Approaches to Collaborative Production

Singapore.
The next day at ISEA 2008 has started. The first presentation this morning, by Susan Kerrigan, is about a creative research PhD project related to Fort Scratchley in Newcastle, New South Wales (which went through a number of names before the current name stuck). The fort guarded the harbour entrance for some time before being shut down and becoming a public space; it was recently restored.

The story to be told about it is both a military and a broader story, then. The approach to this work, then, is a rational, not a romantic approach to creativity, rejecting the auteur model and instead adopting a confluence model that brings together the individual, the field, and the surrounding culture. Susan came out of ABC TV, bringing those individual skills; cultural aspects included the body of knowledge already existing in the context of her project (not least also the local history relating to the fort); and the field within which she operated included the cultural intermediaries acting as gatekeepers, stakeholders, and collaborators. She also had to work with various institutional stakeholders, of course - from Newcastle City Council to various other bodies with a connection to the site and its history.

Susan now shows a little of the Fort Scratchley Website which she helped design - it's set up to be a pre- and post-site visit resource. The site includes a considerable amount of material and took a fair amount of time to generate; material is largely organised along a timeline from pre-establishment times through to present day. Overall, then, what is presented here is a broad-based story including military and other histories, created by a variety of skilled practitioners who worked collaboratively to generate this material. This, then, was a successful application of creativity theory to the project.

The next speaker is Claudia Cragg, whose background is in journalism as a foreign correspondent. She has recently moved into the new media field and highlights the lack of genuine approaches to citizen journalism in conventional media. The project she is presenting here is related to Aung San Suu Kyi, incorporating user-generated content into a collaborative new media project called Twitter Suu. How can such content be generated, and how is it then processed into the project itself?

Claudia builds here on the work of people such as Howard Rheingold (Smart Mobs), whom she interviewed for the purposes of her project in Second Life (unfortunately, the audio quality of the interview was relatively poor) - a key question emerging from this was related to the question of developing the site for Web or mobile phone delivery, and the level fo Web 2.0 features involved in it (this is also related to the extent to which people in Burma and the region were going to be able to access the site).

Further, the journalists with whom Claudia worked largely saw the blog element of the project as mainly an adjunct to their print publication; this was not acceptable, of course. After some dabbling in Google Page Creator, a first version of the site was developed using Plone and incorporated a number of Web 2.0 features; additionally, Claudia set up a participatory media project using Twitter.

Overall, the indication was that without blogging, the site itself was simply dead; participation was and is key. Journalists and bloggers rarely overlap as groups, however - few bloggers are good journalists; few journalists are good bloggers. Utilisation of Frontline SMS can be useful here (as seen currently in the coverage of Zimbabwe), but this remains an opt-in network for the non-profit sector; Twitter has more recently emerged as a key alternative tool for microblogging using mobile phones.

Eventually, then, Claudia set up the Twitter Suu site; here, the challenge was to change Twitter use from reportage about what people themselves are doing at any one time (first-person reporting) to a more third-person mode of coverage. In itself, at the same time, Twitter is insufficient for grounding a project; it needs to be combined with other sites (such as social networking platforms like Facebook or MySpace) - a further Facebook site incorporating the Twitter Suu feed was therefore set up. To drive traffic to the site, tag clouds were utilised (and this also required an analysis of the content of the existing site).

Overall, then, Claudia suggests that building a site is not enough (most journalists still don't necessarily recognise this); blogging is the sine qua non of bringing users to a site, but Web 2.0 is not a magic bullet either. Twitter alone will not stimulate engagement, and teamwork remains essential. There also remain very good opportunities for connecting new and old media components as well.

The next presentation is on collective movie script writing, by Pekka Ollikainen and Juha Kaario from the Nokia Research Centre in Finland. Their main interest, therefore, is in mobility, of course, but this applies beyond being on the move itself also to encountering changing situations, dealing with idle times, and making social connections. Mobiles are crucial in this, of course, and more people in the world today have mobile phones than Internet connections.

Nokia have developed a Mobile Journalism Toolkit, adding keyboards, recording devices, relevant software, and other elements to the mobile phone itself. Such tools are no longer used by mainstream journalists only, of course, but also by citizen journalists - and Juha notes that there's been a gradual shift in some contexts from citizen journalism per se to news coverage through social media; indeed, there is a shift here towards collaborative creative work, too, in the form of creative writing, community movies (including machinima like Red vs. Blue, but also full-scale movies such as Star Wreck and projects like A Swarm of Angels).

Pekka picks up on this to map out some of the interesting collaborative online film ventures - in addition to Swarm also projects like Open Source Cinema, or XiFilm. Additionally, there are now various collaborative film scripting tools such as PlotBot, Celtx, or more simply conventional wiki systems. Pekka and Juha used PlotBot to develop an open source movie scripting process, involving steps that assigned particular tasks to participants (such as theme, characters, synopsis, dialogue, scenes, and treatment).

Partially, this was done also through mobile devices uploading content (text, photos) to a basis PHP-driven forum system, which also enabled a kind of tag-based writing: as the synopsis is written, for example, users add their own personal tags to the content, which enables better management of a widely distributed collaborative process.

Additionally, further Web tools could be used in the scripting and production process - photo sharing and Google Maps for location scouting, for example; automated text analysis of the movie synopsis which generates tags and highlights relevant content in relation to specific scenes. All of this could also be used for purposes other than script writing, of course - Juha gives the example of environment monitoring here.

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