Detente 2.0

Who is Google's Katie Stanton, the person named today to be White House Director of Citizen Engagement, a new job on Barack Obama's social media team? Here are some bits to add to the emerging picture on the blogosphere: she told attendees at last month's Alliance of Youth Movements Summit at Columbia University, co-sponsored by Google, the U.S. Department of State, Howcast, Facebook, and Access 360 Media that "the Internet is potent fuel for democracy, more than any war or troop surge or invasion." [The summit was organized to respond to the recent, sharp rise in the number of Facebook-organized political protests and mass demonstrations around the world.]

Watch this summit video, below, of Stanton and others discussing how new digital media platforms can be leveraged to affect social change. Stanton [in red] didn't say much, but called the attending youth activists—each of whom had used some form of social media to help bring about social and political reforms in their home countries— "the new United Nations."



For more on Stanton, see Nancy Scola's report on techPresident and Peter Kafka's piece on Mediamemo.

(Photograph, West Virginia Series 4, by James Pauls for istock.com)

Mo' Real

A small group of social activists, journalists, and filmmakers has begun using Second Life to start covering the news. Leading the charge is Draxtor Despres [aka Bernhard Drax, a 38-year-old, Munich-born machinima hobbyist living in Pacific Grove, California]. Drax recently posted a report on YouTube telling how the incoming Obama Administration will use Second Life to help engage the public over health care reform. Here's that report, virtual video-style, below. [NOTE: Draxtor is the suited avatar with headphones.]



Drax, who has been experimenting with Second Life as a medium for news for nearly the past year, received international recognition in mid-December for his efforts [and recognition for Second Life as a new information medium] during the Paris celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. There, Drax was awarded an "Every Human Has Rights" media award for his SL report, "Virtual Guantanamo," a feature story on the "virtual Gitmo" built in Second Life by filmmaker Nonny del la Pena and Peggy Weil, a professor at the University of Southern California. Their work, "Gone Gitmo," offers viewers an immersive experience about what it's like (no, really) to be a prisoner at Gitmo. See Drax's award-winning report, below:



Drax uses screen capture software to film events and gather interviews. Douglas Thomas, the director of USC's Network Culture Project, predicts an expansion this year in the use of the medium in education, journalism, and social advocacy, saying many nonprofits and social advocates also might start using Second Life as a new storytelling medium for encouraging public engagement in their causes. Says Drax: "How can we improve the real world? That's what I'm trying to focus on in Second Life." Drax will start filing reports next month from this virutal world for PBS's Frontline World. Said Drax, in accepting the award in Paris: "I'm proud I've gotten this award but it's a signal that this is viable, that this is legitimate, that this [SL] is not a game."

For more on the development of virtual worlds for social change, check out Games for Change co-founder Suzanne Seggerman and her work by clicking here to see her talk at the recent Pop!Tech 2008. Also check out Contribute Magazine's special report, The Cause Web, [September/October 2007], chiefly the story, Pixelanthropy, about the trend toward nonprofit activism in Second Life.

Newsbreak

A piece in The New York Times today, on the front page, caught my eye. It's a story by Richard Perez-Pena and carries the headline, Web Sites That Dig for News Rise as Community Watchdogs. Increasingly, the news business—information and its consumption—is becoming a nonprofit activity, more like public broadcasting.

Perez-Pena cited Voice of San Diego.org, which does original news reporting at close to half the cost of what it would probably cost offline. Similar nonprofit Web news operations have cropped up in other cities, including Chicago and Seattle, and news nonprofits without a specific geographic focus—such as Pro Publica, a news site devoted to investigative journalism -for-hire—also are trying to fill the void left by dying local newspapers and imploding old media newsrooms. In fact, public- or foundation-funded news operations are getting close to reaching critical mass: some of the people running these new nonprofit news operations say they plan to form an association to start fighting, collectively, for future funding.

The question, though, is scale. Is there (and will there be) enough funding available to nurture the expansion and adequate development of this new model for news? Is this truly the future of journalism—a form of taxpayer-funded, citizen-led advocacy, in its own right? The topic has been hotly contested for years—but there seems no doubt, especially this week (and in this economy) that the movement toward "nonprofit news" is accelerating.

Spot.us, a new platform for community-funded journalism, officially launched this week. It promises to give the public a way to commission journalists "to do investigations on important and perhaps overlooked stories." Its open-source platform promises to build a template that can be used by others, to reinvigorate civic engagement in local communities. Stanford's own John S. Knight Fellowship program, meanwhile, just announced it is revamping its vaunted program for mid-career journalists, to focus more on newsroom innovation and the use of social media to foster new forms of community engagement in journalism, online and off. (Last week, as if to underscore the urgent need for new models, the Knight Foundation launched a new community site called Knight Pulse, to discuss the future of information, itself.)

Buzz Woolley, a San Diego businessman quoted in the Times piece, says that "information should be thought of now in the same way as education and public health. It's one of the things you need to operate a civil society and the [current] market isn't doing it very well."

The bad news? Competition is becoming more brutal for existing nonprofit dollars, and the economy isn't helping. But there is also an upside: there have never been more ways to get a story told, nor as many people looking to help tell it. And that's not all: thanks to inexpensive video cameras, Webcams, digital video cameras, and still cameras, it's never been cheaper to tell stories that can make a difference.

This year's market-rattled giving season may have already gone bust, but now's the time to start engaging supporters, readers, and stakeholders of all stripes in telling the stories of their lives. This year's recession? A great place to start.

(Illustration, Target Man, by Miroslaw Pieprzyk for istock.com)