Calling on CivicSpace Community-Building Platform
I've been getting up to speed on the latest and greatest web technologies, and one of the most promising finds that I've made so far is with CivicSpace Labs.
When I interviewed PressThink's Jay Rosen last June, he had mentioned that his nephew Zack was an open-source programmer who was working with the Dean Campaign. DeanSpace was the community-building platform built on top of the open-source content management platform of Drupal. DeanSpace has continued development as CivicSpace and has an impressive range of community-building and collaboration tools that should come in real handy for managing a decentralized volunteer labor force.
I talked to Zack Rosen briefly this afternoon asking for the best way to get the word out for recruiting some tech help for setting up CivicSpace and developing a specialized tool set, and he suggested posting a message on the CivicSpace Labs forum.
I've included the full post below for posterity's sake.
Open Source Documentary on Pre-War Media Failures
Greetings. My name is Kent Bye and I am in post-production on a documentary that analyzes the pre-war failings of the ABC, CBC & NBC evening news -- specifically how they became an "Echo Chamber" to the countdown towards war.
We're working with five months of pre-war news footage and over 45 interviews with journalistic & political experts with affiliations ranging from CBS News, Knight Ridder, Former President of NBC News, Editor & Publisher, Democracy Now!, Guardian of London, neoconservative, liberal hawk, non-interventionist libertarian, pacifist progressive, retired government analyst, French Embassy Communications Director, Republican strategist, Buddhist scholar, President of Institute of Noetic Sciences, Human Rights Watch and more.
The full list is at
http://www.echochamberproject.com/interviews/interviews.htmVolunteers are currently transcribing these interviews and I've started posting some of them on my site so that I can make this into an open-source, online investigative journalism / documentary film project.
I NEED YOUR HELP!
I'm very interested in the capabilities that CivicSpace offers, and I am looking for help in implementing this platform over at http://www.echochamberproject.com
EchoChamberProject.com has the potential to train the next generation of citizen journalists interested in investigative reporting. We interviewed a lot of knowledgeable people about the strengths and weaknesses of the current mainstream media. Volunteers involved in the project will learn what the media does well and fails to do.
This project could actually provide some practical solutions to the pitfalls of traditional closed-door, top-down, profit-driven production of news by implementing a philosophy of collaborative and transparent content development.
The context of The Echo Chamber is the 30-week public relations campaign to sell the war in Iraq, which is certainly an emotionally engaging topic that has the capacity to recruit A LOT of volunteer labor and cooperation from around the world and across many different academic disciplines.
The problem is that I'm just one person and I need help pooling, guiding and directing this type of decentralized labor force.
I know what I need to accomplish in order to direct and edit The Echo Chamber documentary --categorize & index over 40 hours worth of interviews and 35 hours of news footage & edit it down to a 90-minute film.
But the difficult part is figuring out the best way to integrate the filmmaking and Internet communications mediums:
* Coordinating a new media ecology and defining job descriptions within the organizational hierarchy
* Creating a system to harness the power of decentralized labor
* Creating citizen journalist-friendly tools and database applications (portals to mainline news stories, indexed sound bites, etc.)
* Podcasting & posting text of raw interviews
* Creating a community of bloggers for subjective emotional release and objective fact-based research
* Establishing a reputation-based hierarchy within the volunteer community
* Creating a new business model to compensate high-value volunteers
* Determining incentives for volunteer participation and civic engagement.
* Collaboratively producing a clearinghouse of information about the American press and the build-up to the war in Iraq.
* Creating a collaborative learning community that empowers people with the skills to be able to go out and do more civic journalism either in their own backyards or within the DC beltway.There are a lot of other things that need to be done, and I'd love to hear other insights as to where to take this project.
If any of this interests you, then please respond here or get in touch with me directly at kent@kentbye.com or 207-223-5566.
I've been brainstorming logistics, philosophical approaches and other issues over at http://www.echochamberproject.com/blog
I'd love to get some tech support to start getting an interactive community up online so that we can start recruiting more volunteers, academic advisors and funders.
FYI: Projected date of completion is between Fall 2005 to Spring 2006.
