of the content on reddit is submitted and voted on by users like you.

Digg describes itself this way:

Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users.

Del.icio.us, the least “news” of the three, is a social bookmarking site designed for people to share resources on the web with each other – not to disseminate news.

Second, the report compares the “news agenda” set by mainstream media, to a “news agenda” set by users on user-news sites. But does it make sense to talk of an “agenda” determined by popularity of a largely random set of actors, in the same sense that one talks of an agenda set by a very small number of trained, experienced, full-time editorial staff?

Is it really surprising that the coverage is more varied when contributed by random users across the web than it is when carefully assembled by a small news team who works together?

When they describe the portion of the study which covered Yahoo! News, they contrast “Most Viewed” with “Most Emailed” and “Most Recommended.” Not too surprisingly, the “Most Viewed” was the most sensational (people look at sensational stories more than they would recommend them or share them with others). The editors also don’t seem to get (I often see this not mentioned) that the email function is often used to send a story to oneself for later reference – not just to share with others.

I’d love to see a longer study which really looked at specific categories of news. Digg and Reddit both skew highly toward technology – makes sense, given their early adopter audiences – but when they are reporting news of, say, the war in Iraq, how different are the stories preferred on Digg to those on CNN, or MSNBC, or Fox News? But it can’t conflate “new stuff on the web” with “news.”

Luckily, despite some overlapping sessions, the keynote by Yochai Benkler was shared across summits and I was able to attend.

If you’re not familiar with Prof. Benkler, you should be. His book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is the treatise on /study of commons-based peer production. (It’s available in many formats including free versions under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Attribution Share-Alike License).

He’s also the author of “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” in which he argues that:

while free software is highly visible, it is in fact only one example of a much broader social-economic phenomenon. I suggest that we are seeing is the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment. I call this mode “commons-based peer-production,” to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets. Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.

What follows are my rough outline notes of his talk. Benkler’s the kind of speaker where the notes or even the slides don’t do justice to seeing him speak – but at least I’ve got some of the highlights and examples down.

Benkler:

We now live in a world in which:

• The most important inputs into the world’s core economic activities are widely distributed (the ability for globally distributed populations to create information and culture)
• Behaviors once on the periphery of economic concern are moving to the core (social relationships, friendships, concerns about decency and fairness)

Example: The Encyclopedia – used to be thousands of dollars to get a 24 volume set of bound encyclopedias. That pressure drove the price of the Brittanica down to $500 in 1989. That was then followed by Encarta for $59.95 in 2000. Finally, wikipedia which is free.

Benkler mentioned the Nature study on the quality of Wikipedia entries, and Britannica’s response (PDF) to it. (Nature‘s since responded to the Britannica objections).

The reality is that most hands on practicing scientists felt both were equally lousy. (Never ask a deep expert to evaluate a paragraph level summary of a complex topic – they always find it lacking). But that this was even a serious question to be tacked – that Wikipedia could be said by a reasonable person as potentially comparable in quality to Brianicca – is Benkler’s point.

“Information Production” is now the critical economic activity – at the same time that our ways of producing information are shifting to commons based production.

Benkler outlined a number of concepts (and drew distinctions between them) related to Commons Based Production:

1. Peer Production
2. Shared Resource Utilization (things like SETI @Home
3. Free/Open Source Software

Examples included (I added links):

• The search for Steve Fossett
• Craters outlined by volunteers for NASA
• The BBC Help Us Make News
• Threadless
• Learning to Love You More
• Kaitura
• Porkbusters and the Secret Holder
• The Sunlight Foundation Earmark Map
• Black Box Voting and the campaign to decertify certain electronic voting machines
• Media Volunteer (as I’m writing this their site seems to be down – asking for authentication for public pages)
• Cambia BioForge

This is really a new kind of production in that it is not market driven and it is not centralized. We’ve had market-driven, decentralized production (standard firms in the US), we’ve had market-driven, centralized production (large corporations), we’ve had non-market, centralized production (governments and NGOs, non-profits). What we have not had is non-market, decentralized production. (This echoes Clary Shirky’s assertions about Perl being an act of love).

Benkler showed a typology of different ways peer production works, in terms of the types of inputs people are asked to make and the types of organizational strategies they use, as well as the kinds of motivations (extrinsic and intrinsic) driving them. The more creativity and knowledge necessary in the types of contributions people are asked to make, the more you have to move to a many to many type collective form of organization. The major examples here are things like Google and Digg, where the effort required by the user is low (making links on the web means helping Google’s algorithm but you don’t think of it that way, digging something is a single click activity); on the other hand Free/Open Source Software requires much more complex structures. (Not sure if he’s overestimating the “volunteer” nature of open source here given the number of developers on may open source projects who are employed and do this contribution as part of their job).

The key question isn’t whether peer production is a fad – it clearly is here to stay – but how it operates and how we can design to encourage the right kinds of collaboration.

Too much of the theories of cooperation has classically depended on “rational self-interest” but newer explorations in a number of fields (sociology, economics, psychology, evolutionary biology) has started to move beyond that.

Benkler’s argument is that people respond in ways which are not always or first self-interested: people resond in ways which are predictably cooperative under certain conditions:

• Communication
• Humanization
• Trust Construction
• Explicit Norm Creation
• Monitoring / Peer Review / Discipline
• Transparency in Governance
• Fairness (in context – concepts of fairness vary widely)
• Self-Selection (as opposed to assignment to tasks)
• Group Identiity and Investment
• Leadership (older sibling style, not parent)

Benkler made a great point about being wary of introducing extrinstic motivators (ie, money) in systems which have been driven by intrinsic motivators. For example, systems which try to introduce shared ad revenue in the user-contributed-video context may alienate existing users who were motivated by other factors. You try to match love with money and some folks end up not wanting the money and no longer wanting to work for love.

Benkler closed with some of the political impacts of social production – ways in which social production is changing the political reality of people all over the world and ways in which industries, governments, and corporations threatened by social production have tried to push back – the DCMA, Trusted Systems, etc. (Unfortunately by this point he was trying to wrap up very quickly and I didn’t get a good list from his last few slides).

Because Benkler’s operating at a high level of abstraction – thinking about the impacts of peer production at a global and historical scale – it can be hard sometimes to connect his concepts to what companies are trying to do in the “Web 2.0″ space – but his elaborations should help us understand the real fundamental shifts underlying what otherwise might look like a “fad.”

Generally this begins with a reference to some school or another (generally seems to be a History department, but I’ve heard multiple schools referenced) which has forbidden the citation of (or maybe even the consultation of) wikipedia entries in student essays. The argument they’re using this bit of data could be either:

1. You can’t cite wikipedia in an academic paper, and that is evidence of the fact that Wikipedia isn’t as good as real encyclopedias with editors and print publication houses behind them.
2. You can’t cite wikipedia in an academic paper, and that is evidence of just how behind the times the ivory tower academics are.

This month’s Communications of the ACM refreshingly adds a richer context to what I was beginning to suspect was some kind of urban legend. Neil Waters, of Middlebury College, wrote this month’s viewpoint column, titled: “Why You Can’t Cite Wikipedia in My Class.” (For now, at least, it appears to be free full text in html or pdf – not sure if that will always be true).

In it, he describes how the Middlebury College History Department came to forbid Wikipedia citations in student essays:

I made that effort [to perceive the positive side of Wikipedia] after an innocuous series of events briefly and improbably propelled me and the history department at Middlebury College into the national, even international, spotlight. While grading a set of final examinations from my “History of Early Japan” class, I noticed that a half-dozen students had provided incorrect information about two topics—the Shimabara Rebellion of 1637–1638 and the Confucian thinker Ogyu Sorai—on which they were to write brief essays. Moreover, they used virtually identical language in doing so. A quick check on Google propelled me via popularity-driven algorithms to the Wikipedia entries on them, and there, quite plainly, was the erroneous information. To head off similar events in the future, I proposed a policy to the history department it promptly adopted: “(1) Students are responsible for the accuracy of information they provide, and they cannot point to Wikipedia or any similar source that may appear in the future to escape the consequences of errors. (2) Wikipedia is not an acceptable citation, even though it may lead one to a citable source.”

The rest, as they say, is history. The Middlebury student newspaper ran a story on the new policy. That story was picked up online by The Burlington Free Press, a Vermont newspaper, which ran its own story. I was interviewed, first by Vermont radio and TV stations and newspapers, then by The New York Times, the Asahi Shimbun in Tokyo, and by radio and TV stations in Australia and throughout the U.S., culminating in a story on NBC Nightly News. Hundreds of other newspapers ran stories without interviews, based primarily on the Times article. I received dozens of phone calls, ranging from laudatory to actionably defamatory. A representative of the Wikimedia Foundation (www.wikipedia.org), the board that controls Wikipedia, stated that he agreed with the position taken by the Middlebury history department, noting that Wikipedia states in its guidelines that its contents are not suitable for academic citation, because Wikipedia is, like a print encyclopedia, a tertiary source. I repeated this information in all my subsequent interviews, but clearly the publication of the department’s policy had hit a nerve, and many news outlets implied, erroneously, that the department was at war with Wikipedia itself, rather than with the uses to which students were putting it.

The key context here is that Wikipedia was (and still is, I believe) disallowed in a specific context, not that Middlebury was trying to prevent its students from seeing that historical interpretations are debated and argued about.

As Waters notes:

If [the goal] is to make Wikipedia a truly authoritative source, suitable for citation, it cannot be done for any general tertiary source, including the Encyclopaedia Britannica. . . . If the goal is more modest—to make Wikipedia more reliable than it is—then it seems to me that any changes must come at the expense of its open-source nature. Some sort of accountability for editors, as well as for the originators of entries, would be a first step, and that, I think, means that editors must leave a record of their real names. A more rigorous fact-checking system might help, but are there enough volunteers to cover 1.6 million entries, or would checking be in effect reserved for popular entries?

In other words, Waters isn’t an ivory tower academic, refusing to cede authority over knowledge to the great unwashed, but a practical educator trying to help his students develop critical thinking skills. (Though I think he has missed out on notion that wikipedia’s governance is also evolving – it isn’t stuck in one model but constantly looking at the right balance of controls versus openness, and how changes on those levers affect the quality and quantity of entries on the site.)

There’s a place for detailed primary and secondary research, and a place for general tertiary sources – and learning that difference seems like a good thing for students and conference presenters to do.

Two recent videos stood out as worth sharing. Both focus on creative visualization, and are inspiring in terms of how some relatively simply changes in visual display of information can have a tremendous impact.

The first is from TED Talks, and it’s Jonathan Harris talking about “The Web’s Secret Stories“:

You can view We Feel Fine and play with it yourself – but I’ll warn you it is ponderously slow on my Linux machine – much more engaging in Windows or Mac OS.

It’s also open – at least in the “here’s an API, go mash up something cool” sense. (Free as in beer and free as in API but not as in Free software – Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike).

I wish I could spend a week just playing with what this API makes available, maybe using Yahoo! pipes to connect feelings to news stories about locations?

The second is from OSCON, and it’s Ben Fry talking about Processing, a design and prototyping tool:

Click To Play

Processing is Open Source – GPL/LGPL – so you can not only try it out and see what goodness you can make, you can also contribute to its development.

I find it nearly impossible after watching these to go back to standard office docs – but I think that’s a good thing.

I finally got time to watch it on the train on the way to New York last week. It was well worth the wait, and I’d really encourage you to go watch it if you’re interested in social networks or youth culture in the U.S. Danah got a lot of press earlier this year for her post/essay on social class issues in MySpace and Facebook, to some of which she’s also written a response.

Fast forward through all the room introductions (sorry to those who were in the room, but I don’t think that makes for interesting viewing to one who wasn’t there) and get to the core of the discussion.

Here are my quick notes on the bits I found most interesting – these are really more like raw search engine terms that will hopefully connect people to the video than cohesive notes (see also Ethan Zuckerman’s much more complete notes):
–

What Web 2.0 is really about is the shift from a sociality organized around topics toward a sociality organized around friendships / relationships – people who I know.

Early adopters of social network sites were self-defined geeks, freaks, and queers. Tech savvy youth, alternative youth seeking places to gather without prejudice.

Friendster became more mainstream quickly – which drove out fringe users. Friendster went about trying to make people behave by canceling accounts. But not all the users wanted to play by the rules – fakesters existed for good reason – ie, the Harvard U fakester (this was before you could identify groups — the Harvard U fakester profile was used to connect people in an ad hoc group). They killed people who were playing around, but in the process they killed lots of good profiles too.

MySpace – planned as a Friendster clone, but more loose with rules. Indie Rock folks were targeted as an audience, in part because they had been kicked off Friendster. Some of the key features that are still on MySpace came from this era – the individual profile URL for example. http://myspace.com/bandname. The first set of users were musically inclined – tracking bands. First emergence of code in MySpace forums – MySpace knew within 24hrs of it occuring that people were pasting html and javascript in the forums but chose to allow it. “Copy/paste literacy” – someone else’s term. Leads to some interesting stuff, since people didn’t really know what they were copying and pasting.

danah’s using “social network” site as opposed to “social networking” – focus on a place where people write into being their social network – not use it to meet new people.

Basic characteristics of Social Network sites:

• -Profile (inherited from dating sites)
• Friends (not the same as friends in the offline world)
• Public comments (saying things very publically about other people) – started as testimonials on Friendster but got turned into communicative space. (Table salt and pepper fakesters writing to each other). (66% of comments on Facebook are on the wall, not via private messages)

How are network publics different than the kinds of publics “we” grew up with:

1. They’re Persistent. They stick around.
2. They’re Searchable. You can find things. So can your parents.
3. They Offer Replicability – copy and paste from one space to another. Negroponte’s digital bits come to life. This is one of the best ways to bully – copy and paste conversation from IM and edit.
4. They Have Invisible audiences – you don’t know who is watching. These are mediated spaces.

It’s a question of context. Context sets expectations (formal and informal). Context used to come from topic – socialization on usenet of what is ontopic and offtopic. Example alt.tasteless and cat recipes, cat shaving, cat skinning, etc. By the time the boom was over, there is no more “like minds effect” on the internet and conflict is certain.

Joshua M – No Sense of Place – Stoky Carmichael and the issue of how to go on TV – how could he speak a neutral voice? He chose, and ever since we think of black power as anti-white.

This generation in growing up with celebrity style publics – where everyone can be famous among 15 people, but now know which 15.

Depression era – Labor Unions, Compulsory education at High School level (14-18) gets created, in part as a way of keeping laborers out of the workplace. Keep kids away from labor organizers and out of the workplace – leads to age segregation. This is also where a new kind of bullying occurs because of the lack of older folk. “Teenager” itself is a 1941 creation.

(In some ways the whole pedophilia issue is about the anxiety of teenagers knowing adults – why is this such a megatopic right now?)

Children’s Society in Britain is tracking this issue of fear – no real correspondence in the US.

Playdates – one version of the kind of control now being exercised.

Young People are turning to these network publics in part because they have no actual public to go to.

Why do people write public comments? In large part because the defaults are public. But also because there is a visibility issue – you need to be seen commenting, you get replies, etc.

On MySpace, to get rid of comments, they just delete the person, which deletes their comments.

The difference between the profile with 30 friends versus 900 friends is a question of what imagined audience is. Facebook’s “private” setting means just my friends – which is not admissions officers and law enforcement.

There are two audiences youth don’t want:

1. People with direct power over them.
2. People who want to prey on them – the more realistic fear here is less sexual predators than spammers and marketers.

How do they avoid them?

• - Artificial walls / lies.
• Demand the way the world should be – get out. No mom’s allowed, etc. This is where the “public” gets difficult – we want to be public but only to people like us, not to parents or teachers.
• Ostrich. Pretend that if we can’t see the invisible audience they don’t exist.

This is the way they have to socialize – it isn’t necessarily the most optimal way, but often the only accessible way.

Cellphones – totally locked down – this is interesting because users prefer the online social network because those aren’t locked down. Email is for talking to parents.

One of the reasons social networks outside the US are more profile oriented – because here we pay to recieve SMS – elsewhere people use SMS to communicate and the network just for the profile.

—

Ethan – one of the analogies you use is the Mall – which is part public but also very private – which makes them interesting legal cases. But all these social network sites are similarly partially public and owned by private companies. Do the youth your studying care? Are they aware of that commercialization?

db – I wish. It’s actually very accepted. “If its got ads on it it will be free forever” They are so used to being blasted by ads they don’t think twice about it.

Class dynamics on MySpace/Facebook – working class, marginalized kids (freaks, music kids, etc) are on mysapce – college-bound, “good” kids are on Facebook – this plays out in part between different schools, between different neighborhoods in schools, etc. The military banned MySpace but not Facebook – they banned what soldiers are using not what officers are using. REcruitment is done via myspace – and youth talking bad abotu the war may be what’s behind that block.

Cultural aesthetics – facebook seems less commercial because it looks modern and controlled, as opposed to myspace’s wackiness. MySpace is still about bling – and it is ok for the ads to match that aesthetic.

The difference between having Tommy Hilfinger written across it and knowing what a Prada bag is.

The youth don’t know a public that is not commercial.

—

What is this evolving into?

db – the tech industry is obsessed with Web 3.0, and immersion, and 2nd life and WOW.

I think the next level will be mobile. I think the question is can we do it – given the way mobile is structured in the US.

Growth and fragmentation cycle – investors require infinite growth but that doesn’t necessarily match what is best for the community.

Facebook is gaining the older audience but losing the younger audience. They ran into this even when college students were upset that they added high school students.

Cluster effects – you need entire groups to participate. Not everyone created their own sites – people share passwords and check each others messages, and play with each other – they don’t want secure “my site, my password” stuff. People create profiles for their friends who can’t or don’t.

–

What about youth subcultures who *are* reacting negatively to the commercialism of the culture? What about networks that are using these technologies to organize against this? Other possibilities exist.

I’ve been working on this as well – on the edges – in order to look at what is next you need to look at the edges not the center.

db – I’m just not seeing it among high school students – I wish that I was, but I’m not.

What about the possibilities of temporary autonomous zones – there is power in these.

db – but people build social cues into these environments. WoW is one of the few exceptions where guilds for example are age diverse. Otherwise people are signaling their age / class / gender / race in all kinds of ways.

The challenge is that what is at teh edges is not what becomes mainstream – things get modified on their way to the mainstream and lose imuch of their edge in the process.

Kids are told that all adult strangers are bad and evil. Kids are afaird to talk to me, even though I’ve got berkely.edu all over. I don’t know how to break that in the online world.

—

The adults are just not doing a good job navigating the future for you – you need to become the navigators for them. Hawaiin political movement – charting hawaii’s future.

–

What about Gender?

db – It’s amazing how many of the boy’s profiles were created by their girlfiends in part in order to be the first in the top eight. None of it is really surprising which is why I haven’t written much of it up.

Boys are much more likely to collect strangers, more likely to friend porn divas, etc.

Homophilly? (Birds of a feather stick together) – Homophilia? It is clear that people are more likely to meet people that are like them – the more you have in common the more likely you are to become better friends.

Interaction with people unlike you – social network sites are helping reinforce this, but it is the absence of real public experiementation in the first place. We’re losing that across the board not just in social networks. In fact social networks *may* enable more interaction in unexpected ways.

Pew research – the 7% who are not online, 75% of them don’t want to be online.

—

Parent info sharing – this is really being driven by 30s parents having kids later. I’m not seeing real activity among teen parents that is different than other teens use. Not really seeing a teen parents group rising up.

—

So what do we do?

db – well, for one thing there is the defensive – bills to ban these sites in congress in various forms.

Education – help people get literate about how to use these sites and how to manage them. Innuit morality play – how would you feel it? Why do x rather than y?

In terms of law, the number one request is to stay away – so much of the legal intervention is around sexual predators – if we’re going to do something let’s actually enforce the laws about sexual predators rather than talking about the danger.

We need digital street outreach – the equivalent of clean needles and condoms distributed to youth.

IT would be great to have a street outreach online – people just hanging out talking to kids at risk looking for attention (but this runs up against the stranger danger problem in that youth won’t talk to adults).

Ethan – the bingo for today is Paris Hilton, Needle exchange, and Jerry Fallwell.

–

danah’s also become a Berkman Fellow for the 2007/2008 school year, so hopefully we’ll get more opportunities to follow her research.

On Friday, Ethan Zuckerman posted The 5-4-3 double play, or “The Art of Conference Blogging”, including an extensive set of tips on how to do blog from conferences more effectively. As one might expect, it’s a comprehensive list that makes me realize just how underprepared I’ve been in the times I’ve tried to do it.

The highlights:

• The kit: I come to conferences with my beloved Mac, two charged batteries, a power strip, a digital camera and cables, granola bars and a lap desk. . . .
• The location: Bloggers rarely sit in the front row to blog conferences. . . . It’s usually better to sit to a side, near the power plugs. . . .
• Preparation: Conferences usually give you a speaker program ahead of time. Use it. Over breakfast before the day of a conference, I’ll type the names of each speaker and their talk title into a text file. If I’m really good, I’ll do quick Google searches on each of them and link their names to their blogs, research institutions, arrest records, etc. Prepare sufficiently and you’ve got the first paragraph of each post written ahead of time.
• Macros: . . . This is a way of storing pieces of text that you use frequently and linking them to key combinations. . . . Even if you’re composing online, within your blogging platform, or if you don’t feel comfortable setting up macros, it can be a big help to put some useful snippets of text in a text file and cut and paste them into blogposts.
• Keeping Up: I have a hard and fast rule for myself – I complete posts on a conference session within fifteen minutes of the end of that session. . . .
• Hard Talks: . . . Experienced speakers are easy to blog – they follow a narrative path through their talks, speak at a pace the audience can understand, emphasize key points with visuals. . . . It’s much harder to blog inexperienced speakers. . . .
• Use your commenters: Because I’m blogging ten or more talks a day, I get things wrong. Sometimes I get things egregiously wrong. Comments allow other attendees – and sometimes the speakers themselves – to correct me. . . .
• Collaborate: . . . My goal in blogging a conference is not to be the sole, authoritative voice of the blogosphere. It’s to do what I enjoy doing: writing detailed summaries of each sessions. . . . It’s a whole lot more fun to blog these events in groups, even if that means sitting next to someone trying to liveblog at the same time as you are, arguing about how to spell a word the speaker has just uttered.
• Digest: I go to conferences because they give me a wealth of new ideas to wrestle with, sometimes for weeks or months to come. . . . So that I have a chance to wrestle with the big ideas, I’ll often try to write a summary or reactions post a week after a conference. . . .
• Have Fun: Not everyone enjoys blogging at conferences. I have many friends who’ve tried it and discovered that it stresses them out or detracts from their enjoyment. There’s an easy solution to this: don’t do it. Most people don’t keep score at baseball games. That’s okay, as there’s an official scorekeeper, a scoreboard and at least one journalist in the stands. We don’t need everyone to become a conference liveblogger – just a few more of us.

Although I’m reading these points after OSCON, not before it, I think my approach was much closer to what Zuckerman describes than my own previous liveblogging from Enterprise 2.0.

In a few sessions I took some live notes (see posts tagged OSCON), but in most sessions I just felt like trying to liveblog was getting in the way of enjoyment for me. I posted a few key notes to twitter (as when the OSI announced approval of the CPAL) but didn’t try to keep up with any of the other OSCON twitterers in terms of detail or frequency.

But I did have fun.

Look for some digest / summary / follow up posts over the next few months.

Head over to GetMiro and download the Public Preview 1 (v. 0.9.8) release.

Miro is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and pre-packaged for a number of Linux distros (Fedora, Ubuntu, with Debian and Gentoo coming soon) as well as source code for the true DIY.

Miro lets you:

• Play virtually any video file, across different platforms
• Download and play full screen, high definition video
• Subscribe to video podcasts, video blogs, any rss feed with enclosures
• Locate new video content using the Miro channel guide
• Download videos from YouTube, DailyMotion, Google Video and others
• Download BitTorrent videos and watch them in the same application

Miro’s based on the Mozilla XULRunner framework, and is an excellent example of cross-platform, non-proprietary alternative approach to taking Internet-based applications beyond the browser context, without losing the open, standards based approach that made the web successful in the first place.

Deborah Weil has been around the block a couple of times and she must have known when GlaxoSmithKline’s agency approached her to consult on a new flog for its Alli weight-loss product that it was a dishonest, insincere attempt to cash in on the social media craze and that the parameters set for it doomed it to failure.

He’s referring to Weil’s post where she requested of her readers:

head on over to GlaxoSmithKline’s official corporate blog for alli, the first FDA approved, OTC (over the counter) weight loss product. Take a peek and, if you’re inspired, leave a Comment.

She also, to be clear, disclosed the relationship:

Full disclosure: I’m working with GSK on the blog. And this was my idea to ask for Comments.

However, as Kevin Dugan points out in the comments, the email version of the post included the sentence “No need
to say that you know me, of course.” See also Weil’s followup post: Using the backchannel of email to invite Comments on your blog.

While I’m not sure that Bowles’ personal attacks at Weil and her “inexplicably popular” blog help his argument, and alliconnect doesn’t fit my definition of a flog (since it declares directly it is written by GSK folks), the core of the issue is the extent to which traditional PR and Marketing techniques are conflicting with next generation Internet conversations. On this, I think Bowles is right on:

Many companies still don’t get it. To them, social media represent just one more set of marketing tools to sell more stuff. They believe they can have it both ways–control the message AND build relationships of trust with potential customers. They are wrong and, when engaged to provide advice, communications professionals who understand the new realities have a obligation to tell them so.

Echoing the question Weil asked, is it acceptable to use email (what Weil calls the backchannel of the blogosphere) to suggest to people you know that they visit your own blog, or the blog of a client, and leave comments?

I’ve certainly emailed folks I know and asked them to check out the Optaros Enterprise Open Source Directory – and encouraged them to leave feedback. When I’ve written a blog post or a white paper I’m proud of, I’ve emailed popular sites and asked them to check it out – for example, when Ajaxian.com “picked up” this post, that was at least in part because I had emailed them directly, telling them about the post.

I’d argue that part of the launch campaign for any new service or site these days should include a “market to the influencers” component, which includes plans for how to get influential bloggers early access to the invite-only beta.

Is the difference that Weil was encouraging traffic to a corporate blog. rather than her own? Is it that she suggested, albeit lightly, that they not disclose their relationship to her, despite the fact that she consulted with GSK on the blog?

(See for example Dennis Howlett’s Holy Crap!, which cites the product itself as one of the issues, and Weil’s suggestion not to disclose as another).

Is the real problem the fact that GSK is abusing the blog concept? Bowles argues:

You can’t have a successful conversation when personal anecdotes and negative comments are banned and the few comments that are left are so obviously scripted and uninspiring.

What if Weil had suggested explicitly that people visit the Alli blog and leave comments positive or negative? What if she had suggested that they disclose directly that there were doing so in response to her invitation for comments? What if that invitation for comments had been posted directly on the blog in question?

(In addition to disclosing the relationship on her blog, she is listed as a contributor on the Alli blog)

If I posted on the EOS Blog and then came here and asked you all to comment on it, would that be a conflict of interest, or effective marketing?

Ultimately, I’m as concerned about astroturf and bad corporate-pr-blogs as anyone else, but the issue comes down to whether authentic and transparent conversation is being had at the site in question, not whether people were encouraged to go there.

(For some real, unfiltered, and clear feedback about Alli check out: alli: miracle diet pill with teeny tiny side effect and Laugh? I nearly shit my pants. I wonder if the Angry Aussie has tried posting comments on the alli blog).

Andy Peatling at Blaze New Media posted about a recent project: Chickspeak, a social network for female college students.

In their words, it’s is “an organization for young women created to inspire big dreams, strong values and success in the world”:

Our website exists to be the most entertaining and engaging reflection of women’s life in college, while also providing the support and information necessary to stay healthy, grounded and achieve great heights while in school and well after graduation. We are your voice- your interests and passions, your unique journey and experiences. Updated daily articles are written by women currently in college and cover everything from health and beauty, to relationships, travel, entertainment and much more. We also feature guest writers and columnists who are recognized experts in their fields and who act as advisors to our members. Members can post comments on articles and build relationships with other members and the ChickSpeak Team through forums, personal blogs and private messaging. We are an evolving concept and welcome any woman who’s excited about this to get involved!

What’s most interesting about it for me (not being a femail college student) is how it was built – leveraging WordPress MU as the core, changing the theme to de-emphasize the “blog” functionality and bring member profiles front and center.

From Andy’s blog post:

To achieve the desired change it was down to making a new WordPress theme. The theme would have exactly the same look and feel as the core site – making it look like the new member home page was still part of the core site itself.

Within the theme, I removed the code that usually makes the blog posts front and center, and changed it to the code that outputs the users profile. The blog code was moved to the sidebar so it could still be accessed as the members “journal” feature.

Finally, the code to output the users new private messages was added to the sidebar, as well as some code to output polls, photos and other smaller bits and bobs.

The project also incorporates BBPress for forums / discussions, has links into myspace and flickr, and so on, as you might expect from a social network circa 2007. (The facebook app can’t be far behind, if they don’t have one already.)

In one tab, Andrew McAfee arguing that sometimes “It’s not not about the technology”

In the other, Jeff Jarvis arguing that “Towns are hyperlocal social networks with data (people that is)”

At first glance this might seem like a debate waiting to happen: McAfee arguing that he’s growing weary of hearing people say “It’s Not About the Technology” and Jarvis saying “It’s Not About the Technology.” But if you look at what both are actually saying, a synthesis makes more sense.

Thesis, McAfee. He points to the cliche “It’s not about the technology” and explains how in some contexts that perspective can be dangerous:

This perspective is dangerous because it essentially denies two important facts: that technologies can differ from each other in salient ways, and that they can change over time. Losing sight of either of these can lead to confusion, or worse. . . .

INATT, version 2, also encourages the view that there’s nothing new under the sun — that one generation of technology aimed at addressing a business problem is the same as all other generations. So (for example) we need to collaborate and share knowledge better, but it’s not about the technology. We’ve been disappointed with our past results in these areas for reasons that have nothing to do with the technologies we were using, and there’s nothing about any new technologies that give us better chances of success now.

This sense of INATT is pessimistic and self-defeating, even if it’s not intended to be. It denies that there can be improvements, incremental or radical, in the ability of technologies to accomplish important goals. I disagree categorically with this. . . .

Sometimes, at least in part, it is about the technology.

Antithesis, Jarvis: He returns to the discussion of hyperlocal online, and argues that, for those trying to deliver hyperlocal:

Local is people. Our job is not to deliver content or a product. Our job is to help them make connections with information and each other.

. . . I’m not suggesting that hyperlocal is just a social networking tool. Or just a forum. Or just a bunch of blogs. Or just a listings tool. Or just a search engine. Or just a news site. It needs to end up being all those things and more. And as I said the other day, this will not happen in one place, on one site, but will be distributed across wherever people are being people and communities communities, locally. The trick, once more, is to organize it all. Elegantly.

Synthesis: Those trying to deliver hyperlocal solutions need to recognize the social connectivity already in place within communities, and orient themselves not around content delivery or product delivery, but around facilitating connections between people, and providing elegant organization. Applying the right sets of technologies in the right ways is what will make this possible in new, innovative, and potentially revolutionary ways.

They discuss a project Optaros did with Swisscom Hospitality Services as an example of the impact next generation Internet applications can have customer interactions, as well as how we think such applications are most effectively delivered.

The presentations from the webinar are now available:

• David Douek, Product Management, Swisscom Hospitality Services: Swisscom Hospitality Services Room 2.0 (Case Study) (pdf|899.27 kB)
• Joel Gardet, Project Manager, Optaros: What it means to assemble next generation internet applications (OptAM) (pdf|4.05 MB)
• Bruno Von Rotz, VP Strategy & Research, Optaros: The Evolution of the online customer communication and interaction (pdf|3.46 MB)

Hyperlocal will not, I firmly believe, happen at one site. It will work only via networks: content, commercial, social. It will work by gathering, not producing.

In other words, hyperlocal efforts must be based on content aggregation and syndication models, not just content creation models. We need flexible networks for connecting together content producers, advertisers (funding sources), and content publishers.

Jarvis also points to Paul Fahri’s “Rolling the Dice” in the AJR, which asks “is there a real business in this kind of business?,” and answers that “the field as a whole is so far financially marginal.”

The problem is that Fahri’s approach looks at it from the point of view of individual sites, not networks of sites. Jarvis argues:

we will need a combination of models and platforms: Newspapers will have local sites. Local bloggers will do their own thing. There is a need for group sites like Backfence or GoSkokie, which helped inspire it, where people can contribute. There is a need to organize all this; I hope Outside.in can do that (disclosure: I’m an adviser). There is a need to support all this financially; that is where newspapers can play a crucial role, setting up ad networks and infrastructure. And then we still need to see what will motivate people to contribute what they know: money, ego, influence, what? And we need to see what help people need: technology, attention, training, support.

I registered for and took a look around outside.in, which Jarvis mentions, but they don’t seem to have made up into my neck of the woods (01950). There was only one story, which was a Boston.com story about their Metro North edition. (Which means it was applicable, but very broadly to the whole North Shore- certainly not hyperlocal).

There’s a better, organic local site at Newburyport 01950 – but there doesn’t seem to be any way to tell Outside.in that, except to link to specific stories.

What’s the best hyperlocal site where you are?

How can for-profit newspapers learn to work with local information sources (professional, amateur, and everything in between) in a way that enriches both?

Can’t we imagine a business model for a network which is sustainable across the network rather than focused on profit making at a single site?

Licensing through things like Creative Commons is also part of the picture – enabling legitimate, stable content reuse with attribution and rights control.

Another missing piece is a solution the global ID problem – I had to create yet another account at outside.in just to be able to point other 01950 interested folks to the Newburyport River Fest this weekend. Will I ever use that account again?

Dopplr (named after Christian Doppler but with the obligatory missing-vowel-of-web-2.0) allows you to share travel information with others.

You enter your basic profile information, including home city, and then add trips. Adding a trip means providing a destination, start date, end date, and optional note.

Once you’ve added some trips, Dopplr shows them to you in a iist or as a map:

But where it really gets interesting is that you can choose to share your trips with other people – and they can share their trips with you. (Dopplr calls those folks “Fellow Travellers” – does that have no political baggage in the UK?)

This enables Dopplr to tell me, for example, that Dave Gynn and I will both be in Portland the week of OSCON. Actually that’s a bad example, as I already knew that. But as the network grows in size and breadth, Dopplr can tell me when people I know are visiting my home city, when I am in their home city, or when both of us are in some third location.

Right now the network is still building, as they are in invite-only beta. The facebook app should help build the network of users, and each new user gets 10 invites to send to those they want to share trips with.

A few wishlist items that Dopplr doesn’t do well today:

• Handle times of arrival and departure. If I’m arriving in NY at 10pm and someone else is departing at 10am, it’s hardly likely we’ll connect. You can work around this by using the notes field, but I think these should be (optional) structured data.
• Handle multi-leg trips explicitly. The Dopplr data entry screen seems to assume round trip. You get just a start date and an end date. You can string together multiple legs of a journey, but there’s no way I can see to indicate continuing on.
• Import itineraries. I’d love to see Dopplr import itineraries from major sites – either leveraging the “email this itinerary to someone” that most airlines provide today or accepting ical/outlook files. There’s no reason for me to enter this data – there ought to be a universal format for this stuff.
• More granular settings for home cities. I live in Newburyport MA and work in Boston. But I live closer to Portsmouth NH. So I set my home city to Boston since it seems the most relevant to what I am interested in – but why shouldn’t I be able to watch other cities? Or let people know that I’m not actually in Boston itself.
• Let me input past data. I’d love to see, for example, all my 2006 travel, or H1 of 2006 against H1 of 2007.
• Offer more visualizations. What would happen if there were a Many Eyes like system for Dopplr data – my own, or even the aggregate travel of all users, or all users in my network? Might result in some unexpected discoveries.

That said, however, the site has the necessary functionality already in place today to be useful.

I’ve still got a few invites, so let me know if you’re interested in trying it out.

Tapscott

Happy to be here. Flew in late last night – but hey, sleep is overrated.

I totally believe there are fundamential shifts underway: from closed hierarchy to the open networked enterprise.

(Which is from my 1992 book – paradigm shift).

We started, in response to some of my debates with Nick Carr, a syndicated project: “Winning with the Enterprise 2.0″ – one of the summary reports has been made available on the enterprise 2.0 conference site.

Four drivers for change:

1. Web 2.0
2. The Net Generation
3. The Social Revolution
4. The Economic Revolution

Old web was html, new web is xml.

Kids who have grown up net enabled – see Growing up Digital – it isn’t even technology to them, it is like air. Baby boom echo. Instead of a generation gap we have a generation lap.

World Conference of IT panel last year – video at www.newparadigm.com.

Four startling new principles for running a company:

1. Peering
2. Being Open
3. Sharing
4. Acting Globally

What are the new business models for future:

1. Peer pioneers – Linux, MySQL, but also in financial services
2. Ideagoras – like Innocentive Network
3. Prosumers
4. The New Alexandrians: The Sharing of Science
5. Open Platforms and APIs
6. The Global Plant Floor (Mass Collaboration)
7. The Wiki Workplace

Final thought: This is a paradigm shift.

Paradigm shifts are almost always recieved with coolness if not worse. Those with vested interests will fight change. The shift demands such a different view of things that established leaders are often last to be won over.
(Marilyn Ferguson?)

The face of things to come – Sarah as a prototype of the new employee: uses flickr, pandora, facebook, youtube, “computer science and modern culture” major

What will the impact of the workplace in transition be?

The incoming generation thinks of social tools the way we (who you calling we?) think of email.

Web 2.0 – user participation, social networks, programmability, mashups

blending personas – workers are also consumers, the private network and the public network become more like each other – anywhere, anytime access.

Blurring the line between the workplace and the public web. We’re also producers and consumers at the same time.

THe web is changing:

Traditionally the web was a destination – one site. You knew where you needed to go.

In the web 2.0 world, the site is a community creation – you still need to know where you are going but it is more open and unmanaged and less structure.

In the p2p world, the network is the destination not the ste – all you need to know is what you are looking for. (Web 2.0 as a stepping point towards true p2p?)

Apple is largely solving the problem of DRM (did he just say that?)

much greater processing power in people’s hands (cameras, phones, camcorders, palmtops, etc)

Different markets for video which are converging – entertainment, business collaboration, and social networking. (These are traditional markets?)

Again, blurring the line between the social and the business.

Cisco has better luck than IBM getting the video to work (almost – just loses the last word).

Leveraging video for all three – entertainment, business collaboration and social networking.

Returns to the Network as the platform and the role of the Prosumer – consumers whose leverage of the technology exceeds many professionals. (Uses LonelyGirl15 as the example but doesn’t note she was professionally created).

Cisco also points to AppleTV as a new model for delivery of IPTV content. (What about TiVo, Joost, or for that matter, Democracy Player?)

Also uses surveillance as an example of the new video-based platform (baby monitor 2.0?).

All forms of media will use the Network as a platform. More and more intelligence is making its way into the network. Over time it will not just be an information network but an intelligent video network.

Final thoughts:

Web 2.0 is defined by users, and evolving every day.

Video is finally here, as an experimental medium – but the fastest growing medium in web 2.0

Executive Summary:

Enterprise 2.0 promises a new approach to creating, managing, and consuming knowledge within the enterprise, allowing patterns and value to emerge out of relatively freeform, experimental, unrestricted exchanges. Unlike knowledge management systems of the nineties, which locked users into strict taxonomies, enforced rigid workflows, and reflected hierarchical management relationships, emerging social computing systems rely on lightweight, adaptable frameworks designed to facilitate knowledge creation across traditional boundaries, enable rapid change, and foster contributions from throughout the management hierarchy.

This new knowledge management paradigm needs to be supported by new technologies and approaches. It isn’t, however, just a matter of selecting the right set of applications or the right platform; there is no “One True Architecture” which includes all the features and functions users could ever desire.

The paper goes on to talk about Drupal and Alfresco as core platforms on top of which Enterprise 2.0 solutions can be delivered.

I’ll be at Enterprise 2.0 for the next few days – attending sessions (and blogging what I can) and at the Optaros booth during the demo pavilion hours.

Stop by and say hello!

I kicked off my Enterprise 2.0 experience this morning by attending the much ballyhood “smackdown” between Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee and Babson professor Tom Davenport (see Davenport v. McAfee update or the coverage on Social Computing Magazine).

I’m not much of a live blogger, but here’s my raw notes from the debate – which turned out, as such debates often do, to be more filled with violent agreement and relatively nuanced distinctions between positions than it was with rancor or hostility. (It never fails when both participants are reasonable, articulate, intelligent folks).

The debate was moderated by Dan Farber, webcast live on Veodia (no archive available yet so far as I know), and sponsored by BSG Alliance.

(In what follows, DF = Dan Farber, AM = Andrew McAfee, TD = Tom Davenport, and E2 = Enterprise 2.0 – note these are very quick notes, not a transcript, so errors will occur).

DF: Tom, why is E2 the next small thing?

TD: I have yet to see capitalist organizations make more money as a result of E2, or any examples of corporate cultures being revolutionized. I see no problem with the definition of using web 2.0 technology in enterprises, but that begs the question of what web 2.0 is. What I have a problem with is the idea that E2 represents a whole new style of enterprise – given that we’ve had enterprises for thousands of years. I’m an agnostic, not an atheist on this.

AM: On that we actually agree. I’m fairly sure that it will not be trans formative for many enterprises. There is, however, a real discontinuity from a technology perspective – the technology is capable of so much more than it was previously. It’s the fact that anyone can contribute to it – from anywhere in the organization – and the wisdom that comes out of the collective pattern which emerges which is the new thing. Free form, emergent, without structure added in at design time.

AM: These new technologies really have the potential to address some deep needs in enterprises. We don’t have good means to allow our people to collaborate or find each other. If someone did the same project last year in another division, how do I enable teams to find out that info?

DF: Will this all get assimilated into SAP and Oracle, or will the myspace / myblog / mywiki approach overtake the system?

TD: I’m not sure how much of an incremental functionality improvement blogs and wikis provide. Some of the emergent tools are interesting approaches, but they aren’t that fundamentally different that MS Sharepoint (I don’t know if this has been encased in the E2.0 hegemony yet) has for some time. It isn’t terribly exciting, but I bet more people are using Sharepoint today than blogs/wikis.

DF: True, but there is a pretty big cost difference between Sharepoint and what many startups offer today.

DF: Tom – you’ve said I’f I’m being launched into space, do I want to trust the democratic process?

TD: There’s a place for the democratic process – but that place is not everywhere. There are two kinds of Knowledge Management: Convergent and Divergent (per the late lamented Aurther Anderson).

AM: If I were at the top of a rocket, I would want to know that everyone in NASA who had an issue with the launch had been given an opportunity to raise and discuss their objections – this is exactly what they did not have in the challenger disaster. Overly formal approval processes can be in the way. We don’t rely solely on what’s in the wiki – but it offers useful supplement to official knowledge.

TD: All the wikis in the world would not have prevent the disasters you mention – technology by itself won’t solve these problems. (The people running the program could have ignored those just as well).

DF: If the opposite of imposed structure is emergent structure, what does that look like? Is this just an HBS thing?

TD: The Kremlin on the Charles, as they call it [HBS]

AM: It’s going to take enlightened leadership – people at the top who allow and enable information to rise to the top. Leader versus a Bureaucrat.

DF: You’ve also said that the tools of E2.0 are not good for empire builders – but isn’t that what enterprises do?

AM: Leaders want to build empires in the market – bureaucrats want to build turf in their organization.

TD: I am for democratizing organizations – I think it is unrealistic to expect that those holding power in enterprises will just give it over to emergent structures.

AM: I agree – but if the people who are senior enough in the organization get it, they will want this information to bubble up. One use is for private equty / buy out firms – I’d want a place where everyone can talk about what’s wrong.

DF: Is there any proof that this is enabling true changes?

AM: No. But how many technologies can we really do this for. IT is a leap of faith. But that doesn’t stop us from spending millions/billions of dollars on IT.

TD: I’d agree there isn’t much measurable benefit – that’s part of my concern with the revolutionary fervor in this space. My focus is now on analytics, and I can point to real examples – P&G, Harrah’s – they are seeing real benefits from applying this technology.

AM: But we’ve been doing analytics forever.

TD. Well, take Search, Links, Authoring, Tags, and Extensions – all of these have been around for some time as well.

AM: Tagging? Social, emergent, metadata – that’s clearly new.

TD: Well tagging is an old thing – but the way you’ve described it. So maybe some of this stuff is new – but not all of it. How long have these technologies been around.

AM: True, but not combined in this way – innovation is not just invention.

TD: One of the interesting things about e2 is that stuff keep getting added – predictive markets, for example, aren’t really in SLATES and aren’t really emergent. The definition is stretching.

AM: Predictive markets – this is a fascinating technology. Even if you don’t have a large set of active traders or high volume of trades – these turn out bizarrely accurate predictive. They are self-organizing, egalitarian. They generally trade anonymously.

DF: What about the emergent audience for these technologies? What impact will the new generation(s) entering the workforce have on adoption of E2 technologies?

AM: The short answer is we don’t know, but I think the impact of the new audience will be large. I feel about a quarter step ahead of my MBAs – these are folks generally who graduated from college in 2001 – which is around the time many of the web2.0 properties emerged.

DF: Tom, will that have an impact?

TD: I would like to think that they will. We really don’t know. Lots of people using Facebook, but what are they using it for? They will be used, but I think more for social purposes than for business purposes.

AM: Why does that have to be a bright line, though? Collaboration borders on social activity. The story of the facebook demo at a recent conference at Harvard – the organizers asked the presenter to explain the difference between how he uses facebook for school versus for social activity – he didn’t see the difference.

DF: Is the problem that these tools aren’t enterprise ready, in terms of security and privacy?

AM: Somewhat true, but in fact many of these tools do – Facebook has the sliders for privacy. The Defense Information Agency is using this stuff.

TD: I was there, and talked to them – he said they’re just trying to get to the point where they can email each other. The predictive markets idea for terrorist intelligence were a good idea.

AM: The agencies technology environments are so deeply disconnected – it is unrealistic that they are just going to turn on a wiki – I think they will find new ways to use these technologies in the context of defense.

TD: I would be happy to see it, but the organizational bureaucracies will get in the way.

DF: How do external forces (litigation, discovery) affect these technologies?

AM: I started my investigation at an investment bank. I can’t imagine any organization with deeper needs for Chinese walls, and siloed info. The response was that these tools are the best defense – transparency is your friend ultimately. If I can show why a problem happened, when it happened, what we did about it, etc – what the prosecutors are after is a pattern of deliberately ignoring such info.

DF: What about blogs and using blogs to help employees contribute?

TD: There were already lots of vehicles for this.

DF: The suggestion box?

TD: My only issue with blogs – I think they are well suited for dealing with opinions – I don’t think we all have time to read them all – do you have to deal with every suggestion?

AM: I don’t read blogs either – I assemble a set of queries and RSS feeds – that’s the difference. We’ve got lots of corporate communication infrastructure but how many of us actually use them? Instead, I get filtered, updated, information based on topics I choose.

DF: What about mining collective intelligence?

TD: Also not a new idea. People have been trying to mine collective intelligence certainly throughout my career.

DF: But aren’t there tools that make it easier to mine that knowledge?

TD: I don’t think it gets easier just because we can make more of it.

AM: Yes, it does get easier – the tools make it easier. You can have an internal digg or a google search that helps the good content emerge.

TD: But popularity doesn’t mean profundity.

AM: Do you find what you’re looking for when you use google?

TD: Google isn’t just popularity (link rank) it is also tag match and others, and it evolves.

AM: Most would say link rank is the heart. Popularity doesn’t equal profundity, but it ain’t bad.

DF: What about extended profile based tools, which help employees find each other by interests?

TD: These also are not new.

AM: I agree the tools aren’t new, but they are easier to use. They also are more emergent – let people choose the terms they use to describe themselves, rather than choosing from a corporate hierarchy – picking from drop downs doesn’t work.

TD: But the tradeoff is some kind of accepted set of terms that will encourage discoverability – if I call myself an Enterprise 2.0 expert, and someone looks for Web 2.0 – they aren’t going to find me.

AM: What’s interesting is how quickly a folksonomy emerges – very soon a hierarchy emerges.

Q from Audience: What about the “entertainmentization” of the Web. If I search for a hotel in paris I get more about Paris Hilton. There are more fools in the world than intelligent well meaning people. Maybe the web is getting dumbed down?

TD: Quality in our culture just keeps going down and down and I don’t know what we can do about it.

AM: I don’t have that same model in which there is an army of marching morons and an elite cadre marching up front – I think the web gets better as more people use it.

TD: Marching morons is not my world view either. Just to be clear.

Q: How does an organization create an E2 culture?

TD: You could use technologies that were out 10 years ago and have the same problem.

AM: But the difference in technology is not a small step forward but a big step forward. The need for it is quite high now. When I was first at Harvard Business School the dean told us “Trust your students” – If you can learn to trust your students, and you can watch the students learn from each other.

Q: Can either of you describe any companies that have done something notable in this space?

AM: I can’t give you an ROI number of any E2.0 companies. But I can tell you about organizations that are trying to open up, but are finding it a slow and difficult journey.

Q: Which companies?

AM: Technology firms first. Google, for example, has many ways to enable ideas to roll up. Honeywell has rolled out an e2 tagging environment. In many of the F500 you find wikis – but often in the software arm for a tech project. The hype cycle is ahead of the reality cycle – but it may not be ahead of the potential.

If you haven’t taken a look at the Democracy Player itself, you really should. Think of Democracy Player as an alternative to Joost : an open source, multi-platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux) video player and download client which can handle video podcasts / vodcasts as well as bit torrent downloads. It’s also open in terms of content, and the channels which can be made available. It is soon to be renamed to “Miro” – in anticipation of the 1.0 release.

As the project page explains, the Democracy Player is not only a better player for its users, but also better for the ecosystem of the internet:

Television is the most powerful medium in our culture, and it’s moving online. There’s a huge opportunity to hear new voices. But if video on the internet is dominated by just one or two huge video websites, we’re all in serious trouble. Openness, competition, and decentralization make the internet work. We need to ensure that online video has that same freedom.

Democracy Player keeps online video open by letting you connect to all of the big video hosting sites and thousands of independent publishers, all in one place. Don’t get locked in to one video host.

Accompanying the beta site, they’ve launched a blog, Behind the Scenes at CNN.com, where they are encouraging discussion of the redesign.

It’s a great concept – specifically highlighting what the team is trying to accomplish in the redesign, and going beyond the constraints of carefully chosen focus groups under NDAs for a far more transparent and open forum.

Not all the comments will be terribly valuable, of course; the first comment on the first post says in its entirety: “It’s too white. Not enough color. print is too small. Make it more colorful like USA Today. com or MSNBC.com.”

But when all the comments are taken together, they will undoubtedly get insights and guidance from their most vocal constituents which will help guide their evolution, and which they would only have received too late (or not at all) under the old “design and build under a cloud of secrecy, then reveal only when it is all complete” approach.

They’re also explicitly working on what Dermot Waters characterizes as “being a good web citizen” by pointing to local news sources and blog posts which are outside CNN’s domain.

The idea, which sounds almost self-evident but isn’t always well understood by online media sites, is that:

. . . by being a good web citizen, we fulfill our core mission by doing whatever it takes to help you get the full story — even if it takes you away from CNN.com. If we do that well, we believe you’ll keep coming back.

It will be interesting to watch the site (and the discussion about its goals and their fulfillment) evolve.

(In the interest of full disclosure, Turner Broadcasting is an Optaros client – but that doesn’t influence what I’ve said above except that I’ve had a chance to meet some of the folks behind the effort and know that they get it and mean what they say.)

I don’t normally blog here about projects Optaros has been involved in, but I think this article in the Current is too good to pass up sharing: “It’s public radio, but with nearly everything different, including the name”

It describes the new station/site (in which Optaros was involved) from Chicago Public Radio called :Vocalo.

There will be a website, but it would be wrong to say that it’s the station’s website. Really, it’s the website’s radio station.
The name, :Vocalo, is an invention, essentially “Vocal” with an “o” at the end. It rhymes with “Zocalo,” a Spanish word that in Mexico refers to a town plaza and in Colombia refers to the infrastructure that stabilizes a large building. The colon before the “V” is intentional — a trademarked emoticon.

The part that I think is most interesting is how involved the potential audience – not the current CPR audience, but the residents of the area the station could potentially serve – were in the process:

In eight focus groups, we gave special attention to the people who had, for various reasons, rejected us but were potential listeners—people who were committed to the area, who volunteered in the community, who follow the news and use radio. We asked them to listen to WBEZ for a week, keep diaries of what they thought, and meet for two-hour group conversations. Then we took questions that arose in the focus groups and surveyed listeners by mail.
These potential listeners were intensely interested in information and discussion about our shared place, the Chicago area. African-American, Latino and Asian-American non-listeners in our surveys and focus groups placed their highest value on local service. They sought it in our broadcast day and held it to high standards—not of production quality but of accuracy and relevance. They were highly critical of what they heard.

Taking the results of the listener (and non-listener) research, which the article sums up as “Nearly all felt the station was not for them – and was not trying to be inviting,” the CPR team went through a sustained and quite strategic effort to make honest changes – not just to rest on their traditional audience but to reconnect with their strategic mission.

One of the results of that work is the new site and station:

This new station will be built on community radio sensibilities but without the characteristic schedule of special-interest shows. In fact, it will have no shows at all. It will air a continuous, seamless talk-based stream completely devoted to Northwest Indiana and Chicago metropolitan area culture, issues and selected music.

It’s also available as an online stream, for those of us outside greater Chicagoland.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out over time as a format and as a concept – reclaiming public media by reconnecting it its core mission.

Involving your community in creating your product has lessons that go well beyond public radio, of course – we all have to be open to reimagining what it is we “do” and how it does or doesn’t meet the needs of current users and prospective users.