This is an example of one of the mini series that we are working on. We call it Your Voice. Each day we respond to the news or to what we are hearing and an intern goes out with a Flip Camera and asks people a question.
No editorial - No follow up. Over time we see patterns emerge.
I see a pattern here - what do you see? We can play this out in the comments.
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This is from our "beta" site at KETC where we are getting ready for a real launch of our work on Immigration next week.
This short clip says a lot about what we are trying to do. The main focus of this clip is a conversation about how the media is handling Immigration. As you will see, the people at the dinner table are not impressed!
They remind us that Immigration has become not only a "Hot" issue but is also very polarizing. How the media handles issues like this is seen by them as being a major part of the problem
They fear that if the media does not change this practice that we will never get to the place we need to to deal with this issue or in fact with any complex issue.
So what to do? KETC is not a traditional news organization but it is a public TV station in St Louis. What are some of the things that we hope to do over the next months?
Firstly it is to create spaces where real conversation can take place.
This clip shows a tiny aspect of this intention. In this case we had been involved in a conversation on Linkedin about immigration that had surprised us with how civic the tone was. There were people with many different and strongly held views - but they were polite and respectful. So we asked some of them if they would like to continue the conversation over a dinner that we would host and film.
This is the first clip of what will be many and what we hope will become a series where particular topics will be raised. Here you see what they think of the media today - not much!
We will be doing much more of this - making it safe for people to have a conversation - both on film and online.
We are also helping the public have their voice. Until now the public's voice is very filtered. We are creating a space where people can talk directly to people.
To help pull this off, we have set up a school to teach the public in St Louis how to make their own films. We can all point and shoot video today - but telling a good story and editing well is hard. Every week we are training new classes of the public in how to tell a story on Video.
So we are we are putting the "Public" into the Production of Public TV.
You will see a lot of films made by people just like you about immigration. We are using the web and this space to offer the public their own voice.
We are also putting the public in the driver's seat in how we conceive of a traditional show as well.
Traditionally TV producers think deep thoughts and then go out and find the stories that they hope the public will like. We have reversed this process as well. Over the last 8 months, we have gone out into the immigrant and refugee communities in St Louis and asked them what was going on. We have talked to more than 300 groups and to more than 1,000 people.
Before this we knew as little as most people do about immigration. Now we know a lot. You will meet many of these people on our site. You will discover them as we did - no longer as labels but as people. Not as "the other" but as flesh and blood people like you.
Based on all of this interaction - we are also making a 4 hour documentary about immigration. Months of engagement in the community has given this work the kind of roots that are unusual.
Starting soon we will share with you - long before the work is finished - parts of the stories, people in the stories, issues raised by the stories - so that we can use your feedback and interaction with you to refine our work further.
Finally we will share with you what we have learned from this work. Even if we are partly successful, we hope that we may help others go further.
I wish I could say to you that this has been easy or even fun. It has been the hardest and most painful work that I and many involved have been through.
Why? Because it is all about Culture. We have had to give up all our expertise and become novices. Novices who have no master to make it all safe. For this path has not been travelled before. I now know how Columbus' crew must have felt before they hit landfall.
As I said KETC is not a news organization. Nor are we a social media organization. We all know the words about how to use social media and how to have conversations. But it is another thing to act upon them. All our norms about who were are and how we do things have been challenged. We have all felt stupid and we have all experienced personal failure and stress.
But we have hope now - we can see that we are making progress. We are not there yet but we can hear the birds and smell the shore.
Our hope is to establish in our actions, the new habits for how a TV station can serve the community in which it lives. In effect to open the doors to the public and have the public come into the station that after all is theirs.
Our hope is to show that public TV can create a place where Americans can talk about hard things and find a way forward together.
We launch formally next week. We have not got all of this worked out yet. So we start with only a landfall. This is only the beginning. In 4 months, much will have changed from where we are are. In fact we find that every week that goes by is different.
If you are interested in immigration. If you are interested in how to get the public into public media. Then please join us and please help us by well "helping us" - please get involved.
We need your views of how we can make what we do better. We need you to work with us to make Public TV - Public. We are not smart enough on our own to do this.
There is a lot at stake - if we can use a new model that promotes a true discourse - then some good may come out of the immigration debate. Isn't that important?
If we can find a way to blend in as a station with our local community, then we might have found the connection that we need to take public TV to a new level of relevancy. Isn't this the holy grail of the new media?
If we can help cope with a complex problem like immigration then we might also know how to help with other complex issues such as energy, food, the war, our education system, health and the economy. Isn't this the way forward for the nation?
Someone has to start somewhere. Why not us and you?
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via youtube.com
However this works this is a great start!
Back to my point on how to do this - Leadership is key - so here we see the PM himself making a symbolic point that the British Government is going to use social media to help engage with the public.
Even if this had been a department head, it would not have been enough - but now with the PM the door is open.
So PEI why not get on board too - VAC is there and can help you
Engagement has not been the forte of any PEI government - but a much better job is possible. Cynthia Dunsford has been a key player out there and can help too.
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I think it is a given that Culture is the main barrier for most large organizations as they look at how to use Social media. As my colleague Joe reminds us there is real hesitancy in the mainstream. No large bureaucracy can be so bound by the fear of losing control than government. So it is interesting - to me anyway – to discover a Canadian Federal Government Agency, the Department of Veterans Affairs, that has got more than a toe in the water. They are well engaged in an area where it is relatively “safe” to find out how to do this. I think that their experience here will give them the right and the know how to expand this into their operational area and to give others in Government the experience-based confidence to follow.
When the public think of Veterans Affairs, many of us think of Battlefields and Memorials. I was one of many thousands who returned to Vimy Ridge for the 90th anniversary in 2007.
Like many who visited, I blogged about my experience and posted a lot of information. Of course in these days I was not alone. Today thousands of us post material. Many people are exceptionally knowledgeable. There is enormous wisdom and energy embedded in those who visit.
One of the first ahas of Keith Hillier and his team Teresa MacLean and Joey Mokler – was that they could enhance the experience by bringing the Battlefield to the public rather than focus only on bringing the public to the Battlefield.
This recognition that there could be a “safe” way to bring the public in had very early roots in VAC. Today “silverorange” is a global leader in designing social media platforms. They have sites designed for leading entertainers such as Feist and Sloan, have added design to Firefox and Ning, have leading edge sales sites and so on. But few know that silverorange got its start with Veterans Affairs. A long time ago when many who are now old men at silverorange were in their early teens, VAC put out a tender for kids to create a Virtual Memorial for all those that had died in Canada’s conflicts.
This is the entry for my wife’s uncle Bill.
These are the entries that I made on his behalf. So even before “Social Media” was a buzz word, VAC had created a site, using kids, where the public could find out about their loved ones online and where the public could not only look but participate.
The key issue here in terms of culture and barriers, is that this is quite real – the public are really contributing and the service is authentic and valuable – but that the risks are low. Above all that VAC is learning by doing how to get a start.
They are much further along now. When I first started work with VAC about 10 years ago, they had this wonderful archive of film that they had made of interviews with Vets from WWI, WWI and Korea. The question back then was what were they going to do with this.
The answer of course has been YouTube!
Over time this invaluable archive is being made available for all of us. Not just in a static way but in a way that we can all use and share.
So what about today? Canadian Forces have been in action for many years in Afghanistan. What about their story? What about their families?
The answer is of course Facebook! There are over 200,000 members right now. Much of this is very personal and touching.
Here we see a film made by young Canadians about what Vimy meant to people in New Brunswick followed by a piece on the Highway of Heroes – the route taken by our fallen as they return from Afghanistan.
So what is really going on behind the scenes at VAC and how can what they are doing help you? Here are a few “Tips” that I can see now after nearly a decade in this work.
1. Leadership - First of all the work is being lead by a very senior and trusted executive – Keith Hillier ADM. My experience is that skunk works don’t work. At VAC as at KETC and before at NPR – having the most senior executives as the real champions is essential. For there are organizational risks and there is big push back and fear. Having a very senior person lead the charge enables you to extend your reach.
2. Use Projects – Don’t try and change the world in one go. Have a real project that you can use to find our by discovery and trial and error that will not get people fired if things don’t go well. At VAC this began with the Virtual Memorial and then has been extended into putting the film archive online on YouTube and now with asking the public to participate on Facebook. Teresa told me of their fears of trolls on Facebook. Conventional wisdom is that if the community is sound enough, they will control the trolls. But of course you don’t know that for sure. The war in Afghanistan is a tricky topic right now and sure enough some came to the site to talk about this. But the community – who are there to support the troops and their families asked them to go away and they did!
3. New actions lead to new thinking not the other way around - You can plan for ever, you can imagine for ever but it is only when you do that you learn and by learning your mind gets changed. By choosing small projects that could be made “safe” VAC is doing the doing and so all at VAC, not just the members of the team, can experience the new for themselves.
4. Start small - The team behind Keith includesTeresa MacLean and Joey Mokler. The money behind this is tiny. But the support is big. I think this is the safer way ahead. Jesus was born in a manger. Moses was found in the Bullrushes. You keep the organizational risk and the naysayers quiet by not announcing the second coming up front.
5. Partner – The early partnership was with a group of local teen nerds – what a gift to them and what a gift to PEI. You will not have the skills inside when you start. Now VAC wish to extend this to their service delivery for Vets. They do not have the resources for this. So the plan is to Partner – Partner with other agencies that can help them build a robust service delivery platform.
6. Have a clear vision for the future where social media gives you the win – The vision for “Commemoration” (Memorials etc) was to bring the memorial to the Public. The Vision for “Commemoration” – offering meaning for the sacrifice and the lives of our vets was to give this to the public. The new service delivery goal will be to shift the web from being a big pamphlet to being the place where the services of VAC are enacted – where a vet can get what he or she needs. Finally the visions for the social needs of the vets – which in most cases exceed the program needs – is to use the web to help vets get connected to others like them so that they can help each other. So far so good!
I think that VAC have earned the right to go for the service goals now – don’t you?
I think that they offer us a process that any large organization can follow too – don’t you?
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At KETC we will soon launch a project on "Immigration" in America. The deep question that we will be asking in a year of hosting an online space and making a 4 hour documentary is "What is the experience like for all people and where should we go?"
A huge challenge for us then is "Voice". What is our position? For the range of opinion is vast, the emotions are high, many see the issue in terms of good versus evil, few look into any of the pragmatic aspects.
It's a minefield!
Jay Rosen has been digging into the traditional perspective taken by the orthodoxy that journalists have to have:
He has opened a hornets nest!!!
I called him last week for advice and here is what we came to.
First of all we were clear that Immigration is not a simple or even a complicated issue - issues that are knowable and that can be resolved by applying known rules. It's a Complex Issue: Being Complex means that it can only be known via the process of "Emergence" - lots of trial and error leading to patterns not to single solutions.
On Jay's site I made the point that this felt like a Quantum world where only zones of probability could be determined and where the view of the observer would always affect the observed.
Another reader said that this was "Bullshit" - but while the issue of complexity may not be Quantum it does share the reality that there can be no single right answer.
The other point is that there can never not be bias. We all live in a world of a cultural screen. We all screen in or out what does or does not fit. To believe otherwise is to be naive.
So where pragmatically does that leave us at KETC?
It might be this? (Welcome your views for this is just MY opinion)
Here is how Johnnie Moore puts it:
Johnnie tells us that the answer is simple but difficult. Difficult because the answer demands that we converse in a different way. Yes the simple idea is that we talk to each other differently. The challenge is that to do this we have to give up some hard wired habits.
What we have to give up is using conversation as a duel or a combat where the dominant player wins and all ideas that don't fit are killed as are of course the divergent thinkers. What we need is a conversation that opens up new ideas and that builds community.
Here is how Dave Snowden sees the distinctions:
One thing is certain - that the Simple and the Complicated worlds are not what we are dealing with here.
So what do you think - how can we best offer up the full complexity of an issue such as Immigration?Continue reading "What is the "right" voice to cover Complex Issues?" »
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Have books been bad for us?
by Rob Paterson
A really weird thought has been building in me for months. Have books been a bad thing?
Is this better?
If so – why?
If so – Is this the campfire of all campfires?
So what’s my argument?
Many people are convinced today that the birth of the web is making us stupid. That the web is only superficial. That only dense books can contain and spread real knowledge.
I am coming to the conclusion that the opposite is true. That books make us stupid and that the web, like the campfire and for the same reasons as for the campfire is what makes us clever.
So here goes. All our foundational knowledge was discovered around the campfire. Imagine you a hominid sitting around the fire at night. You are awake. You are looking at each other. I would imagine that at first, before we could speak, we sang or made music together. The fire elicited a social dance of interaction and community.
I think we can surmise that the campfire helped us speak and so it helped us become conscious. Something like this happened about 100,000 – 60,000 years ago. For suddenly our tool development, art and technology took off. All the foundations of our world today were discovered in a 10,000 year period. Tools had been the same for a million years. Within a 1,000 years they were completely different. We invented pottery. We invented metallurgy. The wheel. Everything we depend on was discovered then. Not only discovered but widely disseminated in a short period of time.
How did this occur?
My bet is that it happened because of the social process created by the campfire and by our hunter gatherer culture of equality. Such an environment extracts order from chaos. Design from intuition. It is ideal for the exploration of implicit knowledge. It is ideal for discovering things that we don’t know exist. It is ideal for taking half baked ideas and refining them. Let’s use a thought experiment.
How did pottery get invented? Surely no one said “Let’s have a project to invent Pottery!” How can you invent something that had never existed? No it must have happened like this – The People stopped for the night after a rainfall. The next morning, as they prepared to leave, the fire keeper noticed that beneath the coals that she was harvesting, the ground had baked to a crust. Maybe she could carry the fire in this thing – this bowl. That night as they shared the food around the fire, she told the people what had happened and showed them the “bowl” that she had lifted out of the earth the day before. And the conversation began – how had that been? Did it hold the fire well? What else could it hold? What if we put it back in the fire? Would it hold water? And on and on. Experiments were made. Some earth worked better than others. At the seasonal meeting with the Cousin Peoples, the People shared their story with the others and gave up a “bowl” as a gift their elder. At the next season meeting, the two tribes spent days sharing the stories of the experiments that they had been making…….
There was no peer review. There was no authorized way of doing it. No one was telling anyone. They were sharing and asking and arguing. They were having conversations!
But with the book comes authority. With the advent of the book, much of knowledge development stopped. Only the in group was allowed to play. What mattered was not observation. Not trial and error. Not experiment. Not sharing. But authority. Most of the accepted authority were texts that had no basis in observation or trial and error. Ptolemy, St Augustine and Galen ruled.
Worse because of the “Book” people who did observe or test were killed or persecuted. The Book stood for the ONE WAY. It spoke not you.
For a while, with the advent of the press, knowledge opened up.
But where did the great advances then come from? Did they come from the Universities? No they came from amateurs – from Natural Philosophers. Who met in clubs over dinner to talk about their work. Gradually, the “BOOK” came back. Only papers written and approved inside the authority system counted as being right. People outside the authority system were discounted.
Knowledge was seen as an explicit thing – an object. The Book was its metaphor.
But now with the web, we have a global campfire. Once again, we can play with ideas, with observations and experiments. Once again we can share with equals who will not knock us down. Even better, this time the group around the fire is not 35 people but all of us.
What new things will come from such a process? Surely amazing things. Things that could never have come from the use of books.
As a person who loves books, whose life is reading, I now wonder……
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The statue’s pedestal bears the words of poet Emma Lazarus, written in 1883:
Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.When the Ellis Island immigration center opened its doors on an island in New York Harbor near the Statue of Liberty in 1892, Lazarus’ words welcomed the 12 million immigrants who passed by “Lady Liberty” after trying trans-Atlantic journeys on their way to becoming Americans.(Daily Cufflinks)
Is this still true? Is America still the land of opportunity for those that seek it?
There is no doubt that in 2010, Immigration, will move to the top of the list of issues that Americans think about. But what will the debate be like? Send all the illegals away! Give amnesty to all! Will it pander to our worst fears? What is the truth?
Can we find a truth? Labeling people is so easy. We know “us” and we don’t know “them”, so it is easy to put our fears on “them”.
At KETC we are trying an experiment - we are going to do our best to help each other find more of the truth. For we know no more than you. We too only know what we know and that is not very much.
So here in this space we are going to do our best to make a place where we can discover more of the truth than we could know if we only bandied about soundbites. We plan to build a very complex web presence to handle a very complex issue. In addition we are planning a 4 hour TV series on Immigration today in America that I think we can use as a Social Object or Catalyst to focus attention.
There have been TV shows that have had a web add on before. There have been web series on issues. This is a first. The first time that a TV station has built a holistic whole of TV and Web. Where the broadcast has been wrapped in engagement from the first.
The TV series will be shot this summer and fall and we begin this week with the web. The engagement process, where we go out to the community and find out from them directly what is going on started 2 months ago.
Here is our design for how the web will role out over the nest few months.
News and Comment - We are getting ready to bring you the most interesting stories being written by anyone. We as a team are scanning the web and we ask you to help us here too. We are also experimenting with a brand new type of search tool, Darwin, that will look for how issues rise and fall on the web. (More on that later). We are building human networks that will reach into the immigrants in St Louis – nurturing social bridges that we hope will enable people who today are only labels to others find their own voice and not only tell their own stories but also help each other find their way in the strange new land that is America. We hope that we can go back and forth between the web and the people and see how the truth emerges.
We will be adding a Twitter and Facebook stream to this soon and we hope that you can help us find material that will add more light to the entire topic. We hope that this space can become the best place to go to find out the wider truth. To discover an emergent picture of what is really going on.
Helping new Americans find their way - As we prepared for this project, we were stunned at how complex the journey is to become not only a legal American but also as important an assimilated American – a person who fits into the culture. We were stunned to find out how complex the legal issues are. We were stunned to find out how much conflict there is between cultures that see the extended family as the core of existence and the homeland culture that looks to the law. In this segment we plan to offer a number of views. First of all people need expert advice. Getting the system wrong is easy and has enormous consequences. We plan to find sources of expertise who can shed light – just as we did in our Facing the Mortgage Crisis project. We at KETC can never be the experts, but we can help you find ones that you can trust. But we have found that there are two kinds of experts. The technical experts and those who have lived and are living what you are going through. We plan to offer the second kind as well. We hope to have a panel of New Americans that have made it. Made it through all the system and also made the cultural adaptation. We hope to find a panel of immigrants who too are finding their way. It is our hope that such a panel will have the practical expertise to ask and answer the best questions. For who will know more than they about how to make this journey?
Helping established Americans find a place for their concerns - Many people have deep fears. Fears of having their economic future threatened. Fears of losing their community. Fears of losing their culture. Many others merely dismiss these fears as being stupid and then wonder why people become angry. We plan to explore these fears. For a fear explored is then a fear that can be coped with. What is the impact on jobs? What is it like to have your community change around you – who gets to set the culture? Most of all “Who are these strangers” and “what do they want”?
Dealing with the “Other” - Nothing is more scary than the unknown. As we walk down the street and we see people who are unknown and unknowable to us. They look so different. We plan to explore the “different”. What it is to be Bosnian in St Louis. To be Liberian, to be Mexican, to be Chinese, to be Irish or Scots, to be different. We will explore food, music, religion, family life. What is their culture. We will explore what brought people here and what the journey has been like.
We hope to give people a chance to be themselves in public to show yes how different they are but also how much they are the same. How they too want the freedom that America represents. How they care about many of the same things. About what they face from the dominant culture. How surface similarities hide fears. Such as how a Liberian can be taken for an African American until he opens his mouth and how the same is true for a Bosnian being taken for a WASP. We will find out that many immigrant groups who believe that they are unique will find out that others share much of their story such as how both a Liberian and a Bosnian have both come from a war zone so horrific that we cannot imagine – how maybe both boys saw their father killed in front of them.
Established Americans are strangers too for many newcomers. Much about the established America is hard to understand. This is manifested not only in the streets, the schools and the workplace where we all meet but in the homes of many traditional immigrant families. As the youth adapt, as girls wear new clothes, as boys listen to new music and eat new food, the older generations become afraid. As the power to translate the new culture moves to the young the old power lines in the family are threatened.
Our hope is to give all a chance to celebrate who they are and so give us a glimpse of not of a stranger but of people that we get to know who too have fears, hopes, families and a deep desire to do well in life.
Video and Story - As you can see as this project evolves, we intend to give up most of this space to you. Much of it will involve video. So to enable you to tell your story well on video, we have set up a “school”. This “school” is here to help you learn how to master short form story telling for the web. We will teach editing, all the mechanics and how best to tell a story. To help in this, we also have more than 100 Flip cameras that we will be lending to those that wish to tell their story.
The Documentary - Currently we are in the development phase of the film making process. We are deciding on what 4 big stories we will tell and what each story needs to be made. As we get more defined, we will come back to you here and tell you what we are doing. You will see the documentaries being made – the “story of” will be made as we make the story. There will be times when we need your help and we will ask you here for it.
The Team - At the moment the team is all from KETC. It involves people from all disciplines. But in time, we will withdraw to the background. Most of whom you will see and hear from will be from the community of St Louis.
This weekend we launch a new project at KETC. We are taking a subject that is at the heart of the nation - its social, economic and cultural heart - and trying something never before attempted.
We are trying to get away from the "He said" - "She said" - "on the one hand" and "on the other" POV of how issues are traditionally covered by the media.
We hope to offer up the broad complexity of the issue.
We are creating a TV series that is surrounded and informed by social engagement and the web. No add on after the show but the Petri Dish in which the show is born.
We are creating a "Social Object".
Over the next year, I will do my best to tell you the story of this project.
This post is from our new website. It has just been launched. It's only a starting point right now.
We are at the day of birth today. Much has been happening in the womb before this day. Much of it messy and painful. We have had to go from let's put on a show to having a real plan based on real objectives. Later I will tell you about those struggles.
Our new child is as helpless and feeble as a new born is. But as the months go on, she will I hope, grow into a strong and capable person - capable of reaching the potential that her "parents" KETC hope for her.
My hope is that by November we can have expanded the debate beyond the demagoguery that I fear and that we with your help may shed light and hope into this so complex and taxing issue.
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Online dating is bigger than porn – People want Contact more than Content
by Rob PatersonFacebook has over 400 million members and growing. Why?
Now it is clear that people are finding that online is THE PLACE to find a mate. Average time on site 22 minutes! Average age is 48. Customer spend on average $239 a year. The industry is worth over a $1.0 billion a year. Why?
What this says to me is that:
- People are alone and cut off – they want to find safe ways of connecting
- What we want is social contact more than content
- If you have content, then you have to wrap contact around it - a Jane Austen Book Club will do it – As Hugh says make it into a Social Object
- Your content becomes a Trust builder- Is this why so many personal ads say “I am an NPR listener”? It could just as well say “I am a Tea Bagger” – still tells others who you are
Contact – real human contact is what people want. The proof is in the sex statistic – 1/3 of women have sex on the first date – why? I think because the online dating algorithms work – both feel that they are indeed a match and the barriers go down
And your online social strategy is based on what ideas?
HT Stowe Boyd http://www.underpaidgenius.com/
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So about $3.8 million is planned to be spent on the new online ad strategy for PEI Tourism. Let's see where the money will go and then look at a PEI alternative.
My bet is that the agency will chew up most of the $3.8 million in "Creative" and in Placement. My bet is that at least 90% of the money will leave PEI. Next year we would start all over again.
Also remember that ads compared to real stories and engagement and participation have very little impact.
So what it we did it on PEI and followed the new rules as I laid out in the prior post. Who would do the work?
If we went down this route - we would be building permanent capacity that would get better each successive year. Story builds on story - community grows like a garden - so then do the connections and the attachment.
As importantly - all the money we spend stays at home:
So it's not too late to do the right and the best thing........
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