I'm happy to report that through a series of connections that The Echo Chamber Project has received a $55,000 grant for the next year of operations. Below is the text of the four-page grant that I submitted to the foundation, who prefers to remain anonymous.

I am also pleased to report that I have made it past the first round of the Knight Brothers 21st Century News Challenge competition, and am in the process of submitting a full proposal.

OVERVIEW
The Echo Chamber Project explores collaborative investigative filmmaking by using new media technologies as well as a repository of original video interviews with journalists and scholars. It is a project that details the limitations of American journalism while at the same time embodying innovative solutions through collaborative media production. In short, it is an independent filmmaker's "YouTube" combined with "Wikipedia" for serious journalism.

Radical innovation is needed in order to discover both sustainable business models for hard-hitting investigative journalism as well as new ways of maintaining influence and audience attention with trustworthy content. The Echo Chamber Project explores the two key trends of Online Video and Tapping into Collective Intelligence through Citizen Participation.

Continued below is a brief overview of the history and scope of the Echo Chamber Project, as well as a funding request for a total of $55,000 for the next year of operations...

This is my demonstration of the collaborative editing workflow for The Echo Chamber Project during the Politics and Social Change Session during the first day of Vloggercon. Total run time is 9:15.

This software demonstration is at the prototype phase, and I'm transitioning to a private alpha and then a public beta over the next couple of months.

Please sign up as a user if you're interested in getting more involved with the project as it evolves.

More background information can be found in this post: Iterative Media: Treating Collaborative Media Like Open Source Code

The second day of the Beyond Broadcast Conference split into smaller working groups, and I attended the "Iterative Media: Treating Media like Open Source Code" session with about 30 other people.

The idea was to draw parallels between open source software development and the trend towards interactive and participatory media.

The Echo Chamber Project has been very much influenced by the open source production model, especially after watching the Revolution OS documentary about the free and open source movements -- as well as reading Eric S. Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

Here is some of the discussion that came out of session as to how it relates to The Echo Chamber Project:

* WHAT IS ITERATIVE MEDIA?
* COLLABORATIVE EDITING WORKFLOW
* BOTH INTERACTIVE AND TRADITIONAL FILM, NOT EITHER/OR
* BALANCING FILM BY COMMITTEE MODEL AND BENEVOLENT DICTATOR MODEL
* SUBMITTERS AND COMMITTERS
* PROVIDING INCENTIVES AND USER MOTIVATION
* CORE DEVELOPMENT VS. CONTRIBUTED MODULES VS. FORKING
* POWER LAW OF PARTICIPATION
* MORE DETAILS

Flash Version

This video provides explains how the media fits into political and social change and specifically addresses the following questions:

* How is the Press supposed to Work?
* How and why does the Press act like an Echo Chamber?
* How is media changing?
* What does it mean that the "news is becoming a conversation"?
* Will these new media changes affect the nature of politics?
* How does The Echo Chamber Project fit into all of this?

Featuring: Amy Goodman, Lawrence Grossman, Jim Lobe, Jonathan Landay, Richard Sambrook, Jay Rosen, Dan Gillmor, Jeff Jarvis, Doc Searls & Merrill Brown.

You can subscribe to the Interview Audio here or browse it here.

Additional interview transcripts are here.

Sign up as a user here.

Using new media technology to make the filmmaking post-production process more collaborative has uncovered some interesting theoretical insights. It has introduced some constraints that have allowed me to abstract some broader concepts that can be applied to journalism and collaborative sensemaking.

Below I explore some of the parallels between Collaborative Filmmaking, New Media Technology, Journalism, The Intelligence Cycle, Knowledge Management Pyramid and the Scientific Method...

* Constraints Can Be Good
* Scaling Up Complexity with Folksonomy Tags & Playlists
* Towards a Theory of Collaborative Sensemaking

Listen to a presentation that I gave at Ritual Roasters coffee shop in San Francisco's Mission District on January 3rd, 2006. (Length: 25:28)

Chris Messina announced this meet-up with this blog post and submitted this announcment to Upcoming.org, and there were about a dozen people who showed up to listen to this brief presentation. Jennifer Myronuk recorded the talk, and I was interviewed by Geek Entertainment TV in a piece that should be airing sometime in the future. Update 4/10/06: Here's the episode.

Here are some blog reactions from Andy Kaufman & Irina Slutsky and some photos from Tara Hunt and EFF's Jason Schultz.

This is a more general overview of the collaborative filmmaking schematic, and I'd recommend listening to the presentation while looking at the flowchart shown below.

You can also listen to a similar presentation that I gave at the Open Media Developers Summit in early January here.

Listen to a presentation that I gave at the Open Media Developers Summit on October 21st, 2005. (Length: 25:01)

This is a fairly technical overview of the collaborative filmmaking schematic, and I'd highly recommend listening to the presentation while looking at the flowchart shown below.

You can also listen to a similar presentation that I gave in San Francisco in early January here.

Video essay in response to Jay Rosen's "Dick Cheney Did Not Make a Mistake By Not Telling the Press He Shot a Guy" bog post -- featuring Chris Nolan, Mindy Finn, Hugh Hewitt, John H. Brown, Don Beck, Steve Rubel, Merrill Brown, Tom Rosenstiel, Congressman Rob Simmons, and a virtual Jay Rosen.

You can listen to the full entire audio for some of the interviews -- and read the full transcript for the others.

Subscribe to this feed for future videos.

Subscribe to this feed to download all audio interviews posted so far.

Music: On The Moon (Trip Hop mix) by disharmonic

Here's a Windows Media version.

Full Transcript and Further thoughts are down below...

The media spends so much time and energy focusing on problems, but how can they do a better job at empowering citizens towards a vision of hope and possibility?

Music: On The Moon (Trip Hop mix) by disharmonic

This video features some insights on this from Sharif Abdullah, Marilyn Schlitz, Don Beck and Van Jones.

I conducted these interviews at a conference on Consciousness and Healing with the following two lenses:

* How the press can be more solution-oriented?
* How can the press better account for our subjectivity, worldviews and the influence of our culture?

The full audio of 10 interviews from the conference can be found below...