Tuesday I gave you a quick summary of Public Media Camp and what it means, today I’d like to walk you through some of the vision behind why #PubCamp, and why now.
Personally, I hope that the unconference movement marks a transition in civic and community service volunteerism — local public media stations have always been great about pulling together volunteers to do things like answer phones during pledge drives, but more and more I hear from stations who wish they had more capacity to do really innovative things online and across platforms.
There just isn’t enough money and employees to make all of our dreams come true, hopefully PublicMediaCamp can help.
We’ve (and by we, I mean PBS, NPR, the American University Center for Social Media, and iStrategyLabs — talk about some firepower behind the idea!) came up with what we think is a solid platform and framework for organizing and capturing ideas and content.
We’re not only going to gather 300 of the best and brightest of Washington DC, but also we’re creating a toolkit that local public broadcasting entities across the United States can use to hold their own unconferences no matter the scale. Those local events may be 20 people in a conference room, or 700 people in a convention center, the scale of the event doesn’t matter as much as the people and the ideas that are generated.
In the coming weeks, I’ll walk you through some of the other thinking behind the event and give you updates on where we are in the planning phase. If you’re interested in becoming involved in PublicMediaCamp just send a tweet or an email, we need lots of volunteers and sponsors to make this event a success.
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