This week we were very lucky to have John Coster from Leicester's Citizen's Eye community news organisation come along to class to talk about his work in Leicester, his motivations and challenges and his links to the #media2012 framework. John spoke for an hour (which is available in 6 parts below, epic viewing - ignore my shaky hand at some points ;-)) and then answered questions and gave advice to the class about their own community media manifestos. An excellent session worth sharing outside of #mc539 - thanks John! 

This week follows on from last week's 'flash' activism project where the group planned and delivered a social media campaign project within the three hours of class time. The details of these are here, here and here. Based on the reflective directed study task, asking them to think around the questions of sustainability - they were to explore the notion of sustainable campaigns within this context of 'alternativeness.'

The lecture looked at governing factors of sustainability - framed around the approaching struggles of resources, 'business as usual' and the shock doctrine which can provide a critique of cultural capitalism (in which many "green" marketing is situated within) Furthermore, it looked at the concept of "greenwashing", where the term sustainability is used to counteract claims of corporate irresponsibility (using the Canadian tarsands/Vancouver Olympics as an example) - it is worth questioning what is sustainability allows in the context of the alternative (media)?

Using a few examples from the march for alternative at the weekend, it notes if campaigns need to be 'sustainable' at all - where some chose ephemeral direct action which exists only to disrupt the dominant narrative of an event (reflected in both action and online occurrences) However, with the mainstream media's ability to control the dominant message, despite alternatives- many uses of social media could be used as an alternative archive/challenge to mass media constructs.

Directed study task

The feedback for the manifestos will be with you by Friday this week - so use it to come prepared to present a 5 minute update of your project to the class.

How to prepare and how to present:

1. Read your feedback carefully
2. Work out what your key strengths were (relate that to the list below)
3. Work out your key weaknesses (relate to the list below)
4. Start your presentation with a manifesto that summarises what you are doing
5. Explain the project in more depth
6. Ask for feedback on how you could improve your project
7. Be ready to offer advice to others on your key areas of strength

If you are not ready to present, then you will not be able to attend the session from 12pm - 1pm.

Common areas of weakness

• Talking about yourself, not talking about how you are helping the subjects or communities
• The project is very self contained - no sense of mainstreaming or dissemination
• Little sense of "alternativeness"
• No manifesto

Common areas of strength

• Good ideas on sustainability of projects
• Realistic projects
• Good planning for contingencies

Next week we have a guest lecture from John Coster, the editor of citizenseye.org - a community media organisation in Leicester who are involved in #media2012 project. He'll also be able to offer some critical feedback on your project. Do not miss this!

Having successfully planned and executed your activism campaign as a group, it is time to get all reflective in time for next week's class on sustainability of projects. So, for next week, you will be expected to answer the following:

• Give a brief overview of the project and your role throughout.
• Provide the objectives of the group.
• Detail what steps were taken to achieve the objectives.
• How did you know it was a success/fail?
• What surprised you about the result? 
• What could you have done better?
• How can the project be taken beyond the classroom?
• What do you think 'sustainability' can mean in this context?
• How can you relate the experiences to your own manifestos?

This reflection should be roughly 500 words, but should focus specifically on what was achieved during week 7 (so feel free to illustrate your reflection with whatever multimedia you feel is required.)

If you are feeling brave, email the directed study task to mc539@posterous.com (to be shared on the class blog) ahead of week 8's class (where we will also be going through the network analysis tasks from the week before - which also wouldn't mind being shared to the same account! :-))

The blog and twitter account have now been set up. They have been listening to people who have 1) used #trainfail #trainpain (from the previous night) asking them to respond with their #trainfail issues. They also have been contacting people who have been using the @londonmidland service and not received a satisfactory response to their problem.

The group made a call to the London Midland press office to enquiry about archives of statistics relating to their services and access to a history of delays. The press office could not provide the statistics and said that "1.5%" were delayed over the last couple of weeks. The group were not satisfied with the response and decided to blog about it.

From twitter it was not clear what the objectives of the campaign was, so they decided to halt promotion until they had added those details to the blog. They needed to make clear exactly who they were supporting, why they were doing it and what they wanted from the project. They also decided to make all the objectives 'tweetable' so under 140 characters. 

The have also decided to create content around the delay/replay scheme and the union disputes. These will be shared before 1pm.

Having decided to go with a combination of posterous and twitter for their campaign, the group are now using research gathered from several members around their campaign.

Twitter account: @BhamTrainFail

Website: Birmingham Train Fail

Points of note:

• Channel 4 Dispatches showed a programme called "Train journeys from hell." last night which draw attention the poor service provided by train companies in the UK. Channel 4 were encouraging people to tweet using #TrainPain - however #TrainFAIL was also being used and picked up on. Therefore, the topic is relevant and timely in terms of "what people were talking about on twitter." but also is seen as a 'back channel' to the back channel, provoked by general complaints on trains. 
• They also found a press release from the last 24 hours regarding potential strike action from London Midland around pay and conditions which suggests that the staff are unhappy too.
• They will be calling train company press offices to find out how many services were delayed in the last year.

Action:

• Target the campaign specifically at Birmingham - and London Midland, who have a twitter account (responding to complaints) but they were unclear of the transparency of the account (i.e. where they just retweeting information from National Rail records, rather than looking at wider contexts of problems) It was also seen as a brand management exercise rather than something that can provoke change to practice.
• It is also raises awareness to the issues which face Birmingham, especially with its city design being geared up for change. The group want to be able to use anger in a constructed way.
• The blog will be seen as a hub which will be populated with information relating to the campaign and the wider context of problems.

Planning the campaign. Objectives, resources, tools, outcomes.

(download)

Click here to download:

Planning_stages._mc539_trainFA.zip (2.07 MB)

This week the class have to plan, prepare and implement an alternative media campaign in three hours (!) They will have to prepare objectives, select tools and build a project which relates to an issue which is relevant to this week's news/activities. I'm live blogging the discussions in the class.

Hour 1:

They have decided to focus on the cuts to services/staff (and public transport in general) in Birmingham. They have decided to approach the project in solidarity with the union - and will be drawing attention to poor service caused by cuts in budgets and staffing in local stations.

Their larger objective is to make people aware of the importance of trains in a world where resources are becoming scarer (and how one train could take x amount of cars of the road) and to do this they will making the services aware of how bad they are and how better they could be.

They will be defining what is 'poor service' - delays, cancellations, low staffing, frequency.

They will be drawing attention to the under-promoted "delay/repay" scheme which London Midland offer when the train is more than 30 minutes late, a refund is automatically offered. They do not promote this on their twitter account so the group will making a tool to make it easier to claim a refund.

They will be setting up a blog to share information about their cause and will be using twitter as their main vessel of promoting the cause. The hashtag to follow is #trainFAIL - which people already use to tweet their train woes.

Exercise

Part 1:

Pick a reading from the last slide of the lecture on Networked Power. Make notes towards conducting a network visualisation. Show evidence (in any way!) how this has informed your analysis.

Part 2:

Select a tool from below and analysis one of your own social networks. If you do not use social networking software, you can analysis somebody else's (or in the most extreme circumstance, a company or a celebrity) Focus on your position in the network, what might be considered examples of strong or weak ties, observations about how the network has appeared, what might have caused the network to be shaped in that way and how networks could be used within your project. Also consider how different networks may work better for different acitivities. Try and incorperate some of the reading in your assesment of the network.

Post the results (including screen captures on the network) on your reflective diaries to share for week 7 class (if you have put them on a blog, feel free to post thoughts in comments.

Tools

Facebook:

Visualiser

http://vansande.org/facebook/visualiser/

"Visualiser is a tool to graphically explore your social network (on Facebook). You can use it to see how your contacts are connected to each other, and you can filter on things like sex or relationship status."

Touch Graph

http://www.touchgraph.com/facebook

"The tool allows users to see how their friends are connected, and who has the most photos together. Users can also explore their own personal networks by graphing photos from anyone's album, or view the connections between members of a group. The interactive tags feature seems also quite interesting."

Tag Graph

  http://apps.facebook.com/taggraph/

This new version of Tag Graph for Facebook. It is a way of browsing your friend's tags and pictures whilst displaying networks of connections. You need to approach the application on your account for it to work.

Twitter:

Twitter Friends Browser

http://www.neuroproductions.be/twitter_friends_network_browser/  

"Twitter Friends Browser is a fun, simple and light application (5k according to the author) that allows you to browse through all your twitter friends. You can start by typing a particular twitter username to immediately see all their connections and latest updates. You can then continue clicking and dragging in an endless friend-of-a-friend network."

Mention Map

http://apps.asterisq.com/mentionmap/

"Released by Asterisq, Mentionmap is a web app for exploring your Twitter network. It allows you to discover which people you interact the most and what they're talking about. It's also an interesting way to find relevant people to follow.

The visualization runs in your browser and displays data from the Twitter API. It loads each user's Twitter status updates (tweets) and finds the people and hashtags they talked about the most. Clicking a user will display their network of mentions as well as details from their profile. The lines drawn between nodes become thicker the more users mention each other. This draws the viewer's attention to potential discussions and interesting debates. Hovering over an edge also reveals the exact number of mentions. You can also search for friends by typing their Twitter usernames into the search box."

Social Collider

http://socialcollider.net/

"The Social Collider reveals cross-connections between conversations on Twitter.

With the Internet's promise of instant and absolute connectedness, two things appear to be curiously underrepresented: both temporal and lateral perspective of our data-trails. Yet, the amount of data we are constantly producing provides a whole world of contexts, many of which can reveal astonishing relationships if only looked at through time.

This experiment explores these possibilities by starting with messages on the microblogging-platform Twitter. One can search for usernames or topics, which are tracked through time and visualized much like the way a particle collider draws pictures of subatomic matter. Posts that didn't resonate with anyone just connect to the next item in the stream. The ones that did, however, spin off and horizontally link to users or topics who relate to them, either directly or in terms of their content."

Linkedin

Linkedin Maps

 http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/

"Developed by Linkedin Labs, InMaps provides a visual representation of your professional Linkedin universe. This appealing visualization tool allows anyone with a Linkedin account to map their professional ties and is a great way to understand the relationship patterns between you and your entire set of LinkedIn connections.

The map is color-coded to represent different affiliations or groups from your professional career, such as your previous employer, college classmates, or industries you've worked in. Bigger names represent people who are the most connected within that specific cluster or group. When you click on a contact within a circle you'll see their profile pop up on the right, as well as lines highlighting how they're connected to your connections."

Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places

http://weeplaces.com/foursquare/

"Weeplaces is an application mapping an individual's shared locations on Foursquare. Blue circles depict popular places, which grow depending on the number of visits, while yellow lines connect current and previous locations with the goal of charting one's movement. A timeline on the bottom also provides additional information on the volume of check-ins over time. Anyone with a Foursquare account can simply login to Weeplaces and start mapping their trails."

Some more reading:

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/

http://www.visualcomplexity.com/

http://www.flowingdata.com

http://blog.ouseful.info/

Lead Lecture: Networked Power: Virals, Memes and Analysis

This week we look at the historical context of what we may consider a network society. The lecture explores the different economical ages as proposed by Bell (1973) and introduces Castells (1996, 2001) network society and the concept of networked individualism. These ideas are used to frame the discussion around viral marketing and memes.

The lecture concludes by looking at network analysis (strong and weak ties and nodes) and how these can be used to strengthen and reflect on manifesto processes.

Directed study links to a network analysis task.

Workshop: Production Ethics

The second part of the session is dedicated to production ethics of the alternative media worker. It will explore the influence of regulation, law and ethics on all production work and what potential ethical dilemmas an alternative media worker may encounter. This will be used to inform part of your project proposals which will be due after the directed study week.

Workshop task:

Audit your proposal for regulatory and ethical issues. Show that you have considered:

• regulations e.g. child protection & privacy
• ethical considerations, in an alternative context e.g. the money question

Links:

• Summary of issues (wikipedia - use with caution)
• PCC code of practice
• Publish and (don't) be damned? - Blogs / Alternative media and reporting restrictions
• Editing interviews - some guidelines
• Ethics of social media for journalists
• Photography & the Law
  
• More resources on photography

Directed Study:

The directed study task will be in two parts.

• The first is to conduct a network analysis of one of your (or anothers) platforms (blog, facebook, twitter etc) (see the document attached of how you might do this)
• Work towards your manifesto which is due at the end of next week (directed study week - NO CLASSES!)

A set of guidelines generated from class discussions (through reflection on draft project manifestos) about what should be at the heart of 'best practice' when working with alternative media production.

• Reputation at the heart of process.

• Awareness of copyright on content – images, videos etc

  (Creative commons, attributing sources, use own images.)

• Permissions when creating content which feature members of the public.

•  Explain context clearly of which content might be used.

• Moderation – making sure content is managed to prevent offensive comments. Self-governance.

• As facilitators, we should be educating the participants about moral/ethical guidelines in order to encourage best practice.

If you feel that we have missed anything, please add in the comments below.