Readers of Gatewatching may be interested in this: the call for papers for EDEM 2010, the fourth international conference on e-democracy, to be held in Austria next May, has now been released. I attended EDEM 2009 in Vienna a couple of months ago, and thoroughly enjoyed it; much of the work presented there (including the paper which Jason and I co-authored, of course) was directly relevant also to the Australian context, especially in light of the explorations currently being undertaken by the Government 2.0 Task Force.

From the CFP for EDEM 2010:

EDem10

4th International Conference on eDemocracy 2010

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government, policy, politics, public sphere CFP, conference, democracy, e-democracy, government, participation, research, social media

You’ll remember that at the time I had a few things to say on Gatewatching.org about last December’s government consultation blog trial by the Department of Broadband, Communication, and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) last year - and a quote from my blog post back then even made it into the federal government’s report discussing the “Digital Economy” blog and other participatory initiatives - while a little earlier and before taking on his current position at the University of Wollongong, Jason was involved in developing GetUp!’s Project Democracy site which provides a social media platform enabling users to track the work of Australia’s federal senators.

Jason and I have now joined forces for a paper I’ll present at the 2009 Conference on Electronic Democracy in Vienna; titled “Citizen Consultation from Above and Below: The Australian Perspective”, we’re discussing the various approaches (top-down, bottom-up) to citizen consultation which are evident in these examples as well as in more general attempts by politicians to use the affordances of Web 2.0 technologies to engage with constituents. In advance of the conference, I’ve now posted up the paper and Powerpoint over at snurb.info.

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citizen journalism, government, journalism citizen journalism, consultation, Digital Economy blog, EDEM 2009, Future of Journalism 2009, government, myHeimat, Project Democracy

Long-term followers of Gatewatching.org may remember that we started the blog in part as a vehicle for discussing our Youdecide2007 citizen journalism project for the 2007 Australian federal election. I’m happy to report that this project has now been featured as a case study in the Australian federal Department for Broadband, Communication, and the Digital Economy’s newly-released report “Australia’s Digital Economy: Future Directions“. For the Youdecide2007 case study, which is described a little misleadingly as an interview with project leader Terry Flew on the DBCDE Website, I drafted a concluding section with a few ideas on likely future developments in professional and citizen journalism, but because of the overall word limit we could only use a few bits from it - so I thought I’d republish the whole piece here:

The Future of Journalism and Citizen Journalism

The journalism industry is currently facing a number of substantial challenges, further exacerbated by the global financial crisis which is severely affecting the commercial media organisations operating newspapers and broadcasters. Newspaper readership, especially among younger age groups, is continuing to decline in most developed nations, and income from advertising is diminishing. Meanwhile, an increasing number of users are getting their news from a variety of online sources - but here, brand loyalty is often substantially less developed than it was for print and broadcast news. Further, new news aggregators - for example, Google News - track and collate reports from news sources around the world, leading to a more random access model for news. This may be beneficial for smaller news operators (whose news reports are now placed alongside reports on the same topic from major newspapers), but further reduces the special position of leading news brands such as The New York Times or The Australian.

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citizen journalism, government, journalism, policy Australia, citizen journalism, DBCDE, digital economy, journalism, youdecide2007

It’s been less than a fortnight since the federal government’s Department of Broadband, Communication, and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) - perhaps best known at the moment for its attempt to filter the Internet (boo) and its hardline stance against the corporate thugs at Telstra (yay) - launched its Digital Economy consultation blog. Foreshadowed in a number of earlier publications (in particular, a recommendation to trial blogs in the Australian Government Information Management Office’s report on online consultation with citizens, concluding a thought process begun under the previous mob, and Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner’s post on his blog in The Age), the blog was introduced in a guest post by Tanner - and that post alone has generated more than 750 on-site comments to date.

So, as far as community involvement and consultation is concerned, the DBCDE blog can be seen as a success - it constitutes a new venue for the still all-too-rare direct online citizen feedback to a sitting government. That said, a majority of comments on the initial blog posts appeared to deal with those two hot-button issues - Internet filtering and Telstra’s exclusion from the broadband tendering process -, quite regardless of the blog posts’ topics themselves, and that’s a significant problem. If the point of this blog is to engage in a bit of crowdsourcing, harvesting some of the better ideas put forward by commenters on the blog, and in return perhaps also harnessing satisfied participants as virtual marketers for the government’s policies, then so far it’s not yet achieving its purpose.

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Steven Conroy, blogging, broadband, government Australia, blogging, broadband, community, consultation, DBCDE, e-democracy, government, Stephen Conroy, Steven Conroy

The Australian Communications and Media Authority have released their Communications Report for 2006-2007.

ACMA are responsible for regulating broadcasting and communications in Australia. Part of their responsibility is recording and publishing information on the scope of Australia’s communications industires, and the success of broadcasters, telcos and other in meeting their regulatory obligations. This report does all of that, as well as devoting a whole chapter to the state of communications in remote indigenous communities, and another to explaining the importance of improved communications to the Australian economy.

Given that improved communications infrastructure not only has knock-on effects in the broader economy, but is so important to citizen journalism and other forms of online civic participation, it’s disappointing that Australia’s broadband roll-out to date has been so poor. It’s summed up well in this chart.

That’s right: as at the reporting period, a full one third of Australian Internet users are still on connections speeds of 256 kilobytes/second or less. Whether you put this down to market failure, a failure of regulation, or a combination of the two (say, a poorly-conceived, short-sighted privatisation of a dominant telco), it’s a national disgrace.

It puts us well behind any comparable nation in broadband connectivity, and it means that over two million Australian households are significantly disadvantaged - economically, culturally and politically. And that’s not counting all those people who have no connection at all. The worst effects of this broadband drought, naturally, are felt in rural and regional areas.

The Rudd government has promised to address this, but the detail of tomorrow’s budget will tell us whether they’ve invested enough to do anything meaningful about it.

Given that they have, they then just need to get past Telstra.

ACMA, Telstra, broadband, citizen journalism, government, regional bloggers, regulation ACMA, broadband, citizen journalism, economics, government, infrastructure, regional bloggers, regulation, telcos, Telstra

A quick addendum to my last Gatewatching post, which discussed why in the face of a journalistic environment more concerned with scoring points than reporting on the issues of the day it’s not such a bad idea if politicians choose to converse with citizens outside of the media glare: from what I’ve seen so far, quite a few of the journalists reporting on the 2020 Summit have similarly succumbed to the temptation to file lazy stories poking fun at summit procedures rather than investing the time necessary to inform the rest of the country about what’s actually being discussed.

Vacuous stories such as this one by Annabel Crabb make my point for me; all I get from this ‘report’ is that Annabel couldn’t be bothered to find out what’s actually happening, and chose instead to pick easy targets. In a further update in the comments to the story, Annabel adds in the tone of a jilted lover: “you will be interested to hear that by late morning they had closed off the Creativity group session to the media” - to which I can only say, good for them! Perhaps without interruptions by journalists more interested in what brand of butchers’ paper is being used than what ideas are being generated, the summitteers can actually get some work done.

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government e-democracy, government, journalism

Brisbane.
The last AMIC 2008 session this afternoon starts with a paper by my colleague Jason Wilson, our research associate on the Youdecide2007 project and its follow-ups, and he presents especially on the experience and lessons from Youdecide. There may be a need for a structural modification in the role of conventional journalists, and a change of attitude towards working with citizen journalists.

Youdecide ran during the lead-up and up to the 2007 Australian federal election; it was a practice-based project and the first step in an ARC Linkage project between QUT, SBS, Online Opinion, the Brisbane Institute, and Cisco Systems. It offered aggregated hyperlocal content, crowdsourced from citizen journalists in local electorates and coordinated by a small team of site staff led by Jason. It gathered some 2000 registered users, and 230 articles from over 50 electorates were submitted to the site during its lifetime. (There was also a weekly YD07 TV show on the Briz31 community television channel.)

Users could submit text, audio, photo, and video content to the site, as well as comment on one another’s stories, and the site demonstrated that there was an appetite for this kind of project in the country - if from some areas and demographics more than others. Obviously, the focus was on original content (departing from the gatewatching and commenting model still very prevalent in citizen journalism), this was fairly successful.

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citizen journalism, government academic, citizen journalism, government, journalism, preditor

Brisbane.
The post-lunch session at AMIC 2008 starts with Zheng Jiawen from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, whose focus is on citizen journalism in China - and particular, on Zola Zhou, popularly recognised as China’s first citizen journalist. Broadly, citizen journalism is a public response to the inadequate performance of the mainstream journalism industry (and rose to prominence especially after the events of 11 September 2001). Its rise also contributed to a new debate on the nature of journalism itself, and many initial views argued that news blogging was not journalism due to the narrow subjects explored by most blogs, the reliance on second-hand information, the limited sources and experience of news blogging, and its limited credibility.

In China, citizen journalism emerged with the 2003 SARS crisis, when citizens reported about the effects of the crisis; there are now some 28 million active blogs and 47 million blog writers in China (as of 2007), and citizen journalism provides an important source of uncensored news. Zola Zhou, then an Internet manager, began blogging in 2004, and rose to prominence through investigative reports about a couple who refused to have their house moved to make way for a new development project. By late 2007, the blog carried some 814 articles, 112 were filed in a category called “social news” (and Zola Zhou currently works as a vegetable vendor).

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blogging, citizen journalism, government, media academic, blogging, citizen journalism, government, journalism, media

Our latest piece is up at the ABC here Feel free to comment there or here.

Club Bloggery: Once were barons
By Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, and Barry Saunders

The Bulletin magazine, published by ACP, has closed down after almost 130 years of publishing.

Though we often give the print media a hard time here at Club Bloggery, we’re not so sanguine about the end of the iconic magazine, The Bulletin, last month. Despite its virulently racist origins, and its tendency under Kerry Packer to be used now and then as the mogul’s mouthpiece, its end is an alarming symptom of something wider and more serious. The worrying structural problem it reveals is the difficulty of sustaining any venues for the specialised task of investigative journalism in Australian and international media. Read more…

blogging, government abc, academic, blogging, bulletin, business, government, investigative, journalism

A few bloggy responses to the first 100 days of the new government. (If there are some we’ve missed, let us know)

Guy Beres offers a summary of the MSM reaction.

Tim Dunlop reckons that the printed report is a bit rich after the pasting Labor have been giving the outgoing government over political advertising.

And Uncle Piers, well…

AFTER just 99 days of the Rudd government, Australia is in the worst political position it has endured since the crisis days of the Whitlam government 33 years ago.

Here’s hoping he’s on Insiders tomorrow, and that this is just an appetiser.

UPDATE: Yes and yes.

blogging, government, media advertising, blogging, government, media