Future Trajectories for ABC's Pool Project

Brisbane.
The final speakers for this ANZCA 2009 session are Sherre Delys and Marius Foley fromthe ABC Pool project. Sherre, its Executive Producer, comes from ABC Radio Arts, and one of the motivations for starting the site was in maintaining a space for radio arts as well as providing one for other forms of (especially collaborative) multimedia work. The overall idea was to open up public media as a conversation, to address the people formerly known as the audience. Part of this was also to partner with Creative Commons Australia and to use open source technology (Drupal is used as the platform for Pool).

There is also an opportunity here to explore new roles for producers in this process, and Pool was able to explore a number of innovative approaches. The site takes a collaborative approach (in connection with various academic institutions), and has now concluded stage one (after a launch in August 2008); there are thousands of pieces of content and projects on the site by now.

One user, Flickrman, runs a series of photos picked from Flickr, for example, through which he tells a fictional story of his life (and the ABC Drama department is interested in this as an idea). There are also interesting projects with ABC radio shows, and ABC radio content is available online through Pool and ready for remixing - say, Philip Adams with a backbeat.

There will also be further work with Creative Commons Australia, putting more ABC archives online and making them available for remixing - as well as researching why people are interested in participating in this way. Other collaborations are with archives and libraries, for example.

Marius Foley now takes over; he was worked with Pool through ACID to understand its current shape and develop a redesign and development proposal. Pool hosts a small but highly energetic, positive community - why is this so? What is it that motivates its users? There are a number of likely reasons for this - users are interested in building a reputation as media practitioners, and to feed off the recognition of the ABC for their own purposes.

There are also some interesting new hybrid approaches which are explored by the site - not least in community management (there is a social media producer whose role combines community manager and media producer elements). This bridges striated (hierarchical, vertical, top-down organised) and smooth (flat, rhizomatic) space, and Pool may be able to sit in between these two - that is, between the institutional hierarchy of the ABC and the social media environment of the user network. This also requires ABC staff (e.g. radio producers) to be able to move across these spaces, of course, and may need some retraining.

The collaborative practices of social media may also start to influence the larger organisation over time; the hope is that they are strong enough to break through the available gaps and affect institutional culture. This may also require a refinement of the figure of the social media producer, and Pool provides a useful test case for this happening. Additionally, this may also create innovative new social media forms which may become more mainstream in the future - and there is a need to rebuild Pool as a space which displays and demonstrates these outcomes. The second stage of Pool is hoped to be online by October this year.

Technorati : ABC, ANZCA 2009, Pool, collaboration, community, creativity, participation, social media
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