My (work-in-progress) Project Proposal
I decided (just now) to develop a project to study how Public Access TV Producers are embracing citizen media tools, like blogging, podcasting, videoblogging, etc., for community empowerment and access to local stories and information. This project will be developed over the coming years and hopefully as part of my graduate program at Emerson.
Another large part of the project will be to track how these folks are using open source technologies, like Drupal, as platforms to connect communities.
I don’t believe there is such a project yet in existence, although admittedly I don’t know (since I just decided this about 5 minutes ago!). This project is inspired by the many, many people - and organizations - who I’ve been fortunate to meet & get to know over the past year. Including, but limited to:
I’ve been flapping my mouth about it for several months now, ever since Dan arrived as a Fellow at the Berkman Center. To put my money (well, not really) where my mouth is, I’ve decided to focus my graduate program on this issue - although I haven’t really talked to any of my professors about it yet : )
Part of the project will include a series of audio podcasts (and hopefully video blog posts) with community access producers, leaders and visionaries working in this space. I’ll also be setting up a new blog for the project, soon.
There are a number of reasons why I feel this is a relevant and important project. Soon, I’ll have more info about it and a project outline. But for now, this is my first “official” blog post about it.
I look forward to learning from others with this project, hopefully stumbling on some discoveries, and most importantly sharing it all.
In the meantime, here’s a very interesting post I just found from Rik about some of the recent challenges and opportunities facing this subject, which I hope to further explore with this project.
