How do YOU collaborate?
Help us create the story of We Media. We’re asking participants to contribute stories about a collaborative experience. These stories will become part of the collaborations at We Media. Your story can be in any form: a short narrative, haiku, photo, email exchange, anecdote, audio file, podcast, video, office memo, napkin scribble, or brilliant idea. You decide - be creative.
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I utilize a conferencing and collaboration software program called Townhall at George Mason University to post syllabi for all my classes and, more importantly, allow my students to communicate in weekly discussion forums we call the ONE THING (based on the Jack Palance line from “City Slickers”). The ONE THING is just that — THE one thing each students gets from each class; the one thing that has the most lasting impact. The students are able to interact (many students are more reserved in class), get a sense of what their classmates got out of class, and catch up on what they missed if absent. For me as the instructor, I get terrific feedback on what they heard. The carryover for the students is that the forum builds relationships in addition to the in-person class contact. I teach a Political Journalism class at Mason in collaboration with C-SPAN, Pace University and Denver University in which we use video conferencing technology to bring live, two-way interaction into the classroom/studio with guest speakers, the students from the other schools and the other instructors. We layer that with Townhall and the ONE THING, allowing the students to talk to each other after the events in the discussion forum. The class is wildly popular on all three campuses.
Steve Klein
Coordinator, Electronic Journalism Program
George Mason University
Fairfax, Va.
I’ve asked tens of thousands of people … What is the most powerful force in the universe? Responses? Love? Sex? (the Freud-Jung dialectic.) Gravity?
When Einstein was asked he opined … “Compound interest?”
For me it’s one of two things. Denial, or collaboration, because I do agree with the Japanese mystic … “None of us are as smart as all of us”.
- Watts Wacker
A haiku:
Collaboration
is consensus created
in consultation
I’ve become an accidental, now serial, e-community creator. Politically via the creation of ProgressNow. In business (most recently) via the creation of NewsGator. And as a collaborating e-citizen; I IM,OPML-and iTune-share, and e-photo swap … with family and friends.
Writing is a collaborative experience, though it hasn’t always been that way for me.
When I was a student at the Missouri School of Journalism, writing was an educational experience. When I was a reporter writing was an adversarial experience, typically me against the copy editors (I still don’t trust anyone who thinks a month-long investigative piece can be explained with a one column, three-deck headline). And when I was a PR executive, writing — at least writing that made any sense — was an elusive experience.
Now I am a “modern media” communications consultant and a blogger - and I share my writing with whomever wishes to share it with me. I no longer write my “Below the Fold” column for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain, but for anyone who subscribes to my RSS feed or finds an entry I’ve tagged.
I write, they comment, I comment back, I read their blogs, I comment and they comment back. We are sharing and discussing, breathing life into words that once died ignoble deaths as newsprint or electromagnetic pulses.
My writing - and any writing online - has immutable permanence. Conversations live in a persistent “to be continued” state, refusing to conclude just because there is a period at the end of a paragraph. Writing now has an instant and deep memory; the Internet never forgets.
I write - therefore I collaborate. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Wiki, naturally.
BEHOLD THE POWER OF THEM
The ironically named ‘BEHOLD THE POWER OF US’ is a single-day online news industry digerati calvacade, organized by the American Press Institute and held at the headquarters of the Associated Press. I should appeal to the FEW OF THEM in the media WITH …
Here’s kind of a weird example of collaboration … in 1999, while working at The Christian Science Monitor, I was trying to develop a new ad and direct mail campaign. It occurred to me that our readers knew far better than we did why someone would/should read the Monitor.
So I wrote an op-ed describing the challenge we faced in trying to tell strangers what was different about the Monitor that made it a must-read. I invited people to send me a couple of sentences stating “the Monitor difference” in their own words.
I got 450 responses, 2/3 of them by email within just a few days.
They were amazing — thoughtful, heartfelt, intelligent, compelling. Here’s just one example:
“Reading the Monitor is like being spoken to rather than shouted at.”
I wrote another op-ed to share some of the comments with readers, and we built a successful DM campaign around them. We posted them on the csmonitor.com in the “about us” section. And some of the phrases became part of our standard lexicon.
And we all got a big lift from knowing how much our readers appreciated us.
Collaboration is easy - collaboration is hard.
Here’s a story. A few denizens of public broadcasting got the same idea at about the same time, though we had never met. The idea was to build an online collaboration space where we could share, exchange, and repurpose media content from different public TV and radio stations. To do this right you need to set standards for content and metadata, all of which is interesting stuff but beyond the scope of this story. We found each other at a conference organized for an entirely different purpose, the gist of which seemed to be how to monetize and homogenize media content on the web. As our individual voices began speaking up for the potentials of our idea for serving the interests of democracy and human culture, we began to recognize each other as co-conspirators. And perhaps because the coffee was particularly strong that day, the ideas we voiced began to resonate in the conversations of more and more people. By the time of the conference wrap-up, the agenda had shifted to this Big Idea: let’s build an online collaboration space for sharing content and metadata throughout the public broadcasting system based on standards so we can better serve the public interest. The co-conspirators’ jaws dropped as the summary of our most radical ideas were read into the conference record.
A year later the conspiracy had become a collaboration reflected partially in the work published at http://www.opensourcebroadcasting.org. We envisioned a “public library model” of media publishing where anyone could contribute content, and anyone could consumer or reuse it to create new content forms. But everyone got busy, randomness and noise entered the picture, and without any formal organization or resources the collaboration faltered. We each pursued the Big Idea in our own way, and made little progress.
Meanwhile another conference participant, one of the monetizers and homogenizers, decided the Big Idea could serve the ideals of prestige and profits. At the same conference a year later he presented a version of online content sharing based on a proprietary system and what he termed a “shopping mall model.” The co-conspirators’ jaws dropped again for an entirely different reason.
The question left dangling is what’s to become of the Big Idea? The shopping mall version of it hasn’t exactly taken off, and looks to be made irrelevant by the release of iTunes 4.9. But the water has been muddied, and what once seemed a simple idea now looks complicated. The conspiracy that became a collaboration went back underground.
But the Big Idea, that the Internet can serve as a public library for media in the public interest, hasn’t lost its relevance. What remains to be seen is if the idea still has resonance.
London July 7th 2005 - terrorist bombs exploded on London subway trains and a bus. It was a day of loss and destruction, a day of courage and quiet heroism, a day when people, in the UK and around the world, turned to the BBC for the latest news. A day too of intense pressure for our news teams to get things first but more importantly to get things right.
And also a day when our newsgathering crossed a rubicon. Our audiences became involved in telling the story of the day as never before. Of course we have long used video and pictures from the public and invited them to give us their views by email or phone. But July 7th was different.
Our approach to core newsgathering changed forever as mobile phone cameras enabled the public to become image providers … and they trusted us with their pictures, hundreds of them.
Images and information sent in by text and email became an integral part of telling the story. Within 6 hours we’d received over a 1000 photographs, 20 pieces of amateur video, 4,000 text messages and 20,000 emails… in a way we have never seen before people were participating in our coverage.
The public have long turned to the BBC in times of crisis for information, analysis and a place to air their views … July 7th, and the days that followed, proved no exception.
Some of the figures are worth repeating.
· Well over half the population of the UK watched BBC coverage on TV.
· Our website received it’s most ever ‘hits’ in a single day
· More people than ever streamed TV and radio live to their PC’s
· And the world service and BBC World TV news took the story to a global audience of 190 million people. .
And at the heart of that coverage - providing raw information, key images and determining the tone of our coverage for the first time were the contributions from the public. The quantity and quality of their contribution has set a precedent for us - with major implications which we are still working through. It was a collaboration, enabled by consumer technology, forged by trust between broadcaster and audience and transformational in its impact.
The professionals within BBC News have important things to offer which are not shared by most members of our audience: expertise, knowledge, experience, editorial judgement.
But we don’t own the news. Increasingly, news is a partnership, a dialogue between the public and ourselves - as equals.
Taking a step back from the flow, I looked at my collaboration apparatus. It includes:
- Personal Communication clients: In this area, I group things that are about communication and collaboration on a closed or semi-closed channel (generally more one-on-one):
External IM clients (Trillian on the PC and Adium on the Mac, both allowing me to connect to Yahoo Messenger, AOL IM, MSN Messenger, and ICQ. Skype on both system for phone communication and Google talk on the PC), internal IM system for the office, email system (one for internal, web-based for external), land line phone, mobile phone (with SMS and MMS system for non-spoken communication), one-on-one face-to-face meeting
- Group communication: In this section, I list more open modes of communication and collaboration (many-to-many):
Webex client for virtual meetings, Conference room with audio and videophone equipment, internal blogs (and thinking of internal wiki in the future), meeting face-to-face
- Information distribution: Here is where I contribute on things others are saying/doing in a one-to-many fashion (ie. I post, they read). In this category, I would list:
- commenting systems on blogs, wikis, email, voicemail, personal blog.
Input storage: where I store info/input for later retrieval/analysis/manipulation: paper notebooks (always at least one with me), Office Suite (primarily Excel, Word, and Office), del.icio.us bookmarks, personal blog and Database (password protected), notes taken on smartphone, digital camera, recordings.
- Information Consumption: In this section, one can find input (I consider it important to read a lot in order to properly clarify my own thinking):
web-based RSS reader with over 300 feeds subscribed, which can also be used on mobile phone, podcast client (only a dozen podcasts a day), external wikis, comments on blogs, streaming video (on-demand only), newspapers, books, magazines.
The reason I list that last one is that consumption of information is an important part. That’s where the loop starts and often where it ends. Collaboration can take two forms, in my view:
- Start offering initial idea - Get Input - Modify (cycle again)
or
- Learn about new idea - Provide Input - See impact (cycle again)
It’s hard to figure out which one is the most efficient. I know for a fact that I can no longer live without at least some basic access to an internet connection on a regular basis (either via phone or computer) and that I cannot think of a computer without a browser, IM client, and net connection as actually useful.
What a fascinating idea and topic!! Intriguing comments people have made…
Well, my most recent time-consuming collaboration — as in 4 years! — has been my book. What it comes down to is that this book has been one BIG collaborative project.
I simply couldn’t have done it without the help of hundreds of people…
- Interviewed more than 250 experts (scientists, physicians, etc.)
- Hired research assistants.
- Decided to figure out a way to get in touch with my target audience while writing the book so I formed a Yahoo online support group to reach those people. We’re now up to 823 people (nearly 3 years later)… They collaborated in that, by the questions they asked, told me exactly what they wanted and needed to know (so that’s what I covered in the book). Many of them also let me interview them for the book.
- Have worked with numerous consultants.
- Worked with medical experts “vetting” certain chapters — more collaborating.
- And now I’m doing the ultimate in collaboration for a book that’s really been mine from the get-go. I just brought in a doctor, and so we’re now collaborating.
Thanks for helping me to look at it this way.
Connie
Author, SUGAR SHOCK! (Upcoming)
http://www.SugarShockBlog.com
I encourage people to talk and I listen — as much as possible. It’s amazing the ideas that people share when asked — and when they know someone is listening.
When I was at Forrester Research, everything was based on collaboration. Editors and analysts spent hours discussing and pushing the limits of each others’ thinking to make the best case for what the future had in store. I had never had the opportunity to work with such smart people to expand my thinking (and me theirs). The hardest part was applying that to a new research office in San Francisco, which for the first time broke this mode of in person collaboration. We quickly adopted IM (this was 2000) and even Word’s track changes feature to make the most of the two locations. As others found out around then, collaboration using technology was finally growing up.
Fast forward to 2005. I am now at a company called Gather (www.gather.com), and we are developing the technology to enable public and private groups in a way that is inexpensive to the user, and is in support of a user-driven publishing model. So I have moved from being immersed in highly personal collaboration to enabling highly efficient, yet somehow still personal, interaction. My goal would be to have that personal collaboration expand to how people think about politics, cooking, fly fishing, or even their personal trumphs and problems.
I am involved with building a Kiswahili wikipedia, a collaborative exercise. One of the reasons that have attracted interested participants to building up this bank of knowledge in Kiswahili is the fact that wiki platform enables people to produce knowledge collaborative and collectively. It is collaboration at its best. It is like building a house, where everyone brings their own bricks, which, of course, fit perfectly the desired pattern (of the house). Talking about collective intellinge…tapping into collective intelligence, this is it. So knowldege production is not only a practice in collaboration but it is also distributed, global, participatory…this is a form of “ujamaa”, the socio-political ideology linked to the first President of Tanzania, Mwalimu Nyerere.
Collaboration is the journey that is often an end onto itself.
Case in point: One of our young colleagues was stricken with a rare liver disease. She had days to live without a transplant. Naively, we all wanted to help. We would have scrubbed into surgery if we thought that would make a difference.
- we set up a blog to tell our story
- we reached out to fellow bloggers for links
- we unleashed the hounds of hundreds of trained PR pros with great media relationships and ended up on TV, radio even on the front page of the NY Post.
- we launched a keyword marketing campaign
- we did grassroots email marketing
- we did a lot more and we prayed
What were we trying to do? Again, in our naivete, we were hoping that these efforts would identify a liver for her faster. Having lived through a friend who was transplanted and eventually died, I and others knew it didn’t work that way.
What did we accomplish? We came together as a team around something, someone we all knew was important. We raised awareness, even if only for a short while, about the importance of organ donation. We did not affect the outcome of our colleague. She did receive her transplant through the normal channels.
We collaborated. And, for a little while, we set aside self. It made us each stronger.
We Media - Collaboration
In preparation for tomorrow’s We Media summit tomorrow in NYC, those of us participating have created a series of stories about collaboration. No doubt this will be discussed during the event. Check them out. Also, the summit which is filled
I am so far, more an observer of collaborative trends in media & technology, and am amazed and heartened by projects such as Wikipedia, Flickr, and what I have read about the BBC inviting the public to contribute to stories / pictures about the London bombings & the tsunami.
Wikipedia & these recent BBC experiments are great in that they enable ordinary people to turn into active producers of information & content from a global platform. However, I would be curious & interested in how far this laissez Faire can go before the content starts to dilute, become less meaningful. Or in other words, what happens to Wikipedia if the editing committee is not at work, removing entries that do not fit the bill. Or can & would media companies have a free-for-all section, wholly made up of news by the people, with no censorship at all?
At the We Media Gig
With Aaronson and Johnson
Of PBS Talking
As you think about collaborating I hope you focus on the ‘rate’ at the end of the word. The rate at which we work with others determine the meaning of collaborate. Once we discover the pace of working with others things take a new turn. Partnership puts us all on the same ship as we sail away to a new land.
thanks for the great conference - when i think of how i collaborate, it starts by meeting as many like-minded and passionate people as possible and then looking for the creative tension between our points of view. the day at we media was so great because while we were all discussing a similar domain, we each had different lenses. i left with both clarification and validation, as well as a lot more questions.
In case you didn’t get one, here is a link to the social media business model poster that i handed out at the conference:
http://www.managementinnovationgroup.com/docs/MIG_Social_Media_Poster.pdf