sponge – collaborative media innovation lab

[stefan candea]

journalism has no R&D like other industries have. therefore, the old business-model of putting all efforts in building an audience and sell it to advertisers or power-groups, remained the main business-model.

would a collaborative approach outside the mainstream media and at the intersection of related professions change this? would this approach create a community interested in relevant and verifiable information?
we are trying it now in Eastern Europe with the Sponge (www.thesponge.eu)

as investigative journalists with CRJI (www.crji.org) we experienced for a decade with gathering, analyzing, packaging and publishing information. we did it out of need, because we had no decent place to publish our stories, no access to information and resources and no skilled journos to work with. while we extensively networked with other journos locally and internationally, we didn’t expand our clustered community to other relevant professions: coders, activists, designers and academia.

we are now testing a collaborative and open lab approach, working with already established groups and networks of coders, activists and designers. our first collaborative experiment is an open media challenge, in collaboration with Mozilla Foundation (OpenNews). the challenge will end soon (1st of october), so I would talk about our little experiment, what we learned from it, what we plan next and hope to hear from other participants about similar experiments.

[fin]

hey there,

sponge.eu seems to be up for sale. what’s up with that?

-f

[stefan candea]

sorry, my bad, it is thesponge.eu

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