Recently in Potentialities Category

The people that brought us MinneBar hosted a Public Radio Barcamp at the offices of Minnesota Public Radio today. Bob Collins, one of MPR’s star bloggers, liveblogged the conference on News Cut. I won’t duplicated his efforts by describing what happened but it was an exciting experiment in opening the black box of journalism up for the public, or at least for those interested enough to act.

There was a lot of synergy between the two groups working on user-generated content and Nuevo Radio. So what I’d like to see next is another event like today’s. But instead of just brainstorming ideas we should get together to produce a news story.

Here’s how I think it could work.

Everyone arrives in the morning and things are setup as they were today, a bunch of white boards or paper on the walls, a few tables, and chairs. There’s a brief introduction where we explain what we’re going to do - create a news story in a day. For the first hour everyone brainstorms story ideas: who can we interview, what media do we want to use, how do we research the idea?

Then we divide the tasks up into teams and go out and do it.

This would work really well for a significant event, like the upcoming Republican National Convention. The drawback is that everyone else is going to be covering the convention. I don’t know if there is much more that an ad hoc group of citizen journalists will add to the cacophony.

An even better event might be the opening of the state legislative session in January.

Once we’ve pulled off a couple of citizen media camps then we can start looking for a permanent place to produce new media.

I want a web site that combines an online poll with an open-ended survey to collect the poll possibilities. Let me unpack that with an example.

Suppose four friends and I want to meet for coffee on Thursday, but we don’t know where to meet. So we ask a question: “Where should we meet on Thusday?” The poll is open for a day and during that time each person sends in the name of a place where they want to meet. So at the end of a day you have a list of three choices: Primo, Caribou, and Starbucks. Now the computer automatically sends out a poll to each person invited to the event asking them to vote for where they want to go. The poll is open for another day and whatever location gets the most votes is where you meet your friends for coffee.

Basically this is a voting solution that steps through two parts: the nominations and the actual votes. Surely someone has built something like this before? But my cursory search of online poll products shows that most of them have one person/account that creates the poll and then whoever submits the online form votes in the poll.

Clubs or civic groups could use this to choose new leaders. Individuals could use it to setup meetings with colleagues. A book club could use it to nominate book titles and then choose which ones to read.

Spin-offs and enhancements are easy to think of: make it javascriptable and embeddable on web pages so it can be inserted into the middle of blog posts; go mobile and let people nominate and vote via text messaging; email people you want to poll and use the email addresses as an ID to prevent spam or unwanted access.

First, create a questionnaire that asks increasingly private questions. Surely some social psychologist somewhere has developed an instrument or rubric that measures privacy or the perception of privacy. Make two versions of this questionnaire, one for individuals and another for organizations or businesses.

Second, sample two groups of people. One group is given/asked questions about their personal private life. Ask people questions until they feel uncomfortable or refuse to answer further questions. Then follow up to find out reasons why they felt uncomfortable. In the second group do the same thing but with questions about an organization or company that subject works for.

Hypothesis, people will be generally more protective or wary of violating the privacy of the organization/group they work with than they would be for their own, personal privacy.

Possible explanation:

1. People are reluctant to violate the privacy of a group or company they belong to because they have less personal agency over the group as a whole then they do over themselves or their close family.
2. There is an economic reason as well: disclosing information about the company one works for could result in losing one’s job, whereas disclosing information about oneself through search engine histories, social networking sites, etc. has an ambiguous economic outcome. This is supported by prospect theory and the general aversion to probable losses than gains.
3. Finally there is a social aversion to sharing private information about another person without their permission. People are willing to share private information about themselves because they perceive that information as being within their sphere of control. Information about others is not in that sphere of personal control. This might be bolstered or denied by research on gossip. When are people willing to versus reluctant to gossip about another person? How far will gossip travel outside of the core social group?