a proposal for reporting on ci36 main event

[ken manheimer]

among other things, a curatorial documentation team will be conducting on-the-ground reporting of the main ci36 events. the ci36 community site might be a great means for conducting that reporting, both in gathering reports, consolidating them, and conveying them to the community at large (and beyond).

i see three layers of reporting, built on top of the ci36community forums.

1. the first layer is assigned reporters (curators, wex folk, volunteers), who would post reports to their personal blogs, tagging entries with something like "dailynews". anyone could look at all the "dailynews" reports, with the option to sort with most-recent-first, to see what's been reported recently: the current news.
2. the second layer is consolidation - reports from distinguished editors, responsible for monitoring "dailynews" reports from the assigned reporters and periodically posting highlights to forums which are set aside for them, for this purpose. the editor's posting might simply link to single blog entries, summarizing the content with a headline-like brevity, or they might add some editorial comments, or they might editorialize and refer to several related reports, making a sort of "feature" about an event.
3. a third layer is more ad-hoc: any ci36 community member can
   • post comments on news and forum entries
   • post items to their own blogs that tagged with "dailynews" (or whatever).
   the community member comments and postings would provide input and feedback on the reporting, making the whole activity a dynamic and signficant part of the community process.
   consolidators could include ad-hoc reporter's items in features, but they would have at least (and might give preference to) the assigned reporters input.

having many reporters would provide for broad news gathering, while having a few assigned editors would provide for discerning consolidation - editorially distilled views of what's happening.

the postings can include pictures and embedded videos. (i'll demonstrate embedded videos in a followup comment.)

one other piece would be some orientation - some site guidance describing the scheme and how to navigate it, to find the news (and how to embed videos situated elsewhere, if necessary).

this type of approach does not preclude printed reporting. that could be another kind of consolidation, culled from and/or supplemented by the online materials.

the overarching point here is that the community site provides the resources for dynamic news reporting; we can organize use of these resources to cultivate rich and clear communications within the community.

[daniela schwartz]

hi you guys,
just was talking to martin to talk to the hub about making a clear desition to "report the event" so we can really inform people. I will meet documentation curators today and ask them to have a look here... also. (because it conncerns me for the 3 special events)

What is really necessary (im not a tech person and many people arent either, is to SIMPLIFY as much is possible. Peoplo dont understand ... and they get confussed.

SO WHat if you create groups for reporting " like, personal experiences during the celebration", "labs descriptions" classes, .... maybe will be good to organize in one way, so is clearly group... easy to use later to...

dont know just a poit of view... through the satellites i could observe how much difficulties people have with this new tools;....

loves to both brenton and ken
dani

[ken manheimer]

My feeling is that we'll need to specifically train people to use tags or else they won't use them

good point, brenton! there are also some tricks that will be useful - like including embedding video code, and some essential HTML formatting. looks we're going to be discussing all this.

for the curious:

• you can include HTML fragments in blog and forum entries, so eg i just inserted the "embed" expressions i got from YouTube pages of videos in my comment, above to include them
• you can include your own HTML fragments. an HTML expression is generally some text that is distiguished by start and end symbols which are bracketed with "<" and ">" characters, eg:
• the above citation of brenton's comment looks like this:
  <blockquote> My feeling is ... use them </blockquote>
  the "/" on the "</blockquote>" indicates it concludes the section of the opening <blockquote>
• bulleted items like these are, in a simplified form, done by putting the text between <li> ... </li> HTML tags
• links are a step more complicated. a link to this ci36 comunity site looks like this:
  <a href="http://ci36community.ning.com"> ci36 community site <a>
  not intuitively obvious! but very useful...
• in regular HTML source, paragraphs need to be separated from one another with <p> tags. the ning comment and forum entry boxes take care of that, and other nuances, for you.
• i've just scratched the surface here. we may need to get some further into information together, at some point. hopefully, for now, that'll be enough to get people comfortable.

[Brenton (Website Curator)]

Ken, I think it's a great idea to break out the roles like this. My feeling is that we'll need to specifically train people to use tags or else they won't use them, and so assigning special roles like the "reporters" and "consolidation folks" will be a good way to ensure that they get trained up.

[ken manheimer]

trying an embedded video - a bit of vanity, jen abrams and me dancing at the east coast jam, in a video jen posted to youtube:

michal lahav and me in another youtube video from the east coast jam: