What digital champions and reporters might do to animate RSA networks

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by John Oakley on March 17, 2012 at 17:02

I'm a firm believer in publicity. It is the life blood of action. I think the "buzz" created by reporting would be the most effective way of energizing the Fellowship. It is marketing in the 21st Century. We, as a society, more and more turn to the curation of "reporters" to make sense of all the information with which we are bombarded - or to surface information that is kept from us, whether by omission or censorship.

Permalink Reply by David Wilcox on March 17, 2012 at 17:21

Thanks John. I think that by adding reporting to digital championing - whether by the same people or not - we might indeed help create some buzz. Maybe we could do some open brainstorming on topics and storylines ... what is going to interest other Fellows and perhaps also help us fill out the idea of 21st century enlightenment in the process.

One place to start could be reporting on the staff-led projects, which often have fascinating content somewhat buried in rather academic publications. RSA likes to consider itself something of a think tank, and that can be rather constraining in the way content is presented. I think we could help show the practical relevance of much project work by giving ourselves the challenge of creating additional content that other Fellows would want to refer to, as in "did you know this is what the RSA is doing". For example, I found Ben Dellot and Emma Norris more than willing to help by giving me interviews on Changemakers and Community Footprint.

The benefit for the reporter is getting some closer contact with RSA work, and maybe spotting some opportunities for further collaboration.

Permalink Reply by Paul Nash on March 18, 2012 at 7:43

Hi David,

 

Some useful, positive thinking here and I would certainly encourage people to examine this idea closely with a view to taking it forward. Count me in especially as I don't get down to London that often these days.

 

Some words of caution, however; Val Lewis and I look after a website for the Shropshire Disability Network with Val taking care of the vast majority of the work and me just looking over her shoulder now and again and fiddling about with the back office stuff. What we have learned, often through bitter experience, is the need to link the "join up" the "curation" and the "help out". This is dangerous ground because of the potential for stepping on toes, mis interpreting and failing to recognise what is already there. It needs an editorial function, which in turn means that content isn't always included, which in turn means somebody is going to be disappointed.

 

That said, the experience of SDN is that because of the highly relevant content, constantly refreshed and sometimes challenging means that daily visits, to what is a small, rural, volunteers website, can reach 400 unique visits a day with more than 5 minutes spent on site each visit. In short, this is an idea that can work wonders as long as we think about the caveats and quid pro quos.

Permalink Reply by John Oakley on March 18, 2012 at 8:27

Paul has a very good point about the dangers. A friend of mine runs a company-internal biotech website where part of the content comes from reporting on the latest papers in the field in a condensed but accurate format. She has considered abandoning this role on several occasions because of the ruffled feathers of some of the rare birds in this field ( or should it be "air"?).

The worst situation she had was when she published what was in effect the author's own abstract as the article as she considered it a good piece of curation. Alas, the author didn't agree that it presented the key point strongly enough and was quite abusive even when showed the 90%+ correlation between his abstract and the article. However the site is now the "go to" place for all the scientists in the company and the morning traffic peaks suggest that far more than the scientists visit too. I knew it was a success when I had breakfast with a group of IT engineers and found them discussing a biology paper instead of the usual impenetrable hacker subjects. So far I have convinced her to continue but I've had to have several Skype counseling sessions with her - more like cheer-leading sessions.    

Permalink Reply by David Wilcox on March 18, 2012 at 8:31

Hi Paul - thanks for those insights. Excellent if we can do some joining up here of experience from different online spaces, whether of locality or interest.
It sounds as if there's a balance in pallowing people to post what they will, and curating/editorialising to make content accessible and appealing.
The other side is what levels of digital literacy do users need - as I wrote about here.
Howard Rheingold in his book, which I reference, highlights the need for capacity in "crap detection" ... though not in our spaces I hope:-)

Permalink Reply by David Wilcox on March 18, 2012 at 9:00

Hi John - I'm musing on the challenge of creating a go-to place for good content, or these days mayby a come-to-you place via an app. I've rather belatedly downloaded the RSA iphone vision app for videos. Also on Android. I wonder what data there is on web/app access.
Maybe we need to be thinking about the different types of user experience for our content, as well as how we curate it. Is the future, as Steve Dale says mobile, appified and personal?
I'm not suggesting we just try and jump to apps ... but we could give thought to how to help people curate for themselves on their computer, tablet or phone, by giving well-tagged feeds of content that they can choose from.

Permalink Reply by John Oakley on March 18, 2012 at 9:18

Well I use the gReader app on my Android phone and Reeder on my Mac and my iPod Touch for most of my tech input. I tend to use specific apps for the various general news stories e.g. Guardian. I guess gReader is now my primary source as I'm traveling a lot. Once I stop moving I use my beloved Macbook Air and Reeder.

Building a good app is not trivial and an RSS feed might be a good starting point for mobile. It does have the advantage of one site, web and mobile distribution. The first-level curation is then under control of the social reporters.  

Permalink Reply by Paul Nash on March 18, 2012 at 9:40

For what it's worth I'm using Google Reader on the PC to organise my RSS feeds and Flipboard on the iPhone and iPad which allows me to pick up Google Reader as well as the main stream stuff.

Permalink Reply by David Wilcox on March 18, 2012 at 10:03

Thanks John, Paul - fascinating. So looking at this from both ends:
* assume we can give RSA participants/audience a bit of advice - if they need it - on the use of desktop and mobile readers
* how do RSA reporters best curate and create content for them to read and respond to, via RSS, and maybe also taking in Twitter, G+ etc

Do reporters need an intermediate curating space e.g Wordpress, Tumblr, where they can post and tag stuff from different sources, and then offer different feeds? How would this operate for a group of reporters? I'm not expecting answers :-), just wondering if this is the right way to think about it. I so, it shifts the challenge longer term from "how do we build a new RSA platform that does everything to "how do we design a system that works top to bottom, bottom to top: from (many) platforms through intermediaries (reporters) to user/contributors"
As far as possible it would work directly for user/contributors of course, but some human intervention will be needed.
Where might there be a value proposition to Fellows, while maintaining a generally open system to promote RSS?
Am I jumping too far ahead? I think we need to plan back from the future as well as fixes for now.

Permalink Reply by Paul Nash on March 18, 2012 at 11:01

Off the top of my head (never a good idea) we could by way of experiment use something like paper.li just to see what we get and what it looks like. Though my own vision (not sure I should admit to having those ;-) ) would be to move towards more of a Huff Post idea where people contribute to a core collecting point.

 

Thoughts?

Permalink Reply by David Wilcox on March 18, 2012 at 12:01

Thanks Paul - it would be good to experiment. There is certainly plenty of content!
Roxanne does http://paper.li/commutiny/rsa-fellows
A sort of Huff Post as part of the mix would be interesting.
Slugger O'Toole is impressive http://sluggerotoole.com/

Permalink Reply by John Oakley on March 18, 2012 at 15:15

I find paper.li and auto-curation systems useful for general trawling but they are clumsy and limited when dealing with private community spaces i.e. non-Twitter or non-Facebook pointed. paper.li does have limited RSS filtering but I've tried to capture RSA-related stuff with it but I failed to make it any better than Roxanne's version - not that I was trying to "beat" her, I was just testing the paper.li limits. If we are to have rich and relavent content then I don't think there is any way we can remove the human from the equation. That human(s) might feed it to a Tumblr or a Wordpress-based blog but HuffPost's aggregator is a pretty sophisticated piece of proprietary code. 

Slugger O'Tool uses just the basic Wordpress code and normal RSS, Twitter and Facebook widgets (at least according to   builtwith.com) and lots of manual curation. It's not all bad news though because at least human intervention can correct some of the most egregious language abuse common in most internet sources.

(Hurrumphs and stomps off into the distance... thinking "did I re-read what I've just written or did I leave the post splattered with egregious abuse"_ 

.... or is egregious abuse the norm for today's generations who just see it as another way of expression. Maybe it's only old fogies's like me who find it offensive. 

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