Designs for a networked beat (in Mozambique)

Jay Rosen's thought-provoking article on the 'networked beat' has been doing the rounds for the past few days, and it dovetails nicely with our work here in Maputo. With @Verdade, a hybrid, community-driven media organisation covering Mozambique, we're building a community reporter network (and the toolset to power it).

Jay's eight hallmarks of a networked beat map perfectly with how things will work as we're monitoring the Mozambican elections.

My eight steps to a networked beat follow: 

Step 1: Define the right combination of news flows for this particular beat.
Step 2: Put an intelligent filter, made for multiple uses, on the combined flow.
Step 3: From smart filters on combined streams, make a series of simple and useful products.
Step 4: Start to register, verify and make contact with the best independent sources on the beat.
Step 5: When they’re good enough hook the filtering tools up to the work flow for beat coverage.
Step 6: Launch your “inbox on steroids” and prove to the users that it works.
Step 7: Bring key sources (from step 4) and fellow obsessives into co-production. And be prepared to compensate.
Step 8: Go pro-am. Try some campaigns. Crowdsource from an earned crowd.

Read Jay Rosen's article here, or check out our beta snapshot video here...

How open is open? Sourcework and community verification.

Yesterday was your typical project delivery day... early start, unpredictable tangents and roadblocks, a sense of achievement and a late evening.

Battling with bandwidth has been an issue all week. It's clear we need to work further still on optimising our citizen reporting tool for web use in low-bandwidth conditions. However, the SMS component is working fantastically well. @Verdade have set up a shortcode that allows anyone on the two biggest cell networks in Mozambique (soon to be three) to text a report for free. Citizen Desk aggregates these and allows the editorial team to see at-a-glance all incoming SMS, tweets, facebook posts, YouTube videos and more.

Using our open liveblogging software, they can then post these with context to the web, either for community verification, or as a 'signal' blog (as opposed to the 'noise' of their Twitter and Facebook backchannels).

Of course this is a hot topic. As I wrote in yesterday's article...

"@Verdade do a lot of their source work in public, especially on Facebook, pushing out reports to the community for verification and backstory. Once clear details emerge, an article is created on their website and the url is posted back across to Facebook. Comments from their 30,000 followers rack up quickly. But, of course, many people are not online. @Verdade gets round this by having a blackboard outside their office where the articles of the day are posted. People respond in chalk with comments; the best of these are then photographed or transcribed and posted back to @Verdade's social network communities."

We wanted to build a tool that gave media the option on how and where to do their verification. To define their own community model.

There's a strange bias against certain media organisations however. When people like the amazing Andy Carvin do their sourcework in the open, it's seen as revolutionary. For other media organisations, they are seen as untrustworthy or not adhering to journalistic standards of verification. Why is that? Where do we draw the line between rumour and networked journalism?

Spectacle Podcast #8 on net neutrality and internet bricks

Ben and I saw in May's Reboot.fm show with more music from the netherwebs, plus massively uninformed opinions on net neutrality, ad-hoc internet generators, James Blake (AKA dubstep’s Lionel Ritchie), The Knife’s new stage show and a podcast must-listen list to die for.

Featuring tracks from Jon Hopkins (Open Eye Signal), Seven Davis Jr. (Thanks) James Blake (Retrograde), The Knife (Without You My Life Would Be Boring), Phantogram (Don’t Move), Pan American (Project For An Apartment Building), Dark Sky & Breach (The Click) and Midland (Trace).

From Twitter to taxis: building a citizen reporter network in Mozambique

Sitting in his warm office in Maputo, Adérito Caldeira, Editor-in-Chief of @Verdade greets my opening question with a thoughtful silence. When he speaks, as always, he is considered, passionate and informed.

"Really this is our first election where we are engaging with what is happening in the country," he says. "Before, in 2008, we were starting. We just reported the final results. But now, after five years, media is a tool for the transformation and development of the country. This election is one of the first steps."

On the 25th of May this year, electoral registration in Mozambique begins. The entire electoral register is being rebuilt from scratch, meaning everyone of voting age (and Adérito thinks around 50% of all these voters could be identified as "young people") has to identify and find their local polling station and register before they are able to vote. Municipal elections are coming up in November 2013 and the national elections are due sometime (none knows quite when) in 2014.

In a country as big as Mozambique (it is twice the size of Germany), just finding your polling station is a challenge. There are 43 municipalities and some might only have 50 polling stations, meaning the distances between polling stations are more usefully measured in hours, not kilometres.

Ensuring that all these polling stations are fully-functioning is a task @Verdade takes very seriously. But with only eleven members of their editorial team, covering this vast country and its 2,500 polling stations is an almost impossible task. That's where their innovative Citizen Reporter (Cidadão Repórter in Portuguese) network comes in.

Read the rest of my post on building a community reporter network over on sourcefabric.org...

Down on the waterfront...

Went for a run this morning. In Maputo, that is no easy thing. Pavements and roads have the habit of collapsing into each other, and collapsing into deep, black holes. Tree roots buckle walkways and concrete slabs with ease and the trees' energetic branches provide plenty of opportunities to duck. Early morning traffic is not too bad, but the air is already close and hot despite the rapidly approaching winter. 

There are hills. Enormous winding, tree-covered, exhausting hills. My morning route took me past the pleasant leafy park where lovers congregate at night, then down the hill where the previous night I had ended up stumbling around under an overpass in the gloom. Now the morning mists are burning off and early morning ships can be seen, huge foreign vessels full of right-angles and steel, as they carefully pick their way into the treacherous harbour.

Down on the waterfront, the promenade is looking a little neglected. At some point, some authority installed benches – what ever they were made of has now been wrenched away. Palms litter the walkway with discarded fronds and husks and litter congregates at the feet of the fisherman who are spaced out along the curved sea wall. The water is not deep it seems, someone tells me you can wade out, waist-high for miles, if you know where to walk.

Eventually I make it to a marina and an area of land that is being developed, perhaps deserves to be developed. It is at the foot of a cliff, with a beautiful view of the sea and the gentle stretch of the city. Several abandoned attempts to build something here are evident, but the yellow construction vehicles suggest new growth. Condominiums? Affordable housing? Shopping mall? Gardens? Seaside entertainment? It is impossible to tell.

My run takes me (I am no longer in charge) up a long, dry hill. Breathing is no longer an unconscious thing, I stumble alongside the road, the pavement disappears, traffic is tearing past me, but eventually I make it. The cities main boulevards are cooler and the traffic moves slower. Six kilometers feels like a half-marathon. Down on the waterfront, time stands still.