Persona-rji

Wednesday, 9 a.m.-10:30 a.m. Project Update: InfoValet: "From Paper to Persona"

http://www.papertopersona.org

A call to action:

Making the marketplace for trust, identity and information commerce

RJI consulting fellow Bill Densmore leads a fast-paced discussion of his draft white paper, "From Paper to Persona: Managing Information Overload; Sustaining Journalism in an Attention Age." The draft paper is available for reading or skimming from:

• http://www.newshare.com/whitepaper.pdf

Plan to participate in a tough assessment of the potential for industry collaboration through a public-benefit organization that would help make a marketplace for trust, identity and information commerce.

Agenda/Schedule

• Powerpoint walkthrough of "Print to Persona" (25 minutes)
• Q&A (15 minutes)
• Describe discussion process (5 minutes)
• Groups of 3-6 discuss questions/concerns about notions of trust, identity, infocommerce ecosystem (15 minutes)
• Report backs from discussion groups (15 minutes)
• Consideration of next steps (10 minutes)
• Quick highlights of InfoValet Discovery Service beta effort at The Missourian

  (if time) -- 5 minutes

Key premise

Densmore has been previewing the white paper from http://www.papertopersona.org . . . he writes:

"As the news and paper come unglued, what will pay for journalism in the new news ecosystem? . . . An emerging Attention Economy is transforming the news business. It represents for the institutions which practice journalism a chance to survive beyond the era of mass-market advertising, by becoming “information valets” for their readers, viewers and users. Trust, access, identity and value are core issues, affecting convenience, privacy and personalization. The attention economy will invite new collaboration among news, advertising, publishing, entertainment, technology and philanthropic services . . . [T]he defining challenge for news organizations in the 21st century is no longer managing proprietary information, but helping the public manage our attention to ubiquitous information. In less than a decade, we have moved from a world of relative information scarcity -- access restricted by a variety of technical choke points -- such as presses -- to a world of such information abundance that the average user's challenge is not how to access information, or even how find it, but how to personalize, trust and make sense of it. The Internet as we know it today is not up to this task. With a new, public-benefit initiative, it will be.

Synopsis of white paper

The challenge of meshing trust, identity and information commerce in a common system with the potential to help sustain journalism has been undertaken conceptually by a researcher at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Reynolds Fellow Bill Densmore has written the report: "From Paper to Persona: Managing Information Overload; Sustaining Journalism in an Attention Age." The paper calls for the creation of a public-benefit Information Trust Association. It would -- within the limits of existing antitrust law -- convene publishers, technologists, foundations and the public to create a system for exchanging small bits of content -- a sort of microaccounting system -- among multiple independent publishers. In Densmore's "InfoValet" system idea, public users would be able to choose from a plurality of information agents from which to open a one ID, one-bill account that would work to purchase information broadly.

Densmore also sees the Information Trust Association as making and enforcing protocols governing users' "persona" -- personal information -- and allowing consumers to barter that information for value across the same microaccounting, or “value exchange,” system. The ITA will guide not run this trust, identity and information commerce environment – sanctioning and enabling multiple competitive businesses. The banking industry might play a role in the back shop processing.

Densmore sees all this as necessary as news organizations switch from producing products -- newspapers and broadcasts -- to a service -- helping users to find the information -- in any venue – which they need to be informed, effective citizens.

In this role, Densmore writes, publishers will have to rely less on a mass-market advertising and undifferentiated markets, learning instead to understand and deliver the personalized information needs of individual users. This will require that each publisher be able make money referring their users to each others' content -- hence the need for the microaccounting.