Jtm-pnw-session-emerge-particip

Emergent Participataory Curation Systems

We discussed the use of emerging 'signalling' technologies, particularly Twitter, for empowering communities of users to collectively curate news stories.

One of the critical elements is how to weight the input of each users fairly and appropriately, so that everyone can participate, but without devaluing the input of highly qualified participants.

One analogy that was made is film reviews. At one end of the "qualified" spectrum are the "star" reviewers like Roger Ebert, and at the other end is the box office, where individuals are "reviewing" a movie by buying tickets. In reality, the space between includes many individuals with a continuum of "qualifications" for providing valuable reviews. In an emergent participatory system, each of those individuals would have a weight somewhere between a ticket-buyer and Roger Ebert, and that weight would be determined "emergently" through their and others' interactions.

Twitter and Twitter lists in particular provide mechanisms for such a system.

A recording was made by Bill Densmore.

Attendees were: Jody Brannon - News21 David Poulson - Knight center env. journalism, creation of communities defined by watershed (great lakes) graduate students as test bed

Chuck Taylor - longtime journalist Nancy White - intersection of community, communication, engagement,

Jeff Van Der Klute - CircLabs

Leslie Lannan - journalism and social learning and new media, journalist as source, platform for learning , Elgg, Rheingold drupal, "going on"

Brad deGraf