Produsage Communities

Cardiff.
The next speaker at Future of Journalism 2009 is Andy Williams, who shifts our attention to user-generated content at the BBC, with a study based on interviews with BBC staff conducted in 2007. Andy, too, notes the substantial shift in perceptions towards a more active role for audiences (journalism as less lecture and more conversation), but in practice, journalist/audience roles at the BBC seem to have ossified rather than opened up.

BBC news has wholeheartedly embraced audience content (footage and photos, eyewitness accounts, audience stories); beyond this, however, also lie other forms of user-generated content, including audience comments, collaborative content, networked journalism, and non-news content. To embrace such content, there is a need for a new institutional framework; BBC journalists are now trained in engaging with UGC, and the phrase 'have they got news for us' is emblematic for this.

Cardiff.
After the very fruitful EDEM 2009 in Vienna I've once again entrusted my life to the dubious abilities of KLM to deliver me to the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff, where the weather has turned out to be unseasonably warm as well - seems like it's following me! Unfortunately I missed the opening keynotes, so if there were any brilliant new insights into the future of journalism there, we'll have to wait until the recordings become available.

Vienna.
We continue the Austrian focus at EDEM 2009 with Peter Parycek, one of the academics involved in the Austrian e-Democracy initiatives. He suggests that we're in the midst of a new media revolution towards a networked society,driven by digitisation, convergence, and the shift to many-to-many communication; this turns the Net into a social space, and changes our patterns of communication and organisation - the 2008 Obama campaign is a very good example for this.

In politics, advertising, and many other areas, word of mouth has become key in influencing public opinion - this is a shift from hierarchical to networked organisation, and the question now becomes whether we will be able to utilise these new patterns of the network society in government as well. An answer to this is provided by the emerging principles of open government:

Vienna.
Finally for this first day at EDEM 2009 we move to Sabrina Franceschini and Roberto Zarro, who present on e-democracy initiatives in the Emilia-Romagna region in Italy. The region set up its first participatory project, Partecipa.net, in September 2005, running to October 2007. It aimed to define and create participation processes in an integrated manner in the region, to promote participation not only towards citizens but also within the administration itself, to provide a tool for all administrative levels, and to define, test, and disseminate the methodology. It created a committed working community, an e-democracy project in the Partecipa site itself, and it managed to implement and test the participation kit.

Vienna.
The next session at EDEM 2009 starts with Michael Milakovich, who returns us to that question of citizen participation in e-democratic environments. So far, the overall lesson is probably that 'we've built it,but they haven't come yet' - and yet, in the US, online media were certainly used very effectively to help win an online election in the 2008 presidential elections, while the classic citizen participation model - the town hall meetings - are now being used and abused for partisan agitation.

This is an issue not least of digital democratic literacy; the use of social media and other electronic technologies remains in its infancy. There are issues with competing communication systems (used differently across different generations, but not neatly so), and the respective electoral structures also play a role in what e-democracy frameworks are appropriate (e-participation may loook differently in a direct democratic system than in the US electoral college framework, for example). Additionally, there are public concerns about the equation of politics with administration, and questions about the distribution of citizen and government responsibilities.

Vienna.
The next speaker at EDEM 2009 was me, and I think it went pretty well. The third person in our session was missing, so we managed to have 30 minutes of good discussion afterwards. Here's my Powerpoint, and the full paper; I'll add the audio when I can... I've now added the audio, too.

Technorati : Australia, Digital Economy, EDEM 2009, Government 2.0, Project Democracy, blogging, democracy, e-government, participation, social media
Del.icio.us : Australia, Digital Economy, EDEM 2009, Government 2.0, Project Democracy, blogging, democracy, e-government, participation, social media

London.
The next presenter at Transforming Audiences is Stine Lomborg, examining blogging as a form of collaborative produsage. She focussed on three personal Danish blogs, and examined six months' worth of posts and comments for this study, as well as interviewing the authors. The produsage angle of this study examines blog-based communication as an ongoing collaborative development of a shared text; this is combined with socio-cognitive reception theory in which genre is seen as a socially distributed cognitive architecture. The texts themselves were studied using conversation analysis.

London.
The next speaker at Transforming Audiences is Uwe Hasebrink from the fabulous Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg, focussing on a large study of young people's social Web use in Germany. Social Web use is a crucial tool in identity formation and expression today, of course, as well as in the managing and maintaining of relationships. The study, which Uwe conducted with his wife Ingrid Paus-Hasebrink, involved an analysis of relevant Web platforms, a qualitative study with young users, and representative telephone interviews with such users.

London.
The final speaker in this Transforming Audiences session is Floriana Bernardi; her focus is on the role of the audience for Roberto Saviano's book Gomorrah, a book on the mafia which was published in Italy 2006 and has been translated into some 40 languages (possibly the first such books to reach a large international audience). Gomorrah focusses on the banal everyday business of the mafia, rather than glorifying (or emotionally denouncing) the criminal life. It confronts the omertà - the resigned silence which prevents citizens from speaking out against the influence of the mafia on everyday Italian life.

London.
Jo Pierson and An Jacobs are up next at Transforming Audiences; their focus is on user innovation in creating new sociotechnical systems. Technology is layered, ranging from the application layer through presentation, session, transport, network, and data link layers to the physical layer; user innovation takes place to date mainly at the top of this layering, not in the lower levels. How can this be changed, and what tools are required to achieve it? How can the user be placed in control of the creative destruction which innovation can bring about - and indeed, what kind of innovation are we talking about?