Unfortunately, I was sick this past weekend and couldn’t make it to our Boston Action Tank workshop, “Strategies for Shaping the Media/Tech Future: Policy, Funding & Organizing,” at the Grassroots Use of Technology conference in Lowell, MA.  However, I am looking forward to presenting at the Alliance for Community Media conference in D.C. next week with Ivettza Sanchez of Manhattan Neighborhood Network.

Ivettza and I are running the “Training the Trainers: Vlogging 101″ workshop on Thursday, July 10 from 1:30-3:00PM. Here’s the description from the conference brochure:

“Vlogging (AKA Video Blogging) is a short form of video strictly created to upload to the Internet. This workshop will equip you with the tools and materials you’ll need to teach videoblogging back at your CMC. It will also provide you with tips on how to help your producers navigate the myriad of ways to get their videos watched on the web from videoblogs to wikipedia, to social networking sites.”

If you’re coming to the conference next week, I look forward to seeing you there.

There is a nice mention in the Cambridge Chronicle today about my co-workers’ project, NeighborMedia at CCTV. The article, written by Evelyn Ratigan is entitled, “Journalism project takes reporting to the backyard — literally.” Congrats to Julie Adler for the great press and all of her hard work leading this group of dedicated citizen journalists in the community.

“Since September, Cambridge Community Television has been training citizen journalists in digital media and providing a forum to discuss the issues concerning their neighborhoods. The first term of the program wraps up on Monday, June 16, with a presentation of the journalists’ work at 7 p.m. in CCTV’s Big Studio in Central Square at 675 Mass. Ave.

The station offered a series of classes and personal tutorials to a group of six Cambridge residents, teaching them how to film and edit documentaries, post blog entries and host television shows on the community network.

Adler said the program was a station-wide effort to expand the station’s online and television exposure by reaching ‘deeper into the neighborhoods of Cambridge.’”

Read on at Cambridge Chronicle online.

Tony Shawcross of Denver Open Media was recently awarded $380,000 by the Knight News Challenge to develop new “Tools for Public Access TV“:

“This project will enable public access TV stations and community technology centers to use common tools to create web sites that enable the transfer of video between the web site and the TV station. Together, public access TV and community technology centers can engage disadvantaged communities in new media platforms. While there are thousands of public access stations and community technology centers country-wide that provide media education and equipment, they don’t share a tool-set enabling them to become part of a collective, user-driven, online media network.”

Read more at newschallenge.org.

Jason Daniels from Medfield Community Cable Access posted notes from the Alliance for Community Media Northeast Region Conference on “Migrating to a CMS.”

“The goal of this session is to get an Access center in the right frame of mind to begin the process of moving their website from a static html site to a dynamic (open source) content management system.

Below are the presentation handouts from ‘Migrating to a CMS’. Feel free to download and share. I would like to thank those that attended the session. If you have any additional questions and want to keep this dialog going email me at jdaniels (AT) medfield.tv.”

Visit Medfield.tv for additional links to content management systems.

From Matt Schuster, Chair of the Alliance for Community Media’s Board of Directors:

“With media consolidation, the further commercialization of media and a reduction of public affairs programming and independent voices on commercial television, the role of community media is more valuable today than ever.

Over the past several years, community media has faced many challenges including state franchising bills that, in many instances, have resulted in significant reductions to PEG funding and support. New entrants to the multi-channel video marketplace are attempting to offer PEG channels to their viewers in a substandard format and means of carriage. Local and State Governments are facing economic challenges which may ultimately impact support available for valuable community programming. Without active community media operations, many citizens will loose their connection to the voices in their local community, their connection to educational opportunities, and their connection to their elected officials. We can not allow for people to become disconnected.

To address these issues, the Alliance for Community Media is launching our “Keep Us Connected” Campaign. On behalf of the Alliance for Community Media Board of Directors, I am encouraging all of you to become fully engaged to “Keep Us Connected”.

By keeping us connected, the Alliance for Community Media wants our voices heard on a national level. We want decision-makers to understand the harm being done to community media organizations through poor public policy. We want to showcase your efforts in your communities and the people that you are serving. We want to further raise the profile of PEG channels and community media on the national level. And we want to create a proactive environment on the Hill to further the principles of community media through legislative cures within the first 100 days of the next Congress.”

Read more and donate to support community media.

My co-workers and I had a meeting today to discuss plans for our new website. Two important things caught my attention in thinking about how to frame the work we’re doing through our visual and semantic design.

First, visual design. The thing that sets us (community media centers) apart in a REALLY important way from social network websites (e.g., Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, etc.) is our focus on the physical communities we serve. We need to represent that both in our stories and in our visual images online.

For example, the picture above from the staff page on the DCTV website shows the visitor that there are people involved at DCTV in a physical community. So, if you’re a worker at a community media center with a presence online show pictures of your access center and the people from your community. It not only humanizes the web technology that you’re using, but it also tells the website visitor there is a physical place and people involved that others can come to learn more about, learn from, and participate with.

Second, community media is about empowerment. Therefore, community media on the web is not about getting “users” involved. It’s about empowering people to become producers and owners of their own images, messages and meanings–not the ones told by somebody else.

One way that we can take back the terminology adopted from computer technology is to re-frame “users” as producers of community media on our cable access channels AND online.

For example, if a resident in a community signs up on a community media center’s website to participate in a conversation online (e.g., on a blog), they are producers, not users. If this individual is contributing positively to the public discourse on an access centers’ website, they are producing as a member of a physical community, not just simply using the website for individual needs alone.

By showing pictures of a community media center and the people involved on a participatory website and by re-framing users as producers online, community media centers can not only help to take back the discourse surrounding participatory media online (e.g., “Web 2.0″), we can continue to lead and innovate in an space that may soon become co-opted by a commercial Internet culture.

On my way into work this morning, I noticed an article in the Boston Metro entitled, “Pol eye YouTube for city life.” In it, Greg St. Martin talks about how Boston City Councilor, Rob Consalvo is interested in using YouTube to “broadcast” PSA’s to reach younger audiences. Martin adds,

“Consalvo said the city could use the new Boston Neighborhood News (BNN) studio to film the announcements, which he envisions spanning topics such as education, voting and summer jobs.”

This would be an excellent use of a community media center to provide residents with locally relevant information using web video platforms such as YouTube. The access center could also share the content on its website, while inviting community members to be involved in the production process.

It might also encourage residents to work with the city to create a more democratic communication process through their involvement on such a project. In any case, it’s an interesting model that access centers might consider particularly in working with local non-government and non-commercial organizations.

Read the article online at MetroBostonNews.com

I submitted my thesis to the Department of Graduate Studies at Emerson College this afternoon. It’s entitled “Community Media in Transition: Public Access Television in the Age of YouTube.”

I appreciated the feedback I received from my committee during my defense. They recommended that I spend a bit more time on the paper before making it public. I agreed.

My plan now is to spend the next two months revising the paper. I hope to create a more clear and direct version of my thesis statement with the revision. My hope is that in doing so it will provide a much more detailed road map of policy recommendations that I’ve only begun to layout in the paper thus far. I also hope that a revised version will be more accessible to the general public.

While I’m eager to share the ideas presented in the paper, it’s more important to me that I spend the time making it all it can and should be. That’s the work ahead.

Well, I just dropped off my thesis to the printer. I’m REALLY hoping that it comes back in one piece. I have to submit it to grad studies in the afternoon, following my defense, and after tracking down all the relevant signatures I need.

I will be providing an open access version of my thesis later in the week here on this site. It would be really great if Emerson College had an open access policy on Master’s theses. I’m secretly hoping that Emerson’s libraries, professors, and students as well might lobby for open access to student, and faculty, research in the future. The staff at Boston College libraries seems to take a similar position:

“BC’s dissertations are not yet Open Access (OA). However, it is hoped that this lack of Open Access will change and that BC’s dissertations will in the future be available to anyone with internet access.”

In any case, I look forward to sharing my thesis here on this blog and hearing from folks in access and beyond about the ideas presented in it.

The following message is from a post to the Action Coalition for Media Education e-list from Liza Dichter (Center for International Media Action):

“FROM: Chrissy Harmon: mom, teacher and brand-new community media maker….

Can you take 4 minutes to watch some grassroots media and help me fight for my local community TV center? And please, Pass It On!

I’d never made creative media before. And until now, I’ve never written an email asking folks to ‘take action.’

PLEASE WATCH & RATE: http://www.aniboom.com/Player.aspx?v=198688
“Reckoner Video by Tired People”– BEFORE APRIL 27!

My name is Chrissy Harmon, I’m a mom of three, a public-schoolteacher, and just 3 months ago, I became a producer and volunteer with Franklin Public Access — and it truly changed my life.

I walked into my public access station because I had to speak out against domination of media and education by corporate institutions and ended up 3 months later, producing an animation that we entered in a national music-video competition for the band Radiohead.

WATCH & RATE: “Reckoner Video by Tired People”
http://www.aniboom.com/Player.aspx?v=198688

We need your vote! High ratings is how to win the contest. The winner of the contest creates the actual video for Radiohead, and will receive international promotion. Most entries are done by professional production companies and animators. We have the idea that our little homemade piece could gain some attention for Public Access and might help light a fire under the negotiation process happening with Comcast here in our town.

We are asking friends and allies who believe in Public Access to view our video, rate and leave a supportive comment.

While Steve Russo, the only staff here at our Public Access station, was teaching me to make media, and I was discovering a new feeling of empowerment I didn’t expect, I also learned that our Public Access station is endangered. I learned that Public Access and community media everywhere is under threat from big-profit cable and phone companies. I am now committed to help community media resist and thrive.

Please pass on this email– and if you have any advice, tools or support you can offer us, isolated here in our tiny town up against big Comcast, I’d love to hear from you.

Thank you,

Chrissy Harmo
chrissyjane@gmail.com”