Wendy Norris's List: Community engagement

"By now, we're used to letting Facebook and Twitter capture our social lives on the web -- building a "social layer" on top of the real world. At TEDxBoston, Seth Priebatsch looks at the next layer in progress: the "game layer," a pervasive net of behavior-steering game dynamics that will reshape education and commerce."

We pay a number of participants to view your page and track their gaze with our software. You get heatmaps like the one above, which show how the users interacted with your site.

"A widescreen approach to social media measurement ultimately looks at the things that really matter: sales, profits, customer satisfaction and loyalty. Besides, honing in on the detail might not be the best use of your time, given the obvious difficulties that arise, particularly with attribution.\n\nBut standing back and looking at the bigger picture is not going to be enough for your data-mad boss, is it? It's a bit too soft focus, right? He or she is going to want to see proof that all this social optimisation is actually working. "

This report is based on usability studies with real users, reporting how they actually used a broad variety of iPad apps as well as websites accessed on the iPad.

Website devoted to aggregating public broadcasting efforts to strengthen community engagement.

All the activities in these clusters are done by individuals, citizens, working together. Experts and elites work in institutional and professional contexts. Citizens work in association with each other to form publics. Mediating institutions - such as journalism - help connect experts, elites, and citizens. These activities take place in systems and structures that bring cohesion to community life and they are described in the social-capital and social-networking literature. They enable decision making-in politics, government, and markets. And they let us know and learn through knowledge management, innovation, communities of practice, learning organizations, dialogue and deliberation, and other social-intelligence practices.

While few nonprofits have developed mobile apps, the potential is huge if done strategically and of course executed well. We’ll likely see some great mission driven apps released in the coming years as more nonprofits decide to experiment and invest in mobile app development to further their missions.

"While public sphere theory has provided a useful perch from which to critically evaluate media and public life and has led to useful distinctions between deliberative, agonistic, and other conceptions of democracy, it does need to connect at some point to actual changes that are taking place in society. This essay focuses on one such change: the increasing “marketization” of the broadcast news media and the possible consequences for informed citizenship."

""News is a process, not a finished product, and the Web is making that perfectly clear these days. Trust in the process is different than trust in the finished product, and this is doubtless impacting overall views of trust in the press.""

"So it’s noteworthy that Gawker announced today a couple small tweaks to their commenting system. "

"The conversation avoided most of the usual future of journalism tropes: there was no "who's a journalist" questions, no desperate warnings about journalism's downfall or overly rosy pictures of journalism's future, there was no discussion of which new gadget would save journalism. Instead, the panel focused on the very concrete nuts and bolts of developing, launching, and maintaining a new web-first newsroom."

"Today I want to introduce a companion idea. Because the people formerly known as the audience have arrived, the journalists formerly known as "the media" are here, too. And this is what you-the next generation of professional journalists-have a chance to define for the rest of us. The digital revolution changes the equation. It brings forward a new balance of forces, putting the tools of production and the powers of distribution in the hands of the people formerly known as the audience. And so you have the opportunity to become the journalists formerly known as the media, carrier class for a new understanding of the people "out there" on the receiving end of what journalists make. I say "new," but it is really just another chapter in the long struggle to make good on the idea of a public that knows what is happening because it pays attention, informs itself and argues about what should be done."

Block by Block 2010 conference on hyperlocal news reporting.

Carnegie Mellon Social Web course readings