Panelists:
Kent Bye
Raymond Kristianson
Josh Wolf
Brett Gaylor

__________

I’m thinking about making a 4-5 minute video that covers and demonstrates all the basics of the Echo Chamber Project collaborative workflow for people to watch ahead of time, and to keep the panel portion brief so that we can leave more time for dialogue during the session.

QUESTION:

• Do you guys also want to create intro video statements ahead of time?

• Or is the question, do we want to screen this intro videos as part of our panel.

The broader thing that I’m trying to do is what Marty Kearns calls “Network Centric Activism,” which is built on top of the Drupal/CivicSpace advocacy toolkit.

The question that I’m trying to answer is:

• How do you engage lots of people with multimedia tools that can be used to bring about social change?

For me, the mainstream media fails to cover a lot of complexity in their news stories, and so vlogging has the opportunity to fill these gaps through a number of different ways –

• By covering issues through the lens of personal stories
• Individual episodic documentary-type coverage
• Through larger-scale collaborative projects like ECP.

QUESTION:
What other approaches are there that we should discuss or think about?

• We should also discuss collobaration in terms of independent news bureus like indymedia and now public which allow anyone to publish their news.

• the role of independent videobloggers as journalists. I’m currently involved in a case involving this issue with a Federal Grand Jury. It definitely seems like something worth discussion to me personally, and I’d hope others as well.

• Empowering under represented people to shed light on their own stories, ala Homeless Nation, and to some extent, Current TV.

• Building a viable alternative to the corporate media with videoblogs and vlog networks as a component within the existing alternative television media: the Real News (formerly Independent World Television News), Free Speech TV, Link TV, and again Current. Also DVD distro projects such as Ironweed Films, MoveOn viewer parties, and The Rise Up Network

Finally, Marty Kearns has an excellent post about how local and personal participation can bring about global change, which is a concept referred to as “G/localization”

His post called “G/localization: What are the lessons for Advocacy Planners? Network-Centric Design Issues” digests one of danah boyd’s recent essays.

He writes:

In our campaigns we should:

• Empower users. Give them the ability to personalize and culturalize messages of social change and organizing. Help people move social change messages into contexts in which their expression can carry organizing message with subculture norms. (Think creative commons all content and allowing messages to be easily edited, formatted, mashed together and posted in lots of formats. )
• Foster campaigns that recognize messages move across many environments and cultures help users properly “see” and connect with each other in many situations and contexts.
• Empower individual users to be cultural spokes people. Give them the ability to modify the campaigns and messages for their communities and cultural needs. Again, this means openness of all the campaign engagement techniques and providing richer platforms to develop on top of. (think chevy ads )

——

Kent Bye is a documentary filmmaker who is working on The Echo Chamber Project, which is about the performance of the mainstream media leading up to the war in Iraq. How he collaboratively produces the film could provide some alternatives for creating a more inclusive media.  Bye videoblogs at http://www.echochamberproject.com and has a personal vlog with his wife Jen at http://www.ebbandflow.tv

Josh Wolf (www.joshwolf.net) entered the vlogosphere in January of 2005 with “The Revolution Will Be Televised.” A San Francisco transplant, Josh fled to the city looking for fellow political radicals and has documented much of these experiences, including a recent visit the FBI paid to his door. He is also involved with several projects including the Rise Up Network and the Bay Area Media Makers and works as Outreach Director for peralta.TV, an educational cable television station in Oakland.