I have been reading a whitepaper on Public Media 2.0. Except for its unfortunate title, it is meaningful to read for churches and nonprofits. Here is a quote:
Multiplatform, participatory, and digital, public media 2.0 will be an essential feature of truly democratic public life from here on in. And it’ll be media both for and by the public. [...] But public media 2.0 won’t happen by accident, or for free. The same bottom-line logic that runs media today will run tomorrow’s media as well. If we’re going to have media for vibrant democratic culture, we have to plan for it, try it out, show people that it matters, and build new constituencies to invest in it.
Here are some high level takeaways where I have added my opinion:
Public media 2.0’s core function is to generate publics around problems.
I am bummed that in all my experience that the most vibrant and active communities online are based around problems or pain points rather than celebrating the inverse (which would seem to me to be more healthy).
If you can articulate a pain-point in one sentence, you have a good chance at building online community. Too often, I see churches building web apps and sites that solve problems that no body feels -- or that their potential audience has to be educated first in order to see the problem. The problem needs to be clear and apparent within seconds of encountering it. And your solution and benefit needs to be similarly apparent in seconds.
Many-to-many digital technologies are fostering participatory user behaviors: choice, conversation, curation, creation, and collaboration.
There is a lot to unpack here. But one takeaway is that your audience has more content than you do. It may not be "better" -- but franlkly that's relative.
This means there is a huge need in the church for "curators". This is a powerful idea that seems like it has been done in the past but as you dig in -- there is a lot of cool stuff to be explored. See this idea explored in news topic pages.
Quality content needs to be matched with effective engagement. Public media projects can happen in any venue, commercial or not.
Churches and nonprofits can not just push out content anymore, your web site needs to engage its audience. What will happen if you do not?
Well -- as pointed out earlier -- there will grow up a curator who will point to your content (e.g. your blog post gets onto the Digg home page). There audience may see your content but if you do not learn how to engage them -- Digg or some other curator will build community using your content. This is exactly the problem newspapers or the Associated Press is having right now.
Collaboration among media outlets and allied organizations is key and requires national coordination.
Your web site, content or app is NOT an island. In order to engage an audience, you need to collaborate with others. A nice example is One Prayer or the recent Nines conference.
Taxpayer funds are crucial both to sustain coordination and to fund media production, curation, and archiving.
A sustainable plan for funding your projects need to be considered up front. If you can't pay for it over the long term, maybe it should not exist.
Shared standards and practices make distributed public media viable.
I personally think its theologically arguable that the church should hold open source values.
Impact measurements are crucial.
If you can not explain how you will know success when you see it, then you should not build the project.
This is just my thoughts -- I'd love to hear how you disagree or agree?
--
Tim Bednar
http://ashford.turtleinteractive.com/
Comments