Dan Gilmor’s Bayosphere citizen media project is generating some good lessons even though it is isn’t taking off as he had hoped. In his letter to Bayosphere readers/participants he lays out the hard slog. He is now focused on his new Center for Citizen Media.

For over a decade I’ve been subsidizing the time I spend with my citizen media … er … participation project E-Democracy.Org with other paid activities. We learned in 1994 that original content kills. It was too labor intensive for volunteers. Rather than try to raise money, we tried to have no costs and focus on the type online interaction where citizens naturally generated content. Today, people think of individual blogs for “natural” content generation, however we focused on local issues e-mail lists and now use an open source hybrid e-mail/web/multi-editor blog (not quite the third bit yet) online group system (it is not Drupal). Like Dan we use real names for quality control – absolutely essential. Unlike many others, we limit the amount of content (discussion comments primarily) that may be submitted by one person each day as well. This helps keep the online space from erupting into a flamefest which drives our participatory audience away. And like Dan, we think of our forums as serving the readers first and the posters second. That is how we’ve created agenda-setting online spaces instead obscure online speakers corners (most political blogs). Last night in St. Paul a house full of real “citizens” discussed the future of St. Paul E-Democracy (to be our first official local chapter) and they passed the hat. It was an inspiring night because ownership
over the idea that citizens can transform democracy in the information age was becoming distributed and therefore more sustainable. Some day (soon!) E-Democracy.Org will need to hire staff and that transition will be difficult, so I look forward to learning more from citizen media efforts around the world.

By the way, while I haven’t quite defined it, I am planning an online peer group for citizen media practitioners for later in 2006. Perhaps your organization would like to help launch such a forum.

Below are Dan’s tips.

Steven Clift

From Dan Gilmor

• Citizen journalism is, in a significant way, about owning your own words. That implies responsibilities as well as freedom. We asked people to read and agree to a “pledge” that briefly explained what we believed it meant to be a citizen journalist — including principles such as thoroughness, fairness, accuracy and transparency. Although some cynics hooted that this was at best naive, we’re convinced it was at least useful.
• Limiting participation is not necessarily a bad idea. By asking for a valid e-mail address simply in order to post comments, you reduce the pool of commenters considerably, but you increase the quality of the postings. And by asking for real names and contact information, as we did with the citizen journalists, you reduce the pool by several orders of magnitude. Again, however, there appears to be a correlation between willingness to stand behind one’s own words and the overall quality of what’s said.
• Citizen journalists need and deserve active collaboration and assistance. They want some direction and a framework, including a clear understanding of what the site’s purpose is and what tasks are required. (I didn’t do nearly a good enough job in this area.)
• A framework doesn’t mean a rigid structure, where the citizen journalist is only doing rote work such as filling in boxes.
• The tools available today are interesting and surprisingly robust. But they remain largely aimed at people with serious technical skills — which means too ornate and frequently incomprehensible to almost everyone else. Our tech expert, Jay Campbell, did a heroic job of trying to wrestle the software into submission to our goals. We still felt frustrated by the missing links.
• Tools matter, but they’re no substitute for community building. (This is a special skill that I’m only beginning to understand even now.)
• Though not so much a lesson — we were very clear on this going in — it bears repeating that a business model can’t say, “You do all the work and we’ll take all the money, thank you very much.” There must be clear incentives for participation, and genuine incentives require resources.
• On several occasions, PR people offered to brief me on upcoming products or events that they hoped I’d cover in my capacity as a tech journalist, but were happy to give the slot to our citizen journalists. This testifies to a growing recognition among more clued-in PR folks that citizen journalism is here to stay.
• Although the participants — citizen journalists and commenters — are essential, it’s even more important to remember that publishing is about the audience in the end. Most people who come to the site are not participants. They’re looking for the proverbial “clean, well-lighted place” where they can learn or be entertained, or both.
• If you don’t already have a thick skin, grow one.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 24th, 2006 at 6:30 pm and is filed under Blogs and Feeds, Citizens and Participation, Media, Online Communities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.