Produsers and Produsage

I've been invited to take part in a two-day event in Canberra this coming week, organised by the Council for Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (CHASS) - they're inviting early-career researchers (a definition which I'm slowly starting to slide out of) to talk to politicians about their research in order to better inform members of the legislative about current research agendas and the need for policies which address these aims and build on the findings.

As part of the 'Expanding Horizons' programme, we'll have breakfast with Julie Bishop, the Federal Minister for Education, Science and Training, morning tea with the Lindsay Tanner, Shadow Minister for Finance, and will then pair off to meet selected parliamentarians for more private meetings - I've been selected to talk to Senator George Campbell, the Oppositiom Whip. Along the way, we'll also hear from a variety of other high-profile politicians, researchers, and other officeholders in the nexus between education, research, and politics. Should be an interesting (and exhausting) programme!

Ugh. Having been at work since 7.30 a.m. to make some solid progress on the edgeX ("Mapping the Missing Grassroots") project and develop up some tech specs for the site we'll build for it, I got home at 6.30 p.m. only to move right on to producing the next issue of M/C Journal, which I'm happy to say is online as of now (that is, 1 a.m.) - and there'll be a formal announcement shortly. From what I've seen of the articles during the production process, editors Henk Huijser and Brooke Collins-Gearing have done excellent work, and I look forward to reading some of the articles in more detail.

We went on a nice but all-too-short post-V-day getaway to North Stradbroke Island last weekend, but I'm afraid any sense of relaxation went out the window quickly when I saw on Monday that numbers in my Creative Industries unit had risen to nearly 370 students by Monday morning. This meant quickly adding a couple more tutors and giving them an induction to the material, and elsewhere too I've been playing catchup all week already - not because I've been slack in the lead-up to the semester, but because there's just so much to do at the moment.

It's been a positive few days on either side of the Australia/Invasion Day holiday. On Wednesday we gained a major sponsor for the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Brisbane in September, which should enable us to attract a further fairly high-profile keynote speaker; more on this as we go. Later that day we aso started work on the edgeX, or "Mapping the Missing Grassroots", ARC Linkage project between QUT and UQ Ipswich with Ipswich City Council - and I'm looking forward to seeing this one get going. More work on both today, with a few keynote speaker possibilities emerging...

It's been a busy week - partly also because I'm going on holidays in the middle of next week and wanted to finish a few things before then. So, I spent most of last night working on one of the audio recordings from my recent trip to the U.S.: I've now added a recording from my guest lecture 'Anyone Can Edit': Understanding the Produser - Guest Lecture at SUNY, Buffalo / New School, NYC / Brown Univ. / Temple Univ. to this site. As I said back then, my favourite version of that lecture was the one I gave at Temple University in Philadelphia, and so I worked mainly with that recording; however, I also noticed that for some reason the last few minutes of it were missing from the recording, and so I've spliced in the ending from the Brown University recording a few days earlier. In addition, I also made some minor updates to my list of recent publications, splitting this up into publications, recorded talks, and creative work, and added a box with the most recent stuff in the upper right corner of this blog. Hope that's useful. I'm hoping to add recordings from my Wikinews paper at AoIR 2005, and the Northeastern University New Media Panel, soon.

Phew - another day spent editing the Uses of Blogs book with Jo Jacobs; we're now very close to sending off the manuscript to Peter Lang for editorial comments and proofreading. This has turned out to be a very strong collection of essays on blogs and blogging from a wide range of perspectives, and I think it will do very well. And nothing against our original cast of contributors, but we've added a few more authors in the last few months, and they've made quite an impact as well.

Amidst all sorts of other work, including last-ditch editorial work on Uses of Blogs with Jo Jacobs, end-of-semester assignment marking and moderating for various units, the development of new research projects, and my emerging role as conference chair for the 2006 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Brisbane, I've finally managed to write a first introductory piece on produsers and produsage. This follows on from my residency at the Institute for Distributed Creativity last month (where I also recorded a video statement on produsage), and has also been posted on the iDC site itself (and will probably make its way through various mailing-lists soon).

The piece, "Some Exploratory Notes on Produsers and Produsage", maps out some of the key areas of interest in my research for the next few years, so it's something of a mission statement for me. It's also very much an exploratory piece - there are many more gaps to be filled in, there is much research to be done, and many researchers to be collaborated with. So, such as it is, I'm very keen on comments...

(Brisbane) Well, I'm home again, more or less - after a week here I still feel somewhat jetlagged and generally mushy. Work needs to be done, though, so I'm trying my best to keep up with things. Speaking of which, I hadn't flagged this yet: as part of my residency at the Institute for Distributed Creativity Trebor Scholz and I recorded a brief video statement outlining the produser idea - here it is in all its glory: