Drupal

Keywords

* Drupal Modules
* New Media Ecosystem
* Electronic Knowledge Repository

* Community of Practice
* Intelligence Analysis
* Knowledge Management

* Deception Detection Techniques
* Critical Thinking Skills
* Decision Making Transparency

Context

* The documentary is primarily focused on how the media served as an uncritical Echo Chamber to the White House's public relations campaign to sell the war in Iraq to the American people. The concensus in Congress trumped International and domestic dissent. These are politically contentious statements. This phase is designed to aggregate and analyze the confirming and disconfirming evidence concerning the larger contentious political issues.

Keywords

* Scaling Deliberative Democracy
* Democratizing Media
* Drupal Modules

Context

* The gathering and analysis of information from the previous phase feeds into this deliberative phase. I imagine that there will be iterations between the analysis of facts and deliberations surrounding the subjective interpretations of facts.

Intention

* Use insights from Dialogue and Deliberation in order to mediate disputes between conflicting parties.
* Use the deliberative process to "Democratize" the process of narrative content development.

Keywords

* Collaborative Content Development
* Volunteer Feedback
* Media Transparency

Context

The eventual distribution model and business plan for The Echo Chamber documentary will determine the full scope of this phase. (i.e. online distribution with micropayments vs. DVD sales). The intended audience for the documentary film may not be the volunteers are participating in co-creation of the project. There could be a tradeoff between providing access to the video excerpts for volunteer feedback versus keeping the video exclusive for the video release.

I'm in the process of converting this site over to Drupal and then to CivicSpace -- Centralized control over this project has been a big bottleneck, and I should be able to start some parallel processing of tasks as soon as I get it up and running.

Posts will be a bit sparse here since everything will be shifting URLs and whatnot.

I just started really converting the site yesterday, and I'm using my other domain at http://www.echochambermovie.com to get things ported over. There's no graphic design or anything beyond about 4 hours of work.

CivicSpace Lab's Zack Rosen passed along the name of Aldon Hynes, who is setting up a Center for Online Investigative Research, which will also be running on CivicSpace.

Hynes & I talked about our respective projects and similar issues that we are facing such as implementing a set of collaborative tools that are intuitively useful for potential citizen journalists, setting up a centralized/decentralized ecosystem of volunteer labor, establishing a fixed taxonomy vs. having an open folksonomy to organize information, and establishing a reputation system of users and messages.

Within a couple of hours of posting a message to the CivicSpace Community yesterday, a developer from Drupal.org called up and offered to help set up a CivicSpace site for EchoChamberProject.com.

This means that some of the current URL's here will probably be changing. The sooner I switch over, then the easier it'll be.

I'm keeping in contact with this volunteer programmer, and I'll pass along more information as the site gets up and running.

I've been getting up to speed on the latest and greatest web technologies, and one of the most promising finds that I've made so far is with CivicSpace Labs.

When I interviewed PressThink's Jay Rosen last June, he had mentioned that his nephew Zack was an open-source programmer who was working with the Dean Campaign. DeanSpace was the community-building platform built on top of the open-source content management platform of Drupal. DeanSpace has continued development as CivicSpace and has an impressive range of community-building and collaboration tools that should come in real handy for managing a decentralized volunteer labor force.