Rosen Speaks: First Learn from Open Source
In Part V of Jay Rosen speaks, he says that prior to starting Newassignment.net's first project, it is imperative to learn all there is about open source projects. So project 0.0 will be to report on previous open source projects and what can be learned from them. As an outgrowth of my First Monday paper on Reinventing Journalism, I have volunteered to do a series of IM Interviews on open source for Newassignment.net.
Why volunteer? Because I am interested in open source, it will increase my depth of knowledge, build my intellectual capital, build my reputation and finally help Rosen's Newassignment.net, which in turn is all about improving journalism. Everyone wins.
This is Part V of a series of edited segments from a talk Rosen gave at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. The talk centers on his experimental Newassignment.net project. These segments are edited by Leonard Witt from the original production by Colin Rhinesmith.
Tags: Jay Rosen,, newassignment.net, Citizen journalism, Gillmor, open source journalism
November 25th, 2006 at 2:42 am
Who will you be interviewing?
> “…report on previous open source projects…”This would [mostly] be previous open source _software_ projects?
What other kinds of open source projects are there, that _are_ local?(which will likely not be a perfect analogy, for ’scale’ reasons – since much journalism has a ‘local’ value that open source sw doesn’t.)
And – when local – does “open source project” become just another term for “community service project”, and does this mean that Rotary Club, Kiwanis, Elks etc are the appropriate model?
(or for something newer/fresher, peak oil groups) —
A different Q, from something Jay said –
When looking (by introspection) at _your_ reasons for participation (by doing the IM interviews), _does_ the term “gift economy” provide an effective framework for understanding your reasons? I ask because for me as a concept/motivator/explanation “gift economy” feels like it’s at the wrong focal length, has the same immediate-bristling feel as “People should do X in order to enhance their self esteem”.
When the grassroots mobilize to elect their favored candidate, we don’t look at their actions in terms of the “gift economy”; and I think the best cit-j will come from the same wellsprings of motivation – that people need to see it as their [group] dog in the fight in order to join in, rather than looking at it as “hey, I’m getting by giving”.
(the ‘getting by giving’ is like the bass beat in a song – it matters, but it shouldn’t be the focus.) —-
ever the backseat driver, I hope you’ll ask the doers not just the thinkers, and ask them what kinds of infrastructure & support will best make cit-j thrive. Ryan Sholin would be interesting (his Bayosphere critique’s interspersed in here); and for group/individual dynamics&motivation, Clay Shirky and/or Don Marti? Zack Exley? —
Some relevant web stuff, found via Bayosphere - A cool example of something that could work, if the idea was widely disseminated -
Don Marti on “Questions for” tags (ideally to be followed by “Interview with” tags…) human organizational dynamics:
Some good empirical advice (from Linux User Group HOWTO; via Marti) here (e.g. “the widespread urge to vote on everything is at best orthogonal to any desire to perform needed work; at worst, the former serves as an excuse to compulsively meddle in others’ performance of the latter.”)
also via Marti, Do-ocracy
November 25th, 2006 at 8:14 am
Hi Anna:
Thanks for the advice and questions. I have not yet compiled an interview list, but in this open source world I suppose that list will evolve with the help of others, which we hope would include you. Plus I will not be the only one doing interviews. I can’t speak for Jay, but for me the definition of open source should be expansive. It could look at a community organization model, but also at collective intelligence. It would include Moveon to see what motivates its participants, but also Wikipedia to see what motivates its. We might start by looking at the free and open source software movement, but would certainly not stop there. We would look at Wikitorial and Bayosphere to see what went wrong and OhmyNews to see what went right. We would definitely want to do a literature review to see what other researchers have written and studied. If this were just Jay and his staff and me, this would be a daunting task, but here is where we all get to test the newassignment.net open source model. How much participation will we receive from others who understand what we don’t or can help us all collectively learn more?
November 26th, 2006 at 10:40 pm
(sorry once more for my comment’s having taken up all that screen real estate. ‘Preview’ strips out
the whitespace from comments, but didn’t show what the attempt to preserve whitespace would end up looking like when Published (seems br gets expanded to p?))