With my host Trebor Scholz from the Institute for Distributed Creativity I'm now confirming the various talks and presentations I'm giving in Buffalo and New York City as part of my research residency at the iDC - my thanks for them for having me and organising these events. For any readers based over there, here's what we have planned so far:
Recent years have seen the emergence of collaborative publishing models in key news Websites ranging from the worldwide Indymedia network to the massively successful technology news site Slashdot and further to the multitude of Weblogs. Such sites have been instrumental in debunking political misinformation and providing first-hand coverage of unfolding events from 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina, but also provide an important corrective to the mainstream news media in their everyday coverage of current events.
Building on collaborative approaches borrowed from the open source software development community, their participants are gatewatching the news: filtering through the reports of a myriad of news sources, collating the news and adding their own commentary and analysis. In the process they develop a style of dialogic and deliberative journalism which provides a credible alternative to gatekeeping and other traditional journalistic models of reporting and has enabled millions of users around the world to participate in the online news publishing process.