Using Citizen Journalism to Open Source Political Campaigns

I sent the following proposal to Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej to open source the national aspects of their campaign for New York City Public Advocate by remixing citizen videojournalism reports into their communications strategy.

This could provide a viable model for how traditionally top-down driven political campaigns could release some control by collaborating with issue-based advocates on more detailed, Long-Tail messages that go beyond the least common denominator audience.

I heard from David Weinberger that Rasiej was having a conference call last Wednesday for political bloggers, and some other surprise guests.

I joined this conference call where Rasiej said that they needed help spreading the word to New York citizens to vote for him on September the 13th.

Rasiej talked about the national implications of his campaign for how Wi-Fi in NYC would be a cultural and political trendsetter for other cities to do the same -- as well as how he intended to use technology to facilitate grassroots activism and bottom-up democracy.

The only problem was that Rasiej campaign hasn't had time to craft this message on their own, and so they asked bloggers to make the case for him.

It just so happened that I had just completed my second video blog episode where I had already made the connection for how technology is changing media, politics and leadership.

So I suggested that they remix my second vlog episode by cutting out my message out and inserting their own. Using the Creative Common-Attribution license encourages people to do this type of remixes as long as they provide a link to EchoChamberProject.com and an attribution in their video.

This would encourage both of us to promote our respective vlog entries to our network of contacts.

And it also allows us to experiment with how citizen journalism and activism could be used to collaborate with political campaigns.

Below is the more detailed pitch that I sent to the Rasiej campaign laying out my vision for how this type of collaboration between citizen journalists and political campaigns could work. They gave it the green light, and the remix will start being produced next week by vlogger Ryanne Hodson.

Hey Micah and Andrew,
During the conference call yesterday, I noted some pressing desires for your campaign, and I think that I have some innovative solutions to some of them.

I talked with vlogger Ryanne Hodson, and she is willing to remix the following five-minute video on how technology is changing media & politics into a shorter vlog entry that communicates how your campaign can catalyze a larger movement of grassroots, participatory democracy.

This would require gathering a few sound bites with Ryanne, and then having her edit these juxtaposed with the sound bites that I've already gathered from experts at the Personal Democracy Forum.

Here is link to the 5-minute video
http://www.echochamberproject.com/vlog02

Below are more details on how these SOLUTIONS can fill your DESIRES and accomplish your BOTTOM LINE.

DESIRES
* You want to communicate to the larger blogosphere how your election can prove to the Democrats the full capabilities of many-to-many communication technology.

* You don't just want to just use technology as a giant ATM machine or a one-to-many television/radio channel to amplify your message.

* You need to find an innovative way to catalyze and energize the campaign by tapping into the national network of advocates for open source democracy, free culture & true grassroots, bottom-up activism.

* But you're faced with the reality of the Get Out the Vote for the local election and you can only chose 2 major issues to focus the campaign on.

* You need the larger blogosphere to take some initiative to creating a buzz by virally spreading your larger visions for how technology can be used to empower citizens, for how the Democrats could gain a competitive advantage in elections, and for how these changes could transform the way that we govern ourselves.

* Your campaign and vision for New York City is a symbol and catalyst for what's possible with true bottom-up, grassroots democracy.

BOTTOM LINE
* Your campaign seems to still be a closed-source, one-to-many operation where you have a tight lock on the message that is coming from you within the context of your New York City campaign for Public Advocate.

* You can only focus on the local aspects of this election, and you don't have a lot of extra time and resources on developing your National communications strategy for how networking technology can give the Democrats a competitive advantage in the next election cycle.

* It's difficult to realistically run a local Get Out the Vote campaign by focusing on abstract macro issues like how releasing top-down control can tap into the collective creativity and wisdom of the electorate, and how Wi-Fi in NYC will be a cultural/political trendsetter for the entire grassroots, participatory democracy movement.

* So you're asking for help and insights from the network of citizen's media.

SOLUTION
Let citizen journalists like me help you develop that national message by open sourcing your campaign to the larger community of bloggers, podcasters and vloggers.

How?

By having citizen journalists produce media that you can then remix, recontextualize and then make your own.

The first step would be to remix my five-minute video talking about how technology is revolutionizing media and politics.

It's for my collaborative, open source documentary on the pre-war failings of the mainstream media -- but since it's released under a CreativeCommons-Attribution license, then you're free to cut out my message, and insert your own message.

This could prove to be a viable model for how grassroots citizen journalism could be used to help shape the message coming from political campaigns.

The following five-minute video features quotes about how technology is transforming media & politics from Chris Nolan, Jeff Jarvis, Doc Searls, Scott Heiferman, Markos Moulitsas & Mindy Finn:

http://www.echochamberproject.com/vlog02
(Full transcript is attached below)

I've already been in contact with Ryanne Hodson, and she is willing to film the sound bites from you, edit and remix it.

You can go ahead and coordinate with her when to get together to gather the sound bites for the remix -- a remix where you can connect the dots for the broader goals and intentions for providing a proof-of-concept for how new media technologies can be used in innovative ways.

The actual content of the remixed vlog entry would talk about this, and by allowing me -- a citizen living in the basement of log cabin in the woods of Maine -- to help develop your National message by remixing clips from my open source documentary would speak volumes for putting true open source democracy and citizen journalism into action.

The only thing that I would ask is that there be a blog link to the URL with the source material on http://www.echochamberproject.com -- and an attribution citation within the vlog credits.

My incentive is to drive traffic to my website and to my project, and to symbiotically help your campaign demonstrate the power of citizen journalism combined with what's possible with bottom-up democracy. To drive activist technologists to my project in order to build the open source tools within Drupal for large-scale collaborative media. And to experiment a bit with how open source, collaborative media could feed into an open source, political campaign.

Your incentive is to empower the grassroots with a voice, and ultimately catalyze and energize a National-to-Local, peer-to-peer communications strategy by having bloggers around the country to tell every Democrat they know in NYC to vote for you on September 13th. Anything that can realistically create a buzz to GOTV is what's important.

The remixed video and how it was collaboratively produced could provide something viral that bloggers could point at and talk about beyond your immediate network of contacts.

You can talk more with Ryanne and myself about what you want to communicate in the remix, and how the end product could come together.

And I've offered some suggestions for what to keep and edit out in the transcript below, but it's ultimately up to your campaign and Ryanne to decide. I can coordinate any other logistics with Ryanne.

When my vlog and your remix vlog are posted, then we can all promote it to our respective networks.

If we do this and pull it off, then it will be a very blogworthy and newsworthy event.

I'm also imagining that this could help catalyze other vlogging/podcasting/blogging correspondents to gather quotes and vlog entries from other luminaries from their local communities.

For example, San Francisco vloggers like Eric Rice or Schlomo could interview Craig Newmark talking about NYC slum lords. They could post the entire interview or excerpts of video in their vlogs. Ryanne (as well as other NYC vloggers) could collect sound bites from you on this topic, and then they could remix the video into a shorter video for the context of your campaign.

Since you don't really have time to incorporate these types of Long Tail messages into your local campaign, then you could release control to experts like Newmark and other citizen journalists who'd be willing to do the hardest work in producing and broadcasting this message.

Now suddenly you're able to let citizen journalists do the hardest part of spending the time to gather and edit together the meat of the messages from domain experts. They post their videos online, and then it's in the hands of your campaign vlogger to filter, remix, edit and curate the people's messages into your own.

It's distributed citizen journalism being filtered into an open source campaign.

How does this sound so far?

Here's a link to the five-minute video to work with, and the full transcript is below with some edit-point suggestions:
http://www.echochamberproject.com/vlog02
You can reach me at 207-223-5566

Thanks,
-Kent Bye.
Director, The Echo Chamber Project
MetaThought Productions
http://www.echochamberproject.com

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

FULL TRANSCRIPT
Echo Chamber Project Vlog Episode 2: Media & Politics

KENT BYE (EchoChamberProject.com)
[SUGGESTION: Edit out this clip and insert your own intro]
I wanted to talk a bit about the intersection between media and politics for a couple of reasons. Collaborative media can provide a lot insights into grassroots activism and bottom-up democracy. The Echo Chamber Project is also developing a lot of the open source tools for collaborative media that could also be used for political campaigns in the next election cycle. So here are some insights from the Personal Democracy Forum

CHRIS NOLAN ("Politics from Left to Right" Blog)
Back five / ten years ago, the people at Wired Magazine used to say, "The Internet changes everything." They were right. We're just getting -- I mean, outside of Silicon Valley -- people are just beginning to understand just how dramatic and how important those changes are.

JEFF JARVIS (BuzzMachine.com)
If you give the people control of media, they will take it. If you don't give them control, you will loose them. And I think we have to look not just at media where this is occurring, but also in marketing and in politics. I don't think here at the Personal Democracy Forum we've yet seen nearly the endgame of the people taking over their political process, and I do believe that will happen.

DOC SEARLS (Doc Searls Weblog)
Sooner or later, the connected electorate essentially imposes Democracy back on government in a way we've never seen before. So I think five years from now what we're going to see is something that's much more like democracy than we've seen in the history of the Republic.

BYE
[SUGGESTION: Either edit this clip -- or include your own]
It's safe to assume that the Internet will continue to change the way that we interact with media and politics. One of the founders of Meetup.com talks about the challenges of coordinating large-scale collaboration.

SCOTT HEIFERMAN (Co-Founder/CEO Meetup.com)
How do organizations find that balance between top-down and bottom-up? How is that you can both give people direction and leadership while at the same time giving people enough freedom to truly have a grassroots feel? Not just *look* grassroots, but authentically be grassroots. Not just sort of look bottom-up, but authentically be bottom-up.

MARKOS MOULITSAS (DailyKos.com)
Now people want you to be proactive. They want you to be innovative. They want you to really look for solutions to problems. They don't want you to just follow orders. Yet we have a media environment and a political environment that are still very top-bottom driven. They still expect to issue proclamations and edicts and have people follow those. It's not like that any more. And I think that what we're seeing with the blogs is a creation of this new citizen's movement to take over things -- like I said -- politics, journalism and activism.

MINDY FINN (Republican National Committee eCampaign)
We're really tasked with online strategy. Leveraging the web and new media to help advance the committee's goals at all levels. For finance goals, which is raising money. To mobilization -- our political goals, getting grassroots out there, getting folks to the polls and actually voting for our candidates. And message, which is getting our message out there and hoping that it resonates, and helping drive the message into the grassroots and to the public.

[SUGGESTION: Either stop here and comment -- Or include the next two clips]

MOULITSAS
But I hope that what we're creating is culture where people don't feel a need to wait for "so-called leaders" to tell them to act to do anything. It's that they'll take that initiative on their own -- the tools are available.

FINN
There's some hierarchy to respect. And I think there always -- *I* think there always will be and there always has been just to make sure that it's efficient and organized. But that what that hierarchy is all about is really putting people in touch with like-minded individuals -- empowering the grassroots. I mean, you have to have someone kind of crafting message. You have someone making sure that message is getting out to these individuals.

BYE
[SUGGESTION: Edit this clip out, and conclude your vlog entry here with the message that you want to send out.]
I think it's important to find that balance between top-down leadership and bottom-up participation without being too extreme on either end. What I hope to do with my open source documentary is help find that healthy balance. What I've done is I've gone out and taken the initiative to gather all of these interviews -- and ask the questions. But I'm releasing a lot of control with how the final film comes together. So I hope to have a community help collaborative edit and shape the film. So here's Doc Searls talking more about open source communities work.

SEARLS
Groups of people that work together in much the same way as -- say as a group of farmers would raise a barn. Right? And there's a shared understanding of what needs to be done. People step forward who have particular expertise, and they'll work on that part of the project.

BYE
Large-scale collaborative media can provide a lot of answers to some of the questions surrounding grassroots activism and bottom-up democracy. Small-scale collaboration is already possible with blogs, podcasts and video blogs -- but additional tools -- like the ones that I described in the previous episode -- have to be developed in order to facilitate collaboration on a large-scale. I'm still searching for funders and potential [software] programmers. So if you're interested in getting more involved, then please drop by the website and leave a comment.