Sunday, February 17, 2008

Community Media Kickstart Evolution



{painting, "Crossroads", by Asheville's Eliza Hafer}

Ten of us got together for today's Community Media Strategy Session. Held at the well-heeled and charitably donated Board Room at Pack Place, the two-hour meeting was energized by the focus and creativity of all who attended. Ash, Marty, Zen, Jon, Matt, Johnny, James, Bill, Gordon, and an unlinkable fellow named Chris Lowry all contributed to a consensus driven prioritization process for our nascent Community Media (CM).

Click here to see the agenda we used.

After introductions, a review of the CM survey, and some tasty snacks, we broke into small groups. Each group brainstormed ideas then narrowed their ideas to three top priorities. From those were chosen the top three that folks could agree to address first. We agreed that all the ideas were good, it was simply a matter of where to begin.

Before you read any further, please take this four question survey that asks about your priorities for Community Media. Beware, there are spoilers ahead.

Take the survey.

Here come the spoilers.

Better stop scrolling down unless you've taken the survey.

Last warning...



{Collage, "Eclectic Garden", by Asheville's Niki Bonnett}

The process produced the following three ideas that we're going to put into action:

1. Cross Promotion among and between media:

Everyone likes to see that others are promoting their site/program/show/art/photos/writing, and more of an emphasis can be put on ensuring that everyone is helping everyone else get attention. We can do this initially by linking more often to local community media sources, especially across mediums (e.g. A URTV show with a bloggers' roundtable; promoting WPVM programs on blogs). The ten people who attended are going to put this into practice more and more, and we're going to encourage everyone to link to other CM more often too. Get to linking! Let's cross promote the bejeesus out each other.

2. Community Media Wiki:

While everyone agreed that we need multiple "hubs", the group also agreed that creating one centralized site would be a great resource. Rather than build some massive thing that has to be administered, how about a wiki? With a wiki, purveyors of community media could list their own site by genre or medium. James from TalkAsheville.com had a couple of ideas about this and wants your input about the following styles:

phpcow.com
articlelive.com
Some sort of Digg clone or Wiki clone

3. Media swarms:

A media swarm is a periodic, focused, sustained effort for a lot of various perspectives/media to look at one subject area. CM could, for instance, choose to focus on transparency in government, panhandling, underground theater, or Felicity's sock drawer. Media swarms bring a lot of attention to one area, building that bigger megaphone we discussed at the first Community Media gathering. They build community and they raise people's awareness of our media. Take the survey to tell us what kinds of subjects you'd like to see media swarmed.

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We hope to have the next Strategy Session at URTV studios next month. Take the survey to tell your preferences for times/days.

This was a very productive and inspiring process, and I'm looking forward to watching it grow. Please promote the Community Media evolution and invite everyone who's doing CM to join us with their ideas and energy. Anyone can email me at scrutinyhooligans AT yahoo Dot CoM to get on our CM mailing list. This is not the BlogAsheville mailing list. It's different. If you want on it, you have to tell me.

See y'all at the next one. Thanks for a real good time.

4 comments:

Gordon Smith said...

If you're doing Community Media, and you're not on the email list, please let me know.

scrutinyhooligans AT yahoo Dot CoM

Bill In Asheville said...

sorry I had to blow out of there so soon... do you have any idea where my basket and tupperwear things may have gone?

Gordon Smith said...

Zen's got them, Bill.

zen said...

sent you an email on it Bill.