Roadmap for Open Source Documentary & Citizen Journalism Toolset Development
The Echo Chamber is a documentary on the failures of the mainstream media, and how I produce this film will hopefully provide some solutions to this infotainment bottleneck.
I'm trying to develop more sophisticated techniques for citizen journalism by open sourcing my interview material and collaboratively producing The Echo Chamber on a Drupal/CivicSpace platform. More details are below...
Within a year I hope to have finished my film, and be able to pass along Drupal modules that help with:
- * Folksonomy collection and analysis for original source material
* A proof-of-concept model for Open Source Journalism and Decentralized Political Advocacy Campaigns
* Collection and use of user identity for layered communication strategies
* A "Wikipedia for Journalism" Electronic Knowledge Repository
* Scaling Deliberative Democracy for a content development context (can be used for other communications contexts)
* Using OurMedia.org to bridge Digital Divide with distributed multimedia content developers
I intend to build a broad coalition to help create the technical tools required to complete each of the following phases.
- Phase 01 -- Produce Infrastructure for Volunteer Metadata Collection
Phase 02 -- Coalition Building
Phase 03 -- Recruit Volunteers to Contribute Metadata on Interview Transcripts
Phase 04 -- Collect Identity Information on Volunteers
Phase 05 -- Use Collected Information to Inform Documentary Editing
Phase 06 -- Collect Volunteer Metadata on Pre-War Television News Coverage
Phase 07 -- Gather & Analyze Supporting Evidence for Editing Decisions
Phase 08 -- Deliberation on Supporting Evidence & Editing Decisions
Phase 09 -- Gather Additional Multimedia Input from Volunteers
Phase 10 -- Tactics to Bridge Digital Divide and Incorporate Alternative Viewpoints
Phase 11 -- Solicit Feedback for Final Editing Phases
[Tags: open source documentary Media iraq citizen journalism collaboration ]
Wikimentary & Collaborative Editing
Submitted by kentbye on Tue, 2006-01-24 13:46.
Greetings SJ,
Thanks so much for the comment and alerting me to your wikimentary effort.
I took a quick look at the rough cut of the Globalvision video piece about your Wikipedia conference.
I think the biggest question you have is "What is your strategic intent for remixing this footage?" It appears as though Rory O'Connor of Globalvision has produced his verson for Frontline, and now you want to create your own version using his footage.
I added a few links to my collaborative filmmaking flowchart and workflow to the wiki -- as well as some pointers to how sound bite excerpts can be defined with SMIL standards, assigned to unique URLs, and then juxtaposed together within a playlist.
I'd love to talk about where I'm going with The Echo Chamber Project -- and where you want to go with Wikimentary project.
I think a key point to make is to start thinking about films in more non-linear ways -- specifically that the end goal may not be just to produce a linear product. It may actually be more useful to gather context, meaning and interpretations from the collaboration community on the gathered sound bites in the form of granular folksonomy tags, quantitative ratings or look at the implicit value that is gained from the process of individuals juxtaposing a particular sound bite next to another sound bites within a playlist.
How can you recreate the interactive experience of exploring wikipedia articles by using rich media?
For text, it's by clicking on the hypertext links. With rich media, it may be with gathering a lot of information about how dots are connected, and then using this fractal structure as a roadmap for experiencing the process of knowledge creation.
So I see a lot of potential from some combination of extracting navigation information from the bottom-up participation to create a more complex and interactive film structure.
This may redefine what it means for collaborative editing -- and for experiencing a "film."
I've sketched out a few more ideas on this post:
Fractals & Folksonomies: A New Map for Participatory Journalism -- and talk about it more in this interview
Wikimentaries and shared editing decisions
Hello Kent,
It is a pleasure to run across your project. I am involved with a similar if less political project, to compile and produce a set of collaborative documentaries about Wikipedia and its community, based on ~15 hours of video shot at the first annual Wikimedia Conference last summer.
That project is in its initial stages; but we have video and transcripts up on archive.org for anyone to play with, and are actively thinking about ways to support phases 5-11 in your list.
See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimentary and
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=wikimedia
for details. (By coincidence, it turns out that one of the groups supporting the Wikimentary project is George Mason's ECHO project - http://echo.gmu.edu/)
I would love to discuss these ideas with you; perhaps we can find a way to share our coalition-building. Let me know if you're ever planning to be in Boston or New York...
-SJ, who won his first 0.5 Master Points one summer at RHIT