Sidekicks on the South Side: Barbara Iverson on mobile storytelling, “hybrary” cards and cooperative news
Barbara Iverson is one busy professor. In addition to teaching multi-media reporting and other journalism topics at Columbia College Chicago, she blogs at currentbuzz (“where technology meets, greets, clashes with and transforms journalism today”) and co-publishes Creating Community Connections, a community-generated hyperlocal news-site. Barbara will be with us at We Media Miami, and today she shares some thoughts on what she’s learning online and what she sees for community news in the future:
As co-founder and publisher of http://creatingcommunityconnections.org, a community and citizen-media news site in Chicago, I’ve been working with community groups. We solicit contributions to our site and offer to provide training where needed. I meet folks in the ‘hoods who don’t want to be journalists, but they have lots they want to talk about.
And they want to be heard – by the alderman, their fellow citizens, perhaps by mainstream media. These are people looking for civic engagement. But many of these interesting people are not good with typing, writing, and text. They live in aural space and communicate orally. A narrow definition of literate might exclude them. But they all have cell phones.
In economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, Sidekicks are more common than Internet-connected computers. As the major carriers open up their services, the paradigm for how people create and share community news will be altered further. In Denmark, one newspaper just started distributing a cell phone with a button that displays their news on the phone.
I’m using apps like Twitter, Snitter, and Pownce, and beta-testing a video-casting app that incorporates GPS tags to “push” information to users. All of these could become part of an open and highly accessible mobile news network promoting public discourse and building community.
Imagine if a city council member sought input about a zoning change by posting a notice on a property with a call-in number.
One way to jump-start this kind of mobile citizen journalism is to get mobile equipment into the hands of potential contributors and to make our site more mobile-friendly. Creatingcommunityconnections.org, with the support of Columbia College Chicago, could establish a hybrid library/video rental facility, calling it a “hybrary,” in order to do this.
With a hybrary card citizens could check out high-end equipment like smart phones with video capability and GPS-equipped devices to cover neighborhood news they’d share via Web and mobile through the creatingcommunityconnections.org site. In addition to housing and maintaining the equipment, the hybrary would offer training on the equipment and basics of reporting as part of the process of getting a hybrary card.
Ideally, there would be a couple of production stations for members’ use, and a place to drop-in and talk about a project or some new cool tool or app. Running the hybrary like a cooperative, with membership costs scaled to economic need, would encourage interactions between diverse people and provide access to powerful tools for those without access to lots of money.
At We Media 08, there will be people who know how to take ideas and projects and implement them. I am looking to talk to people who have to make money to keep going. A non-profit doesn’t have to be a money loser. Being able to bash my theories against the practicality of people who work with bottom lines ought to help me create a community-strengthening project that is self-sustaining, rather than one that has promise, but withers because it cannot stand on its own.
