Event Recap: PublicMediaCamp

I make it no secret that I enjoy going to unconferences (even though my presence at social media events has tailed off slightly, recently).

Frankly, I’m somewhat surprised that I’m still allowed to register for some of these (“Hey, buddy: Give someone else a chance for a while, okay?”)

I especially like unconferences that expose me to sectors and people addressing social media and online community topics from directions with which I’m less familiar, which was the case for this weekend’s PublicMediaCamp, a BarCamp-style unconference centered around how public media organizations (think NPR, PBS, member stations, and “viewers like you”) can use social media technologies to help collaborate, engage audiences, fundraise (I think coincidentally, this is also NPR’s fall membership campaign), distributed content, and do all that great online stuff.

Here’s my obligatory shot of the session board:

For full recaps, notes, photos, attendees and whatnot, see the PubCamp Wiki, and check the by now de facto / de rigueur social transcript and backchannel that is the Tweets tagged with #pubcamp.

Since I fell under the category of “public media enthusiast,” I was gratified by the presence of actual public media folks, not just from the HQs and big shops in DC, SF, and NYC, but also from affiliates and stations all across the country. (I think the distance travel award goes to John Proffitt, hailing from Anchorage, Alaska.)

Now, I don’t pretend to know all the intricacies and nuance of public media, but I note that there’s an intersection of interests that gives them a very particular set of challenges to social media adoption. I leave it to someone else to try to visualize this into some sort of neat diagram, but you’ve got the relationships between national organizations and local stations; producers and broadcasters; stations and funders; big stations and little stations; and the ever-present (in every sector — for-profit, non-profit, government) tension between institutionalized interests and groups that are trying to do new things.

Some of that tension was evident in the early session (I got there towards the end of the first session, even with the organizers accommodating my schedule by pushing back the start times due to some road closures); you might think that public media would be all one, big, happy family, but throw in resource constraints, organizational inertia, and uncertainty among traditional media companies and news operations, and things are rarely so rosy.

From the session on Disaster Response and Social Media, we were reminded (or informed for the first time, for me), that in many cases, even in this connected age, small community-based stations are often the sole media provider for their community — a particular mandate for public broadcasters — so if they don’t do it, it doesn’t get done.

Other themes that popped up included the role of APIs to share and repackage information, and the ability to leverage national organizations to scale up communities and share knowledge (shocker: public media can be just as siloed as government and the private sector).

Also, I know that “curation” is the in-phrase right now (in the context of managing communities and featuring user-generated content), and it was definitely in full-effect here.

I have to say that, even though I don’t think I was able to add very much, I got a lot out of PublicMediaCamp, I thought that this inaugural event was incredibly enlightening and a useful model for regional followups (keeping the momentum going and coming out with concrete deliverables is a common unconference challenge), so we’ll see what happens.