Phase 02: Coalition Building
Keywords:
- * Citizen Journalism Toolkit
* Media Reform
* Community of Practice
* Open Source Business Plan
* Symbiotic Relationships
* Ideological, Racial and Gender Diversity
Intention:
- * Provide preliminary proof-of-concept by manifesting an infrastructure in Phase 01.
* Build a coalition of partners interested in reforming the mainstream media and developing a Citizen Journalist toolkit for collaborative content development.
* Open Source the Business Plan to make the strategic intentions for The Echo Chamber documentary more transparent.
* Connect this project with larger institutional agenda setters who are monitoring the progress and willing to adopt the best practices developed through the production of this film.
* Create a Community of Practice where there is enough logistical support to manifest the remaining phases of post-production and distribution.
* Create a diverse network of volunteers who are mutually interested in creating a technological infrastructure and citizen journalism methodologies that make the press more democratic.
What I have:
- * I have four advisors: 1 Journalism Professor, 1 Film Advisor, 1 Communications
* Practitioner, and 1 Drupal Developer.
* A brainstormed list of groups potentially interested in collaborating.
* Contacts with some New Media leaders, Activist Technologists, and other SXSW panel participants.
* An e-mail list of contacts
What I need:
- * Recruit an outreach director to help with building a broad and diverse coalition.
* Recruit producers to budget and help raise required funds for the remaining phases.
* Recruit more academic advisors from a variety of different disciplines who would be interested in the project.
* Recruit additional logistical support -- legal, technology, etc.
* Collaborate with activists and organizations who are interested in helping develop tools for the remaining phases of this roadmap.
* Help with spreading these intentions and desires to your respective social networks.
* Receive vouchers of credibility from trusted sources within the journalistic and blogging communities
* Marketing support from the center and edges of the blogosphere
* To get this project on the radar screen of small, mid-level or mainstream news organizations
* To create opportunities to speak with strategic decision-makers employed by the press as the project progresses.
On to Phase 03 Recruit Volunteers to Contribute Metadata on Interview Transcripts
Back to Roadmap
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add me to your mailing list. I am an ex-financial reporter turned financial planner. I am also a retired military NCO, spending some time active but the rest Reserve and National Guard. I have written essays critical of press coverage in general, and the war in particular. Perhaps one of the most immediate contributions I can make is to recommend that you interview HR McMaster, author of Dereliction of Duty, about the Vietnam War. You can contact him through HarperCollins Publishers.
The main reason you should do that is that the build up to the Vietnam War almost exactly parallels that of Iraq, both Iraq I and Iraq II. This has the virtue of showing that a Democratic President faces the same pressures--
--- Generals told him he shouldn't get involved in a land war in Asia
--But if he did it any way, they recommended a force of about 600,000 to do it right.
--The generals also recommended vigorous bombing of military targets in the North
--The generals also made clear that if things went wrong, the President should be prepared to drop the A-Bomb.
Understanding this, LBJ chose to lie to both the Joint Chiefs and to Congress, and the result was a compromise middle road that--as the generals predicted--would lead straight to defeat.
McMaster is an ex-West Pointer, and was an active military commander when he wrote the book As an NCO, it is clear that he doesn't pull his punches. The book came out in 1997, and contains many documentary references that had been previously classified, mainly to protect political interests.
A second book that is recommended reading is the one written by the former SecDefense Caspar Weinberger, called, I think, The Next World War, based on 5 war games played out by the Defense war gamers. Of all the many parts that would curl anyone's hair, I will point out the biggest--so as to not waste your time. It is that back during the Reagan administration, the submarines in the Mediterranean by both US and UK forces were poised to deliver hydrogen bombs to the Middle East--which could have wiped out--100 million people!
Any intelligent coverage should ram this home. If the US gets tired of picking at individual scabs, they could easily decimate significant portions of the world population.
The thing that amazes me is that, even after the bombing in Iraq, guerillas do not seem to thing the US is serious about winning.
The main obstacle would be the reaction of other nuclear club countries, like Russia and China. Instead of having to negotiate with one superpower, the US now has to negotiate with several republics.
A curious side development seems to be with China. As the US appears now to be bogged down in Iraq, China is feeling its oats and making threatening noises about aggression in Japan and Taiwan. It takes a lot of rice krispies to feed 1 billion people, plus whatever they are giving North Korea, which has lost an incredible two million people to starvation. So as a result of invading Iraq, the US is finding itself faced with the prospect of a war on a second front--China--which was on the winning side of the last land war in Asia.
I do not thing that the mass media has properly prepared the US viewing public to comprehend the global forces that are nearing the boiling point, largely due to the needs generated by population growth.
World War II lost something like 100 million people worldwide(check the figure for accuracy). With today's technology, the toll could be a lot more gruesome, in a much more compressed time frame. It would not take four years to kill that many people.
8-10-05 end message.