Introductions
Steven Clift
I'm Steven Clift with E-Democracy.org. We've been around since 1994 and focus on local online community engagement. In particular, we host over 30 online neighborhood and community "Issues Forums" in three countries.
I am looking forward to building some more bridges between the local online engagement world and public broadcasting. We've partnered with KAXE Radio's Northern Community Internet project, had Minnesota Public Radio leverage our Inclusive Social Media effort in low income, high immigrant neighborhoods - http://e-democracy.org/inclusion - (notably Frogtown in St. Paul), and WTIP on Lake Superior is a co-sponsor of one of our community forums. We also connect regularly with Twin Cities Public Television. Over the years with our UK efforts we've swapped notes with the BBC on such projects at their Action Network.
We are big boosters of the CityCamp unconference series and host their vibrant online group - http://e-democracy.org/citycamp - Check it out. We have many online news folks in the mix with this citizen/local gov 2.0 crowd.
My two main reasons for attending Public Media Camp are:
1. To seek potential partners in our future Inclusive Social Media work (Ford Foundation funded) and gather input on our Neighborly proposal: http://e-democracy.org/neighborly (think private electronic block clubs connected up into community-based opportunities for participation)
2. To have a serious conversation about the destruction of real community and local democratic capacity promoted by the default anonymous commenting models used by many local online news sites (local mainstream newspapers lead the way). I think public broadcasters have an opportunity to lead the way with alternative technology and models. With our work in immigrant communities we've come to see the continous "go home" postings on reputable media sites when an immigrant business or group is featured as the virtual cross-burnings of our generation. It is that bad.
So who else will be there? Or better put, tell us about yourself so the newcomers can figure out who to start following on Twitter now. I am at: http://twitter.com/democracy
Cheers,
Steven Clift
Founder and Executive Director
E-Democracy.org
http://stevenclift.com
http://blog.e-democracy.org