Skip the post and Register to hear about #PubCamp ticket availability or follow us on Twitter.
If you know anything about the work we do at iStrategyLabs, you know we’re suckers for a good unconference. Over the past two years, we’ve created, hosted, sponsored and/or co-organized so many terrific open format events – from WidgetDevCamp, to BarCampDC2, Apps for Democracy code jams, Transparency Camp, Government 2.0 Camp, Participation Camp, Privacy Camp and more.
You could say we’ve become pretty good at getting people together for a common purpose – to share a vision, explore possibilities and get down to the creation new things. You could also say that we’re very passionate about citizen engagement as we see the future of innovation being driven by citizens empowered by their government and other institutions to do great things. That’s what our experiment Apps for Democracy is about.
Which brings me to PublicMediaCamp. When NPR and PBS began thinking about how to strengthen the relationship between public broadcasters and their communities, they turned to iStrategyLabs to collaborate on a framework that could serve as a guide for local market public broadcasters across the country to use for engaging their talented citizens to not only foster dialogue, but even better, build something together. Though most bricks will be made of 1′s and 0′s, either in the form of new civic apps or media projects, the most durable bricks these PublicMediaCamps will cement together will be human relationships. These relationship will build enduring bridges between public media and citizens with the end result being a strong mediascape and cityscape.
PublicMediaCamp will begin as a nationally focused unconference, taking place on the weekend of October 17th at American University’s campus in Washington DC. It is co-hosted by NPR, PBS and AU’s Center for Social Media, in conjunction with iStrategyLabs. But PublicMediaCamp won’t stop there – it will roll out across the country organically as other local public broadcasters pickup the torch and create their own camps in their own cities and towns. We’ll support them with a step-by-step guide for creating these kinds of innovation events, and provide a flexible technology framework for content publishing, event planning and virtual collaboration.
If I’m not mistaken, everything we do will be released under a creative commons license for everyone to use, remix and fuel their own community development efforts. We’ll release the guide and further information as soon as we can. See you at #PubCamp!
Further Reading: @acarvin has a post up on NPR.org
