Please introduce yourself

[Andy Carvin]

Now that we're just a few days away from the Think In, I thought I'd start a thread where people can introduce themselves and talk about their goals for the event. I'll kick things off:

I'm Andy Carvin (@acarvin on Twitter), and I'm Senior Strategist at NPR's Social Media Desk. My job is to develop new ways for NPR reporters to interact with the public - and the public to interact with each other - to strengthen our journalism and the role we play in communities. In many ways I see myself as a community organizer - something I've been doing online since I launched my first listserv almost 15 years ago.

I've spend a lot of time over the years mobilizing online communities for a variety of goals. Before coming to NPR, I ran the Digital Divide Network, one of the first nonprofit social networks, which focused on bringing Internet access and digital literacy to marginalized communities around the world. I've also done a lot of work mobilizing communities during times of crisis, including running the SEPT11INFO forum after September 11, serving as a contributing editor to the TsunamiHelp blog in 2004, running the Katrina Aftermath project in 2005, and the Hurricane Information Center in 2008.

Currently, I'm working on an initiative called PublicMediaCamp. It's a series of unconferences kicking off in DC the weekend of October 17 that will attempt to redefine and expand the relationship that public broadcasters have with their local communities, through the development of collaborative projects. In many ways, the project seeks to connect the goodwill that exists for NPR online and catalyze real-world collaborations out of it, as there are many people out there who are willing to volunteer their time to improve public radio and its role in their communities.

For the Think In itself, I hope to come away with new ideas for improving our various social media activities, whether on our own site or in third-party communities like Facebook and Twitter. I'm also interested in ways of connecting the dots between online communities and offline ones, such as the development of meetup-like tools that NPR fans can use in their communities for convening civic, educational and cultural activities.

Looking forward to meeting all of you in San Francisco!

[Steve Outing]

Andy: I'm really sorry to miss this Digital ThinkIn; I was invited, said I'd attend, then had to back out due to conflicting travel. I'm disappointed, to say the least. Nevertheless, I hope to listen in virtually and participate in the online component. And I'd be happy in the future to assist NPR in its strategic digital-future initiatives.

Can I still introduce myself? ... I will anyway. Longtime journalist; spent first half of my career in newspapers and magazines as editor, inforgraphics manager, and writer. Bailed out of print in late 1993 by way of a newspaper buy-out and became an early expert on intersection of news industry and Internet. Since then, I've had an odd, mostly free-agent career as columnist, writer, researcher, speaker, media consultant, entrepreneur. Spent a few years working with the Poynter Institute. Currently focused mostly on consulting, including a university initiative for bringing news through the digital transition.

More on my blog: http://steveouting.com/about/

Steve Outing

[Susan Price]

I'm another who will need to attend the ThinkIn remotely. Steve and I can chat while it's going on, at least.

I'm an NPR footsoldier, Camp creator, coworking sponsor and digital divide bridger in San Antonio. As the CEO and chief web strategist of Firecat Studio, I'm a user-centered website designer, eMail and social media campaigner, speaker, trainer, author, blogger. I consult with organizations to help them leverage web, email and social media.

I helped create the Austin Free-Net, and I work through Knowbility to keep the web accessible to people with disabilities. I've created and sponsored GreenCamp, BarCamp, TweetCamp - so PublicAccessCamp sounds great to me. We're currently organizing a TEDx San Antonio event.

I work actively every day to create the world I want to live in, where people take more responsibility rather than less, feel and learn from the consequences of their actions.

I was once hit on the head by lightning in the Grand Canyon. I'm queen of the universe. I tweet as @firecatsue

As participation in social media interactions rises, we're finding more demand for in-person events. Luckily social media makes those easier to organize - with and among the "usual suspects"; those who live and breathe online, and who travel with broadband cards and smart phones. I help create community events partly because I need to hear from folks NOT so much like me.

One of the most interesting uses I find for Twitter is to "attend" events with others remotely. Examples: the presidential debates, the Little League World Series, the inauguration. I'd love to help NPR organize and publicize those types of events.

San Antonio has a very strong NPR community, and because we're not known as a high-tech center, we can serve as a good testing ground for the NPR folks who don't live and breathe technology. I look forward to being able to contribute my own ideas and help implement others.

Let us know how we can remote in.

[Andy Carvin]

@Susan: You should definitely check out PublicMediaCamp when you get a chance:

http://publicmediacamp.org

We're putting together a toolkit to teach stations how to host their own #pubcamp unconferences; it'll be released around the time of PublicMediaCamp in DC on a Creative Commons license.

[Burt]

Just heard about the Digital Think In and am looking forward to participating remotely. We are out in Hawaii, one of the most remote places in the world, surrounded by thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean. Hawaii Public Radio is the voice of NPR here in the islands and we aim to keep that voice strong.

By way of background, co-host Ryan Ozawa and I do a weekly sci/tech show on Hawaii Public Radio called Bytemarks Cafe. It is on every Wed. from 5-6pm on KIPO 89.3FM. We cover all the science and tech things happening in and around Hawaii. We've been doing the show for a little more than a year.

Before the radio show at Hawaii Public Radio, I did a column for the Honolulu Advertiser called Bytemarks, that ran from 1998 to 2004. It was also about tech but focused on the Internet, websites and online culture. When the column ended in 2004 there was still a strong interest in fostering a tech community. I started a blog to keep active writing and an online community on Yahoogroups. This evolved to include weekly Bytemarks Lunch meetups where we converge on a local tech company to keep current on activities happening around town. I've also organized a local tech Unconferenz to help nurture interaction amongst the tech community.

Social media and web 2.0 tools are actively used and adopted throughout the Hawaii community. You will find active Twitter personalities in tourism, PR, retail, news, celebrity, tech and military. We are helping to bring, slowly but surely, Hawaii Public Radio into the 21st century with their own social media presence. You can find me on Twitter @bytemarks and on Facebook amongst others. I am looking forward to participating in NPR's Digital Think In.

[Loretta Donovan]

I'll join the chorus here and say that I'll be a very enthusiastic virtual participant too. In my professional life, I am an internal organization development director for a terrific cardiac hospital near New York City. I'm also an external consultant, designing large scale participatory events (like Digital Think In) including processes like appreciative inquiry and embedding social media into the interaction.

Social media as a tool for community building, practice sharing, knowledge creation and as a lever of organizational learning and growth has been my passion since I joined my first online bulletin board in 1993. Web 2.0 and public radio are the contemporary embodiments of Thomas Paine's publishing, the party-line telephone, and Solidarity's citizen band radio. In many ways, Americans are less connected to their neighbors today than ever before. Not knowing each others' circumstances or stories makes for a huge gap in our civic lives and the hopes and dreams that we should anticipate and plan for together. That is one of the compelling reasons this event is so interesting to me. The other is the loss of many media print publications and the shrinking size of the rest. Being well informed is becoming harder, and the same time more important as the world grows in complexity.

You will find me on Twitter as LorettaDonovan, and on LinkedIn, Facebook, FriendFeed, Ning, etc. (you get the picture). I enjoy watching the weak signals of the thinking and doing of friends across the US and the globe.

Bravo Andy for this landmark event. Cheers to everyone at NPR as you boldly face the possibilities of a yet unimagined future

[Roland]

Andy, thanks for getting the ball rolling!

My role in the Digital Think In started back in April, when I had the pleasure of sitting down with Kinsey Wilson and Jennifer Dunworth from the NPR Foundation to discuss the role that digital media plays at NPR. They were on the west coast for an annual NPR retreat that I’d participated in the previous year. I was especially interested in reconnecting with the NPR team because there had been some significant leadership changes in the last year including the addition of Kinsey as the VP of Digital Media and Vivian Schiller as CEO.

The new team’s approach to digital media was a breath of fresh air and started from the understanding that NPR needs to not only listen to it’s community for cues about how and where to innovate, but also to the thought leaders at the intersection of media and technology. It just so happens that the latter are concentrated in the Bay Area, so I suggested creating an event at which we could explore NPR’s digital future with this community. This was the beginning of the Digital Think In. Many months of planning later we've got an amazing event on tap and I can't wait for Friday.

Everyone on the organizing team has done an amazing job leading up to the big day, especially Stacey Foxwell for keeping everyone organized and on the same page, Tim Leberecht who brought the frog on board as our hosts, Mike LaVigne who has worked hard structuring the day, David Wright who set up this site, and many others. Make sure to introduce yourself when you see these people during the event because it couldn't have happened without them!

[Chris O'Brien]

Hello all: I'm looking forward to meeting folks this Friday. By way of introduction, I'm the business and technology columnist at the San Jose Mercury News. I've covered Silicon Valley since 1999 and I've been a professional reporter since 1992. We were sort of a canary in the coalmine for much of the newspaper industry, having been hit harder and earlier by the unraveling of the newspaper business model. The newsroom has shrunk from a peak of 420 to 100 people. So I've witnessed the grim side of this era up close.

But I've also seen the promise of this age. Two years ago, I became part of a project called "Rethinking The Mercury News." Our mission was to "blow-up" the newsroom and rebuild it from scratch. We used a design thinking process to better understand our community and the opportunities for the newspaper. After months of research and prototyping, our recommendations were ultimately rejected. While disappointed, the process left me incredibly optimistic about the possibility for news organizations to reinvent themselves. And it also convinced me that design thinking was a powerful process for understanding how to make those changes.

In addition, I was a recipient of a Knight Foundation News Challenge Grant in 2007 for The Next Newsroom Project. The goal of the project was to research and design the ideal newsroom of the future.

As I look ahead to Friday, I'm hoping to see that NPR is considering the kind of wholesale changes I think are necessary to move ahead. I've found that even organizations that profess to want to make that leap eventually get tripped up by internal cultural forces that are hard to bend. Too many news organizations spend their time looking externally for solutions, and wondering what others can do to help them. The key, I think, is to look internally at how to reinvent yourself. The fact that NPR has initiated this gathering makes me hopeful that the latter will occur.

Questions I have on my mind:

*How is NPR thinking about moving onto other platforms, particularly mobile?
*How can NPR become a center of continuous innovation, something that will be necessary to continue to adapt to a constantly changing media landscape?
*How can NPR bring the community even further into its processes of gathering, producing and distributing news and information?
*How can NPR become more transparent, an important step to building and maintaining trust in our fragmented media world?
*How can NPR collaborate in new ways with its affiliates and other news organizations to fill the growing gaps in community news and information?

[Brian Reich]

Andy, I look forward to seeing you again in person. It has been a while. I am most excited about this discussion and am grateful for the opportunity to participate. Thank you.

For the benefits of others, here is a little about me and what I am working on:

My name is Brian Reich; I am managing director of little m media - my own venture - which focuses on providing strategic guidance and other support to organizations around the use of the internet and technology in order to facilitate communications, engagement, education, and mobilization. I wrote a book a few years back entitled Media Rules! (Wiley 2007) about the challenge that organizations face in communicating effectively in the digital age. I blog at www.thinkingaboutmedia.com, as a Fast Company Expert (www.fastcompany.com/blog/brian-reich/im-media-te-impact), and at www.WeMedia.com. You can find me on twitter @brianreich.

My focus is helping organizations to recognize what is changing about our society - how technology and the internet have dramatically changed the way people get and share information. I believe those changes impact everything - what we buy, how we spend our time, what (and how) we read, watch television, listen to the radio, talk to each other, and certainly our expectations of the organizations that we support and engage.

If I were to hop on my soapbox for a moment, I would say that when it comes to organizations (of all kinds) I am just not that impressed - at least not when it comes to communications, education, advocacy, and more. The groups we hold up as models, because of their size or the level of awareness of their cause, aren’t breaking much new ground. Even those who have successfully establish their brand or built an audience aren’t necessarily in a position to take what they do and adapt it to meet the new challenges that we will face in the (near) future. There continues to be far too much focus on activity (how big your email list is, or how much money you give to charity, what your ratings are) and not enough on impact (whether you are really serving a need, or changing things for the better). There is too much emphasis placed on brand (i.e. what groups call themselves, or say they are doing) and not enough on experience (what is really happening, whether expectations are being met). There is too much energy put into growth (how big can we be, how many people can we reach) and not enough commitment to sustainability (can we maintain the quality of what we do no matter how many things are choose to do) or impact (are we achieving our goals).

NPR is different. NPR is succeeding, and for the right reasons. I am excited to participate in the Think In because I know the importance of NPR continuing to succeed, I am thrilled to be able to offer some ideas in that vein, and I know that I will learn a tremendous about by being a part of the discussion.

I come to the discussion with my head flooded with ideas and questions -- there is so much talent assembled in the room that I know I will get so much more from the conversation if I just sit back and list. But I also want to make sure that we think about a few of the challenges facing NPR, and media generally, a little differently. NPR has an opportunity to not only (continue to) set the standard for media, but also to define, or re-define, what media and journalism and information and community (online and offline) look like in the future, and how information can be created, consumed, shared, collaborated on, etc. NPR is doing more and better than most organizations, but is barely scratching the surface of what is possible. And my sense is that the framework for success in the future is not actually an extension of what is being done today, but something radically and dramatically differently, something we can't fully envision right now. That's not to say there isn't plenty we can do in the short term, but its intended, I guess, as an invitation to extend the thinking on Friday out a few levels and really begin to experiment with some different ways of using the internet and technology in the context of media and NPR.

Anyway, just to wrap up -- I am working on a few media related projects right now that I think are relevant, and interesting. The first, which I am working with Molly Bingham (who will also be attending the Think In), is about transforming the media to reflect the realities of our new, connected, global, society. You can learn more about the concept at www.transformingthemedia.com, and about one of the elements we have launched at www.gc4mt.org. I serve as an adviser to Investigate West (http://invw.org/), a nonprofit investigative journalism project that emerged after the Seattle PI (my hometown paper growing up) shifted to web-only. I wrote a piece about the changing relationship between the president, the press, and the public (http://wemedia.s3.amazonaws.com/papers/tp/ifocos_wm_wepresident.pdf) earlier this year and am trying to expand on that project a bit in a few ways now. And, I am teaching a course about media, government and social change in the connected society - which includes some discussion about how the news business is changing (Syllabus - http://www.pmgtclasses.com/class-syllabus/media-government-and-soci...).

I will see you on Friday! If you have ideas, questions or thoughts in the meantime - about anything I am working on, or whatever - I would love to hear them.

[David Nordfors]

I am David Nordfors, co-founder and executive director of the VINNOVA-Stanford Research Center of Innovation Journalism at Stanford University. I will most definitely be in San Francisco on Friday, and I am very much looking forward to it!

My interest is in the role of journalism in the innovation economy. I believe that journalism is key for connecting the innovation economy and democratic society. For that to happen, journalism needs to be good at covering innovation processes and ecosystems. This is not only about covering tech or business or politics, it is above all about being able to cover tech AND business AND politics and how they interact with each other, as well as having matching organizational structure and business model for doing it. Innovation Journalism can be seen as a 'horizontal beat'. Here is my blog on innovation journalism: http://www.innovationjournalism.org

The InJo center at Stanford works with professional journalists, academic researchers in communication/business/innovation, and public innovation policy intellectuals - our mission is not only to develop innovation as a keyword for journalism, but also to develop journalism as a keyword for innovation researchers and policists.

Apart from my full-time position at Stanford, I am visiting professor in journalism and communication at the Tecnologico de Monterrey University in Mexico, adjunct faculty at the IDC Herzliya University in Israel. I am a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the Future of Journalism. My Ph.D. is in quantum molecular physics, I have been science editor of a computer magazine, and worked for many years with public policy entrepreneurship, mainly in Sweden - my home country.

[Chris MacDonald]

Hello, just wanted to quickly introduce myself. I split my time currently between three projects that I am passionate about. As a biz dev guy for LibsynPro I provide consultative services to enterprises (including NPR) in the subscribed media / RSS 2.0 / podcasting arena. I am energized by all of the non profit and non commercial use of our services.

I run a successful music discovery network called IndieFeed. In fact it was this project that led me to Libsyn (I was their first paying client). Currently we serve over 2.5 million Nielsen-verified downloads in 5 music genres plus one spoken poetry channel. Much of our distribution is managed through iTunes, shareable widgets and website. For fun, check out IndieFeed and you might find some new music worth listening to. I will include one of the feeds on my profile page for easy access.

Lastly I am Chairman and co-founder of the Association for Downloadable Media, a non-profit trade association geared at helping its members to create sustainable business models in the subscribed media space.

Looking forward to sharing ideas with this group.

[Matt Gallivan]

I work at NPR as a Sr. Research Analyst in the Audience Insight & Research group. Most of my work is focused on digital media; studying the who, what and why around NPR digital products. Though I won't be attending in person, I look forward to following the conversation here and on Twitter (you can find me at @mgallivan).

There are a lot of interesting folks involved in this effort, and I'm really excited to hear everyone's thoughts and ideas.

[Susan Mernit]

Hi, I am Susan Mernit, long time web/community/product developer person. Currently I am working on the following projects:
a) launching Oakland Local, a new news and community site for Oakland, funded by a J-Lab new Voices grant. We are 2 weeks into debugging the site, and I am getting impatient for launch!
b) Web strategist and revenue modeler for California Watch, a project of The Center for Investigative Reporting. I work with the team them to understand using social media, building a new web site, web strategy for user engagement and page views, content distribution and syndication; we are also working on strategies for revenue and earned income, which is a blast.
c) Co-founder of The Public Media Collaborative, a volunteer group that teaches social media tools, strategies and measurement to community organizations, nonprofits, and ethnic media. We've done a whole set of programs, to good response, and have two programs going on in Oakland, CA on October 23 and 24th--join us if you are local. (And if you're an organization that would like to sponsor a meal at the event, donations are welcomed).
d) Co-convener of the first California Data Camp and SF Data App contest on behalf of California Watch and Spot.us--sign up here.

I was also very involved with the recent Online News Association conference, ran the 2008-09 Knight News Challenge with Knight's Gary Kebbel and Jose Zamora, and was a TechStars 2009 start-up. Currently, I am super interested in local projects, community, civic engagement. I consult part time to bootstrap my own efforts and will probably have some capacity for projects in early 2010, maybe before. Oh, and I blog and tweet like a mad person.