The second speaker at Beyon Broadcast 2007 was John Palfrey from the Berkman Center at Harvard Law.
He presented a mind map covering a set of topics, all around the question of whether participatory culture leads to participatory democracy.
I’ll try to reproduce some of the ideas here, but for best effect just watch the movie.
(Updated again: Jenkins’ own notes on his presentation are here: part one and part two
(Update: The recorded videos from the conference are now available).
Beyond Broadcast 2007 kicked off with a keynote by Henry Jenkins, which was by turns entertaining, upsetting, and thought provoking.
Much of the material was drawn from Convergence Culture in which:
Jenkins argues that the debate over convergence will redefine the face of American popular culture. Industry leaders see opportunities to direct content across many channels to increase revenue and broaden markets. At the same time, consumers envision a liberated public sphere, free of network controls, in a decentralized media environment. Sometimes corporate and grassroots efforts reinforce each other, creating closer, more rewarding relations between media producers and consumers. Sometimes these two forces are at war.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, as a sign of how good the talk was?) I was so busy paying attention most of what I got into my notes were the examples, rather than the questions Jenkins used them to raise – but I’ll try to recreate the as much as I can of the context and the argument here.
(Updates at the end)
In 2006, some of the interesting conversations at OSCON were around the relevancy of the open source definition when it came to software-as-a-service. Tim O’Reilly suggested open source licenses are obsolete, in the sense that “because their conditions are all triggered by the act of software distribution, they fail to apply to many of the most important types of software today, namely Web 2.0 applications and other forms of software as a service.”
Last week, in the context of preparing the session calendar for OSCON 2007, Nat Torkington asked “Is ‘Open Source’ Now Completely Meaningless?”
On the last full day of the IMA Public Media 2007 conference, there was a session on station experiments in social media, moderated by Jake Shaprio from Public Radio Exchange, and including:
Where there should be a solid opportunity to join the two, based on architectures of participation, authenticity, transparency, motives other than the profit, and a drive for relevance, instead there seems to be a significant reluctance, or mistrust, or perhaps just a time lag.
These panelists will talk about what their stations are doing in the social media space – experiments in the sense that no one sees these projects as settled, final answers, but as steps in a given direction which others might learn from.
Just a quick note about an Alfresco Meetup in Boston in a couple of weeks:
The Christian Science Monitor would like to invite you to attend an Alfresco Enterprise Content Management Meet-up in Boston:
Time: 11am – 3pm (Lunch provided with RSVP)
Place: 200 Massachusetts Ave
The First Church of Christ, Scientist
Boston, MA 02115 (map)
Parking: Available on site $5.00
To Attend: Please send RSVP to dannerr at csps dot com.
My colleague Jeff Potts will be speaking about using Alfresco as a platform for application development – you can read more about it at his blog, ecmarchitect.com.
Ironically, I can’t make it as I’ll be in Austin at SXSW (while Jeff, whose actually from Texas, will be here in Boston) – but it should be an interesting even for those interested in ECM, open source, and Alfresco.