Open Source Journalism and the Maker Culture

Journalism is a secretive trade. We hoard and protect our sources, we keep our exclusives under wraps, we cherish and crow about our scoops. Should the outside world do any nosing about in our laundry, we form tight protective balls that would put doctors, lawyers, sow bugs and politicians to shame.

And, we’re a craft that thrives on control. We constrain the size, tone, timing and content of the news. In fact, we decide if it even is news. We are to news what the Spanish Inquisition was to sin.

In an age of scarcity of presses, of airways and of broadcast licenses, that model was serviceable and comfortable - a conceptual famous blue raincoat. 

We thrived on that scarcity, that control, that secrecy and that one-way pipeline to our audience.

But now much of that audience is moving to the social web where the concepts of scarcity, control, secrecy and broadcast are as out of place as a crossing guard at a teen girls’ sleepover.

Yet, much of what we teach in j-schools is predicated on those ideas: that we own the story, that we shape the news, that we control the valve that trickles the word on the street into the ears, eyes and minds of the public- that we are the gatekeepers on a farflung mishmash of data, drama, B.S. and ballyho that is so much noise and nonsense until passed daily through our purifying membrane.

When our instruction toughens that membrane by directing students to think critically, to crank their bullshit detectors to eleven, to unpack and tell great, human stories, we’re good. But, when we fail to encourage them to tell those great stories, new ways we retard our ability to prepare them for an online future. 

If we create j-school curriculum based on secrecy, control and broadcast we will not be training students to lead, we will be teaching them to clean from behind. We will be teaching them do to what we did, but with less paper and more silicon. We will be demonstrating how to shovel, not how to sculpt in a new medium.

This semester I’m teaching an Online Reporting Workshop at Ryerson University in Toronto and an MA class in Online Journalism at the University of Western Ontario, in London. I’m predicating the courses on the principles of transparency, abundance, collaboration and conversation - notions, I think, that resonate with the harmonics of the online audience.

Let me explain. The two classes are collaborating on a multi-part, multimedia project called MakerCulture - Taking Things Into Our Own Hands. It’s a deep, wide exploration of the world of artists, hackers, fabricators, activists and citizens who have decided that a DIY (do-it-yourself) approach to government, software, art, music and hardware is a valid response to global consumerism. It’s a fascinating feature full of astonishing gimcrackery and a sideshow tent full of characters. Great stories, no question.

It will be collaboratively published on rabble.ca and The Tyee. It’s the first time Western and Ryerson have worked together on a joint journalism project, and the first time rabble and The Tyee have co-published as series.

The students at the two universities come together online using a collaborative website called a wiki. Each member of the team can edit, comment on, alter or erase any page of the wiki. It is a read-write medium with no central command and control. All the writing teams are responsible for updating their progress, their contact diaries, links, research notes and drafts. If you want, you can look at it here http://makerculture.pbworks.com/. If you like you can see all the levers gears, false starts and progress we’re making. And so can anyone else.

Sure, we could have said, “Wow, this is a great story. No one else is tackling. Let’s keep it under wraps until we’re ready to launch and then blow the lid off it.” But, online, in the world of social media, that would make no sense at all.

By exposing our work transparently we invite audience participation and engagement early in the story’s development. We encourage would-be readers of the final piece to help us shape the story, make it better, make it stronger, make it deeper and more true. We deliberately blur the line between author and audience. We want our audience to help up tell their story. We want to open source our journalism. That's the spirit of the social web and, in a lovely meta way, the spirit of maker culture.

We’ve also created a blog for the project. You can see that here http://posterous.com/main/site/391061. It’s our public, ongoing diary where we share our discoveries, thoughts, needs and raw footage with our audience.

Is anyone interested? Turns out, yes. In the first week after the blog launched it got over 3,000 page views. Why? Because we also talk about our work on Twitter using the hashtag #mcry. It turns out a lot of educators, writers, journalists and folks in the growing maker culture are very interested in what we’re doing, and are keen to help.

In fact, when we were first developing the mindmap for the feature series we made it public so members of the community could contribute nodes and notions. You can see that here http://www.mindmeister.com/29859948/makerculture. Turns out that turning our audience into collaborators made the mindmap, and the project, stronger from the outset. 

I’m already getting feedback on Twitter and via email from folks who will be great sources and content experts for our stories. So are my students. They are engaging early in an conversation with our audience and inviting them into the process long before the feature series is published (probably next January).

This transparency not only makes the inclusion of the community simple, it makes the process of doing the story simple. No passwords, no central command-and-control. Instead we are creating an organic and open story development process that engages a community of people who can act as evangelists for our work. In the world of the social web that creates an expanding virtuous circle of network links and reposts that gives us access to expertise we would otherwise have missed.

When the story is finally published, all the folks who worked with us to tell the stories will be there to view the final product and to see what impact they had on it.

We’re trying to tell this great story, new ways. We want to embrace everything that is powerful about social media: its ability to virally share enthusiasm, its belief in the collective creation of a common good and its trust in the kindness of strangers and use that to, together, tell a story to ourselves.

This is an experiment. We have no idea how it will turn out. But, we’re diving in and putting our trust in the best of the social web. Maybe that's a good idea for our craft in general.

I Have Met Our Makers, and They Are Us

It’s a Tuesday night in Hamilton, Ontario, and I’m sitting with Myrcurial (aka James Arlen) http://www.myrcurial.com/ talking about makers, hackers' activism and hyperlocal journalism. Myrcurial is an online security consultant, a dyed-in-the-wool hacker and the wise-old-man of think|haus http://www.thinkhaus.org/, a hacker/maker workshop that’s being constructed around us as we sit in an
ex-autoparts outlet in the northend of town.

Myrcurial and think|haus are part of the maker movement in Canada. If the movement has a bible, it’s Make Magazine http://makezine.com/ - a publication that extols the virtues of using circuits and a grab-bag of Home Depot parts to make a potato cannon, a self-watering garden or a microprocessor robot rat.

Makers love Mythbusters, McGyver, old copies of Popular Science and Popular Electronics, 8-bit computer graphics and the chance to crack open and breathe new life into consumer electronics. Their motto is:
“If you can’t open it, you don’t own it.” They have excellent skills.

“We like to bend gadgets and circuits to our will,” Myrcurial says. “We aren’t interested in what we’re told something can do, or must do. We’re interested in making it do what we want, extending its life,
giving it new purpose.”

Makers are experts in soldering, in circuitry, in welding, woodworking, fabrication or robotics. In the Hamilton chapter, there’s a hodgepodge of all those skills embodied in two dozen guys who aren’t
going to win any congeniality prizes, unless they gamed the online voting then used the award to send Morse code profanity via Bluetooth to the judges’ cellphones. The think|haus clubhouse is heavily stocked with cables, caffeinated beverages, dark t-shirts, lumber, wiring and large brains. The gang is planning on making a 10-foot kite with a gimbal-mounted remote control camera on-board. And there's some crazy
stuff too.

So, what does think|haus have to do with activism and journalism?

I think the Maker mentality pervades citizen journalism and activism. It’s really about being the change you want to see in the world and taking the tools at hand to the democracy, legislative bodies, gadgets or hierarchies around you and making them do what you want.

Don’t like mainstream media coverage of your community? Cover yourself. Don’t like the government? Do like the indigenous peoples of Bolivia and remake it in your consensual image. Don’t like international news? Aggregate your own crowdsourced coverage. Don't like DRM? Hack the lock. Against a two-tier web? Organize a townhall and encrypt P2P traffic. Don't like Windows or OSX? Adopt Ubuntu.

Back in 1982, Canadian science fiction writer William Gibson captured the idea perfectly in his short story, Burning Chrome: “The street finds its own use for things,” he wrote. It’s become the mantra of the
Maker and DIY culture - which are driven by the power of unintended usage. What’s different between 1982 is the power that’s unleashed with Makers or activists crack things open in search of new purpose.

When I was a kid and took apart a gadget all I got was a tube. In 1982, you’d get an 8-bit 8080 chip. These days you get a microcontroller or a graphics chip with the power to run full-on HD video. Or, you get an
activist group capable of instant global reach via Twitter, unstoppable cellphones and organizing parties in World of Warcraft.

We’ve always been Makers. Our tools have just gotten better. Way better.

Citizen journalists and activists can learn a lot from the maker/hacker movement. We should be meeting more often. Our rallying cry: “Sure, the government is broken, ya wanna make something of it?”

Quick Change - Episode Seven - Mammalian Diving Reflex

Canadian ISPs - Beyond Belief

This past week the country's biggest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) paraded in front of the CRTC as part of that comission's inquiry into bandwidth throttling.

To listen to the ISPs, you'd think their biggest problem was wrestling with the complexities of an increasingly congested Internet. But it's not. Their biggest problem is that more and more Canadians think they're lying sacks of shite.

Sure, as a recent Canadian Press Harris-Decima poll found, only about one in five Canadians surveyed had heard of Internet traffic management bandwidth throttling, deep packet inspection or net neutrality. And the ISPs are fueling (and counting on) that ignorance as they spread FUD (fear uncertainty and doubt) at the hearings. But, in happy counterpoint, just look at the comments on the CBC website's coverage of the hearings. One poster used all caps to sum up the overarching attitude of the commenters about the ISP testimony:

"WE DON'T BELIEVE YOU".

I have to say, that's a pretty rational response. Big ISPs here in Canada and the U.S. have lied to us before. In the U.S. Comcast denied throttling the bandwidth of users using P2P file sharing. Well denied it until they got caught red-handed and were facing a slapdown by the FCC.

At the CRTC hearings last week Rogers and Telus argued that they had no choice but to continually throttle consumer and wholesale customers' bandwidth because of unpredictable network congestion due to P2P filesharing. And, they didn't need any government oversight over that process, thanks very much.

Now, maybe to the four fifths of Canadians who aren't paying attention to this stuff that sounds reasonable. But, here's the thing. These are the same companies (along with Bell) who two years ago denied, flat out denied, they were doing any throttling at all. Turns out they were lying then and glibly spun a fresh tale of woe to a Canadian commision and public it hoped would have too short an attention span to notice.

Worse, the notion that they have to throttle to deal with network congestion is an interesting argument. Why? Because it follows then that the tubes of the Internet must be pretty clogged and are having a hard time dealing with high bandwidth content like, say, HD video.

So, it is passing strange that just before the CRTC hearings, Rogers Television exec Dave Purdy told a NextMEDIA audience in Banff that Rogers hoped to roll out online access to Rogers broadcast properties. He also expressed the hope that Bell and others could work together on the initiative. So, what about the congestion problem? How is it that music, movies, xrays and other user content clogging the Web like a hairball but ISP content is going to be a great new service that will slide into your home like grease through a goose?

ISP brass argue that Peer-to-Peer is inherently an inefficient file transfer protocol (efficient for end users, not so great for the network). They favour creating a network of distributed local nodes that would serve up the same content repeatedly if folks in the node's neighbouehood asked for it. This is the strategy AOL used to roll out its service.

However the EU has gotten behind the P2P Next project that uses peer-to-peer as the central protocol for sharing high bandwidth files between wired Europeans. So, they must know something Canadian ISPs don't. The reality here in Canada is clear. ISPs want to crack down on P2P with gay abandon and no government oversight because they don't want to invest in bringing the Web's substantial bandwidth into Canadians homes (our bandwidth up and down looks like dialup speeds compared to that in Japan, several European countries and parts of the U.S.)

And much of mainstream media is adding and abetting. Take this statement from a Canadian Press story about the hearings:

"Rogers, for example, uses complex technology to analyze what kinds of communications users are engaged in - sharing a Hollywood movie vs. sending e-mail, for example - and then "throttles" or slows down certain activities so the rest of its network moves faster."

In fact, Rogers just looks for P2P traffic and throttles that, regardless of whether the P2P is legitimate content the users own or not. If Rogers had "complex technology" that could accurately sniff out Hollywood movies from the jumble of encrypted files that flow through the Web and was employing it to dig that deep into the packets it carries, CP has a bigger story on its hands.

As it is, they're just aping ISP PR speak that equates P2P with illegal file sharing. Not helpful.

The sad truth is that Instead of bringing Canadians open modern access the ISPs want to use the bandwidth their infrastructure will bear to deliver their own content. They want to own the content, the pipes and the customers.

They can tell Canadians and the CRTC different, but I don't believe them.

Augmented Reality Doesn’t Bite

If you have trouble coping with reality, stop reading now.

This is a column about augmented reality - software that could be the killer app for smartphones; a remarkable tool for education and activism; and the reason why you'll soon see pedestrians around you holding their phones in front of them like portable rearview mirrors.

But, what they'll be looking at isn't what's behind them. They'll be viewing a growing layer of geo-located data that will contain pictures, audio clips, annotations and links. That information will be floating and bobbing on the screen just like in the heads-up-displays that Ironman and the Terminator used to get bio-statistics and enemy locales.

A crude form of augmented reality has been with us for some time. The Murmur project http://murmurtoronto.ca/, for example,started in Toronto's Kensington Market in 2003 and has now spread around the world.

Murmur offers cellphone users in various urban locations a number they can call to get a walking tour of the vicinity centred on very personal histories of the neighbourhood. A green ear logo is your clue your near a Murmur narrative.

In Japan, Europe and more recently North America, owners of smartphones with close-focussing cameras have been snapping pictures of barcodes printed on products, in magazines or on subway posters to get additional info including song and video clips http://tinyurl.com/rbkcz6. iPhone and Adroid users who fire up the application SnapTell http://www.snaptell.com/ can take a picture of a book cover and watch as the phone pulls in prices, reviews and Wikipedia entries.

Or, they can start up a other application called Shazam http://www.shazam.com/music/web/pages/iphone.html, let the phone listen to a few bars of an unfamiliar song and have the phone identify they song, show the music video and band details.

But that's just for starters. The next wave of augmented reality applications take advantage of not just a cellphone's camera but also it's gps capability and, most importantly, its compass.

A compass? Yes. The Android-based G1 (aka the Google phone), some Nokia phones and the new iPhone 3GS have digital compasses http://tinyurl.com/p77h9t built in so the phone knows which direction its facing, instantaneously and all the time.

That's huge for augmented reality. Combined with the phones' accelerometer and GPS data, the compass's directional data allows applications to know not only where you are and which way the phone is tilting, the apps will also know which direction in the real world you're facing. in other words, the apps will have a pretty good idea what you're looking at in real time and can serve up additional information that overlays the world as it sees it through its built in camera.

The U.K. based acrossair has already released an augmented reality London Underground application http://tinyurl.com/oxvjtn. Users hold up their iPhones and small virtual signs float on the screen exactly in the direction of the nearest stations. The station labels move, change and come into view as the phone is rotated or as users move about the city.

In Austria, Mobilizy has developed the Wikitude AR Travel Guide http://www.mobilizy.com/en/wikitude-ein-reisefuhrer for the Android smartphone platform. Using Wikitude AR you can point your phone at a nearby point of interest (in the Mobilizy demo a castle 100 metres away) and get relevant historical info about the landmark that moves as the phone moves.

At last year's Techcrunch ConferenceJapan-based Tonchidot demonstrated theSekai Camera, iPhone app http://www.tonchidot.com/Sekai_Camera.html. It displays augmented reality information for shoppers who are looking for stores, deals or product geotagged reviews left by other users to hang permanently in the virtual air. It has yet to make it to the iPhone App store.

Then there's Pocket Universe, a planetarium application for the iPhone that shows you the stars, planets and moons above you. It's really a moving window on the universe as seen through and annotated by your cellphone http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aM92roJxkSc.

This is going to be a huge category for smartphones. In fact, I think augmented reality applications could be killer apps for mobile devices.More and more civic data, already geolocated, is being made public. A growing number of pbotographers are geolocating their pictures and movies. And it makes smart business sense for companies to get their messages out to on-the-go consumers who happen into their neighbourhoods. And tourism? Don't get me started.

But there's also fantastic opportunity for citizen journalism and activism. Imagine hyperlocal journalism that comes to life when users are as hyperlocal as you can get - right on the spot.

So, the first time you see somebody holding their smartphone in front of them and rotating don't think they're crazy, or looking behind them. They’ll be taking a annotated look at the future.