Tag: Citizen Journalism

Governor 2.0, Tanya Byron and the Digital Media Literacy Summit

Thursday morning and the phone goes. My kids’ secondary school. “Gawd”, I think, “I need to catch a train to London”. Don’t panic. No accident, no expulsions. It turns out I’ve been elected one of four parent governors.

I can be slow at times – because I spent the rest of the day at the Digital Media Literacy Summit before it dawned on me that perhaps one of the most useful things I could do as a school governor is encourage the school to exploit the social web. With this in mind I ask around at the conference for some advice:

Tanya Byron gave me a couple of tips which you can hear in the podcast below. She’s currently running a government review (consultation ends on the 30th November) on the balance between safety and opportunity for young people both online and in the gaming world. Adam Fahey, himself a school governor, was hugely encouraging including advice on tactics – such as getting on the best committees and finding advocates within schools.

The Age of Tactics.

Tactics stuck out for me at the summit. Chanel 4 Commissioning Editor for education and new media, Matt Locke told us that social web evangelists need to think of this as as much a time for tactics as strategy. This absolutely chimes with my experience where I know organisations can benefit from new ideas and connections generated on the social web – the real issues is how to get them deep enough into the experience to understand the potential.

He also helped us picture the geography of social networking – the combination of Secret Spaces, Group Spaces, Publishing Spaces, Performing Spaces, Participation Spaces and Watching Spaces.

Jon Gisby – the Former MD of Yahoo in the UK – gave one obvious tactical solution – access to the right people. He correctly argues that equipment is not so important, the key for improving digital media literacy is to ensure that there are enough people who understand in the right places. So can we seed places with evangelists, unleash the passions of those already there.

Ewan McIntosh was downright inspiring. He warned of the problem of education being run by 21st century illiterates and said so much more which requires some digestion.

Tim Davies brought us back to a fundamental issue of strategy.

It continues to surprise me how often different standards are uncritically applied to young people and to adults. The justification for the difference is assumed, but never articulated.

As a governor my aim must be to help educate young people to understand and negotiate risk and opportunity. My experience teaching social media (with both adults and children) is that you can only really understand/learn by doing. So, in theory, the more young people do the more literate and hence safer they should become.

For an overview of the point of the summit please watch Peter Packer.  Also there Daniel Snell,  Gareth Morlais, Nick Reynolds, Kevin Anderson and Hilary Perkins.

Citizen or Journalist – the evidence remains the same.

It’s become a journalistic cliche – the crew or photographer who film police misbehaving and then have to hide the evidence or have it destroyed. Curiously enough that now appears to have become an ‘occupational’ hazard for citizen journalists.

Kimberley Michaelson writes how witnesses to an alleged police beating in Chicago were told to delete their mobile phone pics and footage or face the same treatment.

It helps me edge toward another element of a definition of a journalist (whether citizen or not) as someone who has evidence and shares it. Of course that would rule out loads of columnists and other writers and rule in a bunch of legal professionals. No probs there.

Hat tip and much more to Geoff Dougherty who is the Editor supporting Kimberley and other online citizen journalists in Cjicago.

Whose time has come? Netsquared for the UK

I’m about to indulge in substantial conflation. Bear with me.

Yesterday on the train from Birmingham to London to take up William Hoyle’s characteristically sociable invitation to explore Dan McQuillan’s proposition for establishing Netsquared in the Old World, I was reading the latest edition of Prospect.

In it American writer Walter Russell Mead confronts us with a curious idea: “suppose Britain is back.. really moving once again to become a global leader in finance, culture and technology”.

Partly through immigration, partly through economic and social change, Britain is becoming tumultuous once again. The City is too big, too successful and above all too revolutionary and even piratical to tolerate the fussy mediocrity that characterised British economic governance for so long. There are large numbers of immigrants who are not sure whether they really want to be British—and there are people in Britain once again who think that religion is important enough to die for or even to kill for. The Scots aren’t sure they want to stay in; the English aren’t entirely sure that they want them. Various loony-toon advocacy groups are running around taking all kinds of interesting causes to foolish extremes. Vulgar billionaires and shady foreign plutocrats with mysterious pasts swank through the streets of London. And none of these people actually care very much what the great and the good think of them. In other words, Britain today is looking more like it used to back when it was actually great. It is looking a little more like the kind of Britain that a Defoe or a Dickens would recognise: snarky, eccentric, iconoclastic. It is looking less like a slightly moth-eaten tourist attraction and a little more like the titanic force for change that not so long ago exported one revolution after another to the world.

Aside from the ironic instinct to hum Jeruslaem as you read that passage it sort of sums up in my mind part of the discussion that was emerging in the Newman Ams last night (reported by David Wilcox). I don’t mean about Britain. I mean about how disruptive technology, people and ideas are driving change faster than the older politer people, structures and ideas can resist change.
Netsquared (whether UK, European or the original US version) should exist to shake up cosy assumptions (“fussy mediocrity”) about social change and who has the power/authority to lead or drive it. Dan McQuillan made the proposition earlier this year:

The proposal is to establish project like Netsquared that hits the sweet spot at the overlap of technology & social innovation. The goals would be

  • To stimulate web-enabled social innovation
  • To create a an online-offline community for learning skills, sharing experiences and developing expertise
  • To sustain socially progressive activity through alternative business & organisational models

and added:

The conference and community could also address ‘the organizational question’ i.e. the challenge that Web 2.0 raises for traditional NGOs and non-profits. The many dimensions of this challenge have been spelled out recently by Michael Gilbert in The Permeable Organization , Steve Bridger in Whose cause is it anyway? and Katrin Verclas in Online Communities Redux: Why They Matter to You. Perhaps, like the second Netsquared conference, it could aim to incubate a new generation of web-enabled non-profits that use new forms of organising to deliver more directly on their missions.

Netsquared UK can offer room for those who are not complacent about their place in the social economy, for those who think “less like a slightly moth-eaten tourist attraction and a little more like the titanic force for change that not so long ago exported one revolution after another to the world.”

Sadly I left early so missed some of the best stuff. Just a thought though on names. My instinct is to stick with NetsquaredUK simply because some of the larger global tech firms will already recognise the concept.

Also there was: Steve Bridger, Michael Ambjorn, Paul Miller, Simon Berry, Nathalie McDermott and others. Please send me your blog adresses and I’ll add them.  Also see Andrew Brown for other reflections on the Mead Essay