Snurb's blog

I've just posted another contribution to the ongoing discussion on the Vibewire e-Festival Ideas forum. This was triggered by discussion about the New Zealand Greens' use of wiki technology to develop their policy platform, and the perhaps overly enthusiastic endorsement of this model from some of the contributors on the forum. In response, I suggest a somewhat more nuanced view of what contribution wikis and other open produsage approaches might be able to make.

Well if a bunch of people are writing policy together on a wiki it's better policy in that it's a better representation of what the group wants because its written by everyone, rather than one or two people who may filter what other people want.

OK, I'm going to take issue with this statement, at least in this very general formulation (which has quite a techno-determinist ring to it - it sounds like you're saying that policy written using wikis is automatically better/more representative policy because wikis were used in writing it).

I agree that this can be the result, but whether it is or not depends crucially on the dynamics of the the group of people participating in the process. Wiki-based projects are no more and no less subject to groupthink, flamewars, and conceptual blind spots than any other collaborative content development projects. Whether they 'work' or not (that is, capture a wide range of views and achieve a consensus that most contributors can live with) depends on whether there's an active desire (driven by the community of contributors) to listen to, engage with, and come to a consensus with these diverse views.

The Vibewire discussion on e-participation and e-democracy as part of its e-Festival of Ideas continues - and there have been a number of really interesting posts in yesterday's thread already. We're now diversifying into a number of threads, and I've posted a new contribution (picking up on some themes from yesterday) now. Comments welcome - here or on the Vibewire fora.

OK, I'll make a start here. It was very interesting to follow the discussion yesterday, and in that thread, Martin Stewart-Weeks asked a really useful critical question:

Strikes me that eDemocracy, if it's going to be anything interesting, has to play in the middle of this new (renewed?) contest between the individual and the institution. This, to me, gets close to the heart of the matter. If institutions are now, for the most part, the wrong way to harness collective intelligence for a purpose, then what will do that job in the future?

How exactly do swarms of smart, geeky "youths", for all their invention and creativity, constitute a force for sustained action and purpose - as opposed to having a wonderful time ripping down Scientology for a while?

As I've mentioned here previously, the Vibewire e-Festival of Ideas is now underway, and I'm taking part in a forum on e-democracy that also involves such luminaries as Mark Pesce, Jason Wilson, Martin Stewart-Weeks, and Tony Walker. I've now posted my first contribution, which I'm republishing here - any comments welcome, and I'll try and bring them to the discussion. Or better yet - join us!

I think it might be useful to work out in some more detail what we mean by e-democracy and related terms. Broadly, for me there are two interesting areas here: ways in which the Internet and other online media can facilitate better communication between governments and citizens (g2c, as well as c2g), and ways in which they enable citizens to engage directly with one another (c2c), possibly bypassing governments as well as mainstream media altogether.

Both are interesting, and there are a few notable developments here. For example, in g2c/c2g,

This should be of interest to a few readers of this blog: the submission deadline for papers for "Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons", the conference of the Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation which takes place on 25-28 June, has been extended to 21 April. Both proposals and full papers can be submitted at this point.

Should be an exciting conference - the keynote presenters include Henry Jenkins, Mark Deuze, Margaret Simons, Pete Clifton, Norman Jackson, and Susan Greenfield, and that line-up alone should be worth the price of admission. The broad conference themes are:

Brisbane.
The last AMIC 2008 session this afternoon starts with a paper by my colleague Jason Wilson, our research associate on the Youdecide2007 project and its follow-ups, and he presents especially on the experience and lessons from Youdecide. There may be a need for a structural modification in the role of conventional journalists, and a change of attitude towards working with citizen journalists.

Brisbane.
The post-lunch session at AMIC 2008 starts with Zheng Jiawen from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, whose focus is on citizen journalism in China - and particular, on Zola Zhou, popularly recognised as China's first citizen journalist. Broadly, citizen journalism is a public response to the inadequate performance of the mainstream journalism industry (and rose to prominence especially after the events of 11 September 2001). Its rise also contributed to a new debate on the nature of journalism itself, and many initial views argued that news blogging was not journalism due to the narrow subjects explored by most blogs, the reliance on second-hand information, the limited sources and experience of news blogging, and its limited credibility.

Brisbane.
I was the first presenter in the next session at AMIC 2008 (and my presentation on citizen journalism in the 2007 Australian federal election is already online here). Hopefully the audio recording worked as well - I'll add it as soon as possible. The audio from my talk is now online.

Brisbane.
The second day of the AMIC conference has now started, and we begin with a keynote from Vipul Kant Upadhay, the CEO and Editor in Chief of Merinews.com in India. This site is now the largest Internet news portal in the country, and builds very significantly on citizen journalism. Vipul begins by noting that he is no journalist by profession, but instead came to this venture through student activism; his initial motivation was the widespread corruption and nepotism in India.

Brisbane.
We're now in the opening session of the AMIC conference "Convergence, Citizen Journalism and Social Change". Today is just a short afternoon with a couple of keynote speeches; tomorrow, the bulk of the papers (including my colleague Jason Wilson's and mine) will be presented. Pradip Thomas from the University of Queensland is offering some opening remarks - referring to the common trope of the decline of mainstream journalism, and the corresponding rise of citizen journalism and its effect on political developments.

Over the next few weeks I'll be a participant in a number of events in Brisbane and online. As always, I'll try to do as much live-blogging as possible. Here's a preview of what's coming up:

• This Wednesday and Thursday I'm at the AMIC conference on Convergence, Citizen Journalism, and Social Change, where I'll also present my paper "Citizen Journalism in the 2007 Australian Federal Election (AMIC 2008)". I've already uploaded the Powerpoint slides and full paper for this (a round-up of citizen journalism developments during the 2007 Australian federal election), and I'll try to record the presentation as well.
  

• I'll end up missing the last half-day of the AMIC conference, though - I've also been invited to attend the "Creative Destruction: Lessons for Science and Innovation Policy from the Rise of the Creative Industries" workshop organised by the Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi) and the Forum for European-Australian Science and Technology Cooperation (FEAST), which takes place on Thursday and Friday, and I'll make it to the Friday round-table discussions at least. The focus of this workshop is on further developing the new field of cultural science (an extension of cultural studies through a strong injection of evolutionary economics, in the context of creative industries research), and I'm currently working my way through the position papers circulated in advance of the workshop (and presented on day one) - heady stuff in an area which is closely linked with my own research into produsage. Given the complexity of the material, hopefully I'll be able to capture the key discussions at least.

• Finally, a couple of weeks later, on 8-12 April, I'll take part in the online "e-Festival of Ideas" organised by Vibewire, and discussing democracy, media, arts, and social change. More information below: