Today is the second day of the NPR annual membership meeting, and yesterday afternoon I got to facilitate a group discussion on how public broadcasting should use social media tools to engage the public during the 2008 election cycle. Following the meeting I wrote up some notes while riding on the train home, in order to prep for a summary presentation to the whole group this morning. I wanted to share these notes, which I've cleaned up to make them more readable, to help catalyze a broader conversation on the subject.
First of all, it's not a matter of talking about using social media just to improve our election coverage. Yes, we need to improve our technological capacities to create and share high-quality content about the election - no doubt about it. But we need to take it a step further. Several steps further.
It's about using our capacities as broadcasters, journalists and community conveners to facilitate a more participatory democracy. Creating an enabling environment for civil, civic discourse - achieving consensus whenever possible, but remaining respectful of each other's beliefs and values when we can't. Providing tools where we can work in junction with the public to help everyone make their vote - and our journalistic coverage - as informed as possible. Curating knowledge and data about issues and candidates so the public can hold candidates accountable before and after the election.
No matter what we do, we need to remember the election is about all of us, so all of us should have an opportunity to participate in public debate. An informed citizenry isn't achieved through lecturing to them, or only giving them a choice of partisan talking heads as the sole perspectives on a given issue . It's achieved by creating an ongoing, thoughtful conversation not beholden to soundbytes. To paraphrase Dan Gillmor, the public knows more about what's at stake than any single institution within public broadcasting ever could, and we need their help to make this conversation happen.
We must not neglect undeserved audiences - on the contrary, we should embrace them, providing platforms for participation, including activities on air, online, and on location. The voices in public radio and within the Web 2.0 world need to reflect the diversity of constituents who will be pulling the lever in November 2008. Whether it's young people or the elderly, chronic nonvoters, people of color, people with disabilities, people with limited Internet access or tech skills, etc, we must strive to give all stakeholders a stronger voice - one that political candidates recognize, respect and take seriously. Our work is to serve the public interest through public media - and what can serve the public interest more than strengthening our democracy by creating new, sustainable opportunities for all people to have their say?
We should strive towards common branding of all public broadcasting election activities. Common branding will allow us to connect the dots, from a rural station organizing an on-air debate for county commissioner candidates, to countrywide social media projects coordinated at the national level.
We need to recognize the challenge of encouraging local innovation with national coordination, and strive to reconcile this paradox. It's a matter of fact that local initiatives will often their different social media tools. It will be difficult, if not impossible, to dictate to everyone that they need to use Gather, they need to use Public Interactive, they need to use some tool created by NPR, etc. Multiple tools will probably be used, so we must promote open standards for aggregating content - consistent tagging protocols at the station level, heavy use of RSS to pull content together, distributed content modules that can exist simultaneously on local and national websites, etc - to allow all us to mix and mashup these resources so they can surface at the local and national level. Simultaneously, we should explore open, distributed tools for social networking, such as Explode and Elgg, as a way of creating a more seamless, transparent social media experience. For example, if New Hampshire Public Radio organizes an e-debate, residents in Spokane or Sarasota shouldn't have to jump through hoops if they want to participate. IF NPR hosts an online discussion, that discussion could be reflected on station websites, allowing the public multiple points of entry. Again, dictating a single platform for all activities is probably impossible, but promoting open standards and principles of implementation to give the public better right-of-way will make things a lot more productive.
What are some examples of some projects that could take place during the election cycle? Here are some I've been batting around.
This I Demand. Create a social networking tool that allows the public to speak truth to power and spell out why they're going to vote, and what they expect of their elected officials. A place where people can share and discuss what they demand of their policymakers. I believe this idea came up while eating Indian food with Dave Winer, but I could be wrong. If someone remembers where I first started talking about this and with whom, please let me know. :-)
A national video clearinghouse of candidate statements. Inspired by Dan Gillmor's work in California during the last election cycle, the idea would be to create a framework in which members of the public would capture candidates' statements on video every time they appear publicly. The goal isn't to capture macaca-like moments, but to get everything the candidates say on the record. Participants would then volunteer to transcribe and tag content based on the policy issues discussed, creating a distributed video database of candidates' positions. And for those who are elected, the archive could be used to gauge whether they've kept to their positions or not.
Community mediamaker partnerships. Every public tv and radio station in the country should invite local bloggers, podcasters and vloggers over for beer and pizza. Seriously. There are countless members of the public creating smart, insightful content about the election, both locally and nationally, and we could work with them so their voices are heard beyond the blogosphere, while new voices are also injected into the conversation.
Town hall meetings with local ethnic press. Not all of this can occur online or on air. What can we do on location? Events like town hall meetings are useful, but we need to reach out to new audiences. And that often means going directly to them rather than waiting for them to come to us. For example, many communities have a strong ethnic press, either offline or online. What partnership opportunities exist between them and public broadcasting? What other community-based orgs would be well suited for working with us and creating local dialogue that's meaningful and productive?
More mobcasting! I've been arguing for two years now we need better open source tools that make it possible for people without Internet access to listen to and create podcasts simply by using a telephone. There are commercial tools and open source systems like Asterix that can do this, but should make it easier for any station to do. The election provides us with an excellent opportunity to make this happen.
Things we need to coordinate local and national social media projects:
An election 2.0 toolkit - evolving collection of best practices and tools to help stations unfamiliar with Web 2.0 to experiment at the local level. This might also include recommended approaches for creating social media projects, common editorial principles and copyright principles for user content (Creative Commons, etc), how to involve users in moderation/curation, etc. The toolkit would exist and develop online but be portable so any station could have it in hand when they need it. It would emphasize turnkey tools with low barriers to entry, including open source tools.
An election 2.0 clearinghouse and knowledge sharing network. We need a way to keep track of who's doing what in public broadcasting related to the election. We need better tools that would track projects, tools, who's partnering with whom, discussions for coordinating activities, etc. It would serves as an enabler of initiatives, partnerships, help us avoid reinventing the wheel. We'll also have to figure out how content gets shared as well, local-2-national, national-2-local and local-2-local. That's a probably a dissertation in its own right, let alone a humble paragraph in a blog entry.
A public broadcasting election 2.0 strike force. The truth of the matter is that there isn't enough time to form a committee and create a white paper on what we might want to do, then report back in six months. Or even three months. With each week that passes, we fall further behind. And we can't think of this as a one-off taskforce that comes up with a plan, then walks away while expecting someone else to implement it. We need an Election 2.0 SWAT team, a strike force that can literally pull together the vision in a matter of weeks, not months, then evolve into the team that pulls it off over the next 18 months. A small group of people from across the system tasked to lay out the details, building upon the ideas many of us have been working on, in conjunction with new ideas from the system and the public. This team needs to be able to dedicate their time fully to this cause, while having the standing within the system to achieve a critical mass of consensus - then implement it, asap.
Again, time is running out, and the stakes are high. This is an opportunity to public broadcasting to shine. We can't do it on our own, and we can't do it without public involvement. It's their civic duty, but it's ours as well. It's about all of us. Public broadcasters, community partners and the public working together. Our voice, our vote. -andy
