Decentralization

A Discussion with Webjay.org's Lucas Gonze about his playlist community, and how playlist concepts can be applied to film editing and citizen journalism. Playlists being lists of songs, and Edit Decision Lists being lists of audio sound bites and lists of video clips. We also discuss reputation, identity, and distribution.

(51:08 / 14.6 MB / Subscribe to Echo Chamber Project's Community & Technology Audio Feed)

Click here to listen to the MP3

More details in this blog post: Playlists are to Music as Edit Decision Lists are to Film.

Any PHP programmers interesting in helping add some this functionality to Drupal's Playlist module should listen to this as well as the next two discussions with the Drupal Developers Colin and Farsheed. Look at http://www.echochamberproject.com/volunteer for updates.

Here's
an interview with Jeff Jarvis of buzzmachine.com on May 16, 2005 talking about the future of media and issues surrounding the military intervention in Iraq. Also features quotes from Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel of Knight Ridder at the end.

(12:17 / 3.7 MB / Subscribe to Interview Audio)

Click here to listen to the MP3

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.

Here is the second Echo Chamber Project video blog entry

Description: Technology is transforming media & politics, and large-scale collaborative media can provide some insights into grassroots leadership and bottom-up democracy.

Featuring: Chris Nolan, Jeff Jarvis, Doc Searls, Scott Heiferman, Markos Moulitsas, Mindy Finn & Kent Bye.

(5:08 minutes / 12.6 MB)

Download Quicktime

Subscribe: Vlog RSS / Blog RSS

Listed below is a full transcript of this video with additional links...

[1] A handcrafted Drupal tag cloud for all of my blog posts:
http://www.echochamberproject.com/tagcloud

[2] Tag Cloud Font Distribution Algorithm
http://www.echochamberproject.com/node/247

[3] Flowcharts for Personalized Drupal Tag Clouds
http://www.echochamberproject.com/node/245

[4] Collaborative Media with Drupal + Final Cut Pro XML
http://www.echochamberproject.com/node/219

[5] A list of all of my blog posts tagged "Theory" discussing Journalistic Paradigms with New Media technologies
http://www.echochamberproject.com/theory

[6] Swarm Intelligence Journalism
http://www.echochamberproject.com/node/151

[7] Phase 01 of the 11-phase Development Roadmap for The Echo Chamber Project
http://www.echochamberproject.com/phase01

[8] A list of all of the full-length interviews that were conducted with some transcripts posted:
http://www.echochamberproject.com/interviews

[9] A list of 13 leaders of the New Media movement interviewed at the Personal Democracy Forum
http://www.echochamberproject.com/newmedia13

[10] A cover story in the Baltimore City Paper featuring The Echo Chamber, Kent Bye & Jennifer Gouvea.
http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=7807

I asked some of my volunteer transcribers to tell me some of the reasons why they're helping with this project, and a lot of their responses shows that they are largely driven their concerns about the state of US politics and the mainstream media -- as well as a number of other personal reasons as well.

I originally started the film with an advocacy goal trying to convince people that they should adopt my progressive worldview after I laid all of the facts out on the table. I was really pissed off with everything that's going on in this country both with politics and the media and the war, and I just wanted to provide information so that people could think just like I did -- Then all the world's problems would be solved, right?

But then I went through quite an evolution after interviewing so many different perspectives last July. I decided to put my focus and energy on how I could use this documentary project to create more inclusive and collaborative journalistic paradigm that could help solve a lot of the problems with the press that were identified by these insiders.

I intend to help create a media that promotes dialogue and understanding and not one showcases people screaming ideology at each other for the sake having a dramatic debate that scores big ratings....

Robert Greenwald of Uncovered & Outfoxed fame announced that he's doing a film on WAL-MART three weeks ago, and he's already set up over 700 screenings in homes across America via Democracy in Action.

Greenwald is the leading pioneer creating alternative distribution paradigms for independently produced documentary films, and so I'm definitely taking note with his latest strategy and success.

Greenwald just sent out an listserve e-mail asking people to vote on what the title and subtitle of their documentary should be. Greenwald has started referring to his audience as "the distributors":

A friend I respect a lot, George Lakoff, raised some concerns about the movie's subtitle, so I thought the distributors should weigh in. And that's you.

Greenwald provides a link to his blog with the final choices and solicits people to vote:

Thankfully, in our democratic version of Warner Brothers, YOU, the distributors, have to make the final decision. The choices are....

Greenwald is holding a live chat next Wednesday to announce the results, and he's asking people to post questions beforehand on his blog post.

Greenwald's innovations with using grassroots activist organizations to distribute his work have provided me with a strong foundation for finding new ways of getting my work out there. I'm standing on his shoulders with this experiment of getting the audience even more involved in the post-production of The Echo Chamber Project. I'll be watching his WAL-MART film closely.

I put a call out yesterday to all of the volunteers who have already completed a transcription. I needed to re-assign 9 more interviews to be transcribed because of a delay in loading the footage caused by a hard drive malfunction back in late 2004.

I sent out about 18 e-mails and I had my 9 volunteers less than 24 hours later -- even with my website completely offline during most of this time period.

I was surprised about how eager these volunteers were to help out again. I think that Americans are really hungry to get involved with helping out with these documentary projects because they want to feel like they're making a difference both politically and with their frustrations with the media...

Steve Rubel points to a Reuters article that Microsoft will be switching over to XML as their default file format. This seems to be more evidence for what the technologists have been saying about 2005 being "The year of RSS." RSS being based upon XML.

I see XML is a metaphor for consumer choice. Consumers can choose how they consume web content by having it delivered directly to their RSS readers -- the pretty web design and other superficial graphical supplements are irrelevant when the "Content Will be More Important than its Container."

XML is also a metaphor for giving up centralized power and hierarchy. The fact that software giants are incorporating XML into their programs means that it'll make it easier for consumers to chose to take their content and use other third-party programs to manipulate their data...

Steve Rubel has been asked to participate in a documentary film about bloggers done by a career film industry guy named John Hart. Rubel says that the 59 chosen bloggers that Hart plans on interviewing represent his vision of the blogosphere -- after looking at the preliminary list, I can tell that Hart isn't very political since there is no sign of Instapundit, Atrios, Daily Kos, or Talking Points Memo on the list. Hart blogs here.

Rubel suggested that it might be a good opportunity for a company to support the project from a viral marketing opportunity.

Rubel didn't mention Chuck Olsen's Blogumentary or PBS' Media Matters: Welcome to the Blogosphere.

I met Olsen in Austin for SXSW and we had already discovered each others' projects. I had found his project because Olsen wrote on his site:

I want to make Blogumentary the first open source documentary. (If this has already been done, I'd love to know about it!)

Olsen found my project after Rebecca MacKinnon & David Weinberger linked to my New Media Ecosystem flowchart.

Olsen and I agreed that he is doing "open source" filmmaking from a transparency perspective, and I intend to do "open source" filmmaking from both a transparency and a decentralized collaborative perspective. A summary of links are below, and I have a couple of other blog posts about it on the way.