Another unconference in the books

The third community unconference — — came and went last Saturday. There were 11 people who overcame the overcast day and end-of-vacation stress to spend three hours together at the library. It marks the largest single gathering for a session — the RootsCamp effort last November had eight in the first morning session, while the original attempt for CONA a year ago managed just 3 — but it was at least a half dozen fewer than expected. Still, we had representation from the City of Bloomington, Bloomingpedia, Bloomington Online, Bloomington Playwrights Project, Indiana University, and local bloggers.

A follow-up on this topic is tentatively being planned, sometime after participants have had some time to process and explore the outcomes of the conversations. I’d also like to try a Politic Exchange unconference on eductation later this spring.

Once again, the participants dictated the format as we broke up into separate discussions only once, and grudgingly at that. The strength of an unconference is that no one feels subjected to talking about a topic in which they have no interest, yet that is what happened when we stayed together and bowed to my strong desire to talk about the local blogosphere. For the last 20-30 minutes of the first discussion period, though, we broke into groups and covered areas of interest. In the second discussion session, we remained as one big group and got through just two of the five items listed on the board. The quality of those conversations, though, was very high with everyone contributing some perspective to the day.

Introductions — A variety of interests drew participants to this unconference. Some brought in personal projects seeking feedback, while most wanted to attend to gauge the pulse of local internet activity. Everyone had some experience or other information to share that no one else had.

Local Blogosphere — The discussion about identifying and cultivating a local blogosphere boiled down to issues of benefit, location, authors and content. Blogs could offer an aggregate picture of the community that would never be found in any traditional media. Being able to create aggregator sites to corral local news and personalities can only strengthen the quality and quantity of that content. One big obstacle is the transitory nature of Bloomington. People leave, and new residents require education about local institutions. That can be helped by coordinated efforts at a community portal not necessarily owned by one entity.

Benefits of a Portal — Although I only heard the summary on this, the central theme of this event (The “ideal” Bloomington portal) was covered here by first trying to define what was meant by portal. Is it best to create a new content tool to coordinate everything else and fill in the gaps, or should the portal be a framework to arrange content that lives elsewhere? One of the big problems in looking for local information is that the common tools to do so, like Google, don’t know how to separate its definition of relevancy from what is actually relevant to our community. The debate over whether a portal should generate content or be traffic cop for it seemed key to this discussion.

Citizens Journal — There were four main points of discussion in this conversation: Journalism; Control; Coverage; and Bias. The idea behind a citizens journal is to replace the gaps in quality news coverage in rural areas as profitability of traditional newspapers takes a hit. By using lightly-trained citizen reporters, a journal could respect the “ethos” of journalism without being subjected as much to top-down economic limitations. The question remains about whether editors responsible for the training and compliance with a journalistic ethic would interfere with a self-organizing ability of a community to write about itself.

Ideal City Site — The City of Bloomington is in the middle of a web site upgrade. The current site features a departmental structure, which makes complete sense to those who already know the structure but makes navigation difficult for those who do not. Finding practical information can be difficult () and it is sometimes difficult to keep all branches of the government equally up-to-date. The new design will likely focus on a question-based structure that reflects how most people will use the site. The idea was put forth that releasing raw data as a web service for anyone to use would allow others in the community to contribute development without relying on the City to get around to construction. Some data isn’t in database form, and some that is would be restricted from public view as proprietary in nature. However, some content should be easily released for developer consumption.

There were several tangible things to do coming out of these conversations:

• Use known community forums (including terrorware.com) to ask about who is blogging in and about Bloomington.
• Ask univeristy researchers in SLIS about local blogging, as well as searching and data mining techniques.
• Research the technology involved and cost of hosting of a blog aggregator.
• Create a matrix of features and issues of existing Internet sites for the Bloomington area.
• Investigate the Google API to see if “Bloogle” — a search tool for just Bloomington-relevant content — is possible.
• The School of Journalism can apply for a grant to create citizen journal.
• Ask the Bloomington Alternative to solicit citizen journalsists.
• Identify what database information the City has which can be turned into a public service quickly.

A new wiki was created to contain the results and future outcomes of these Politic Exchange unconferences. Thanks to all who continue to support these community conversations.