Produsers and Produsage

Singapore.
We're still in the first paper session at ISEA 2008 - but I'll start a new post for the next three presentations. The next speaker is Konrad Becker, who has previously published the Tactical Reality Dictionary and is now working on a Strategic Reality Dictionary to complement it. He notes that tactical media spontaneity nonetheless relies on the availability of underlying infrastructures, raising questions around the strategic dimension. Tactics are more strongly related to temporal considerations, strategies to spatial issues. Konrad now shows a matrix tracing different combinations of space and time, and points to scientific understandings of time and space.

(Cross-posted from Produsage.org.)

I'm happy to report that the Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre has finally been launched. It's taken far too long to get to this point (initial Australian federal government approval for the CRC application was received shortly before Christmas, 2006), but after a lengthy process of negotiations between the twenty or so universities, government bodies, and industry partners involved in the CRC, the Centre has finally been launched by the federal minister responsible, Senator Kim Carr, on 3 July 2008.

Make no mistake - with funding totalling some $120 million over its seven-year timeframe, this is a very significant development for the Australian digital services industry, as the range of partners involved in the Centre also documents. The Centre will conduct research and development across a range of domains, from financial services through education to mobile media, building on the work of its predecessor, the Smart Internet CRC.

Brisbane.
The final session here at the CCi conference is billed as a copyright perspectives panel in the context of user-led content creation on Web 2.0. The panel begins with Oli Wilson from New Zealand indie band Knives at Noon and Otago University. Knives at Noon released its EP online under a Creative Commons 3.0 (BY-NC-SA) licence, free to share and remix for non-commercial purposes. The band was somewhat unhappy with the content of the EP itself, but wanted this creative material not to be wasted - they hoped that it would take on a life of its own by releasing it online as a ProTools source file (roughly following Linus Torvalds's logic in releasing the initial Linux kernel). Release in this format also allowed users to access the individual components of their tracks, not just the mixed end product - and it suited the band's creative philosophy.

Brisbane.
The post-lunch sessions on this last day of the CCi conference take a somewhat more legal angle. The keynote speaker here is Graham Vickery from the OECD, which has just published a set of high-level recommendations related to making public sector information more publicly accessible, as appropriate to the emerging participative Web environment. The OECD is interested in the economic framework for this new environment (for example, online games, music, publishing, film, video, advertising, and news distribution) in order to identify what aspects (of value chains, business models, etc.) are shared across these environments.

Brisbane.
The next plenary session at the CCi conference responds to Mark Deuze's talk - John-Paul Marin from SBS and Tony Walker (blogger at ABC Digital Futures and the ABC's Manager of Digital Radio) will share their own experiences of operating in the new, user-led, media environment that Mark has sketched out.

Brisbane.
The third and last day of the CCi conference starts with a keynote by the fabulous Mark Deuze, author of Media Work. He begins by pointing to Henry Jenkins's work on convergence culture, and reminds us of the magnitude of that trend. Why is this happening, what is the context for this - how do media professionals work in this environment?

Media organisations are very well positioned to make sense of this from a production perspective - they are well placed to find new ways to tell stories across multiple (new) platforms, but in doing so reproduce mainly what they did before. We need to move forward beyond this approach, though: how do we start from scratch in developing new content forms and forms of participation which are native to the new (media) environment, characterised as it is by niche communities and diverse interests? (Mark's upcoming book Beyond Journalism tells this story for the journalistic environment.)

Brisbane.
The last speaker on this second day of the CCi conference is John Quiggin. His interest is in the impact of the amateurisation of content production on innovation policy. John begins by noting the outgoing 20th century model of technical innovation, which involved publicly funded pure research (with a public good rationale), followed by private sector R&D (creating patents and IP with some direct subsidy) and finally the marketing of new products to end users. He contrasts this with the 19th century model of cultural innovation, where individual artists created cultural works (protected by copyright) to be delivered through cultural institutions (often under public funding, outside of the commercial mass media).

Brisbane.
The post-lunch session at the CCi conference starts for me with a panel on citizen journalism which involves my colleague Jason Wilson from Youdecide2007 (and Gatewatching.org), Larvatus Prodeo's Mark Bahnisch, and Graham Young from Online Opinion. Their theme is the role of citizen journalism in the 2007 Australian federal election.

Brisbane.
We're back to paper sessions at the CCi conference now, and for a change I'm in the cultural science stream. The first speakers here are Chris Brennan-Horley from the University of Wollongong Susan Luckman from the University of South Australia and deals with mapping the creative industries in Darwin. This ties into wider creative industries and creative cities theory, and Chris's approach here has been to focus especially on mapping the micro-level through qualitative ethnographic approaches - this is necessary as much grassroots-level creative industries activity remains unaccounted for in standard quantitative surveys of creative industries performance. Chris operated especially through interviews with creative industries practitioners in the city, and he was interested especially in geographic information - what spaces in the city were of importance to such practitioners in relation to their creative work?

Brisbane.
There's a great line-up of keynotes and plenary speeches starting this second day of the CCi conference, before we get back to paper sessions: we kick off with Convergence Culture guru and serial book launcher Henry Jenkins, then move on to Camilla Cooke who was the driving force behind the online arm of the Australian Labor Party's successful Kevin07 campaign in the last federal election, and follow this with journalist and commentator Margaret Simons speaking on future directions for mainstream journalism. Should be good!