Your last assignments for your individual weblog (not the group weblog) are as follows:

Next week we will have daily presentations on the group weblog projects done by class participants. On each day of presentations (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) your assignment is to write a brief entry (one or two paragraphs) commenting substantively on one (or both) of the projects presented in class that day.

“Commenting substantively” means write a bit more than, “Great site, guys!” If you think the site is great, say why. If you have a question or comment, share it. Be sure to make a link from your entry to one of the entries at the group site(s) you are discussing (so it creates a “ping” at that site).

At the end of next week, each person in class should have three new, brief entries reacting to other classmates’ group sites/presentations.

As always, be sure to check both your group and individual blogs, using the links provided on our links page, to be sure they look the way you intend.

In the last week of class, final project groups will do brief presentations on their project sites. These presentations should be relatively informal and should take about 15 minutes. All group members must actively participate in the presentation. Presentations should address the following:

• How did you decide on your project idea(s)?
• What were your sources of information? How did you choose sources or find new sources?
• How did you build your community (of sources, readers, etc.)?
• What successes did you have? What challenges did you face?
• What did you learn?
• Discussion…

Presentation dates are as follows:

• Monday 3 December: Taste of Life and Almaty
• Wednesday 5 December: Anihumancolor and We Love Films
• Friday 7 December: Chikas and Be Free

Throughout this course we have been trying to understand the internet as a socio-technical system–a system that is defined both by technologies and what they enable people to do, and by social relationships, conditions, and expectations of people.

In asking whether there is or could be online participatory journalism in Kazakhstan, we also need to consider socio-technical issues. Many have come up in our recent readings.

Today in class we will brainstorm ideas, drawing on and hopefully going beyond the readings. The question I want you to consider: What social or technical factors influence the opportunity for OPJ to work effectively in Kazakhstan?

Some ideas from class:

•  Personal motivation
• Fear of punishment
• Atmosphere of free speech
• Atmosphere in which people speak out
• Lack of unity–need for sense of social cohesion
• Trust
• Economics

I’ve noticed that some of the links people have been finding for the online participatory journalism in Kazakhstan assignment don’t have any relationship to Kazakhstan at all. To clarify, we are interested in discovering whether there is any evidence of OPJ in Kazakhstan; the rest of the world does not much matter for this assignment.

What you should look for is a site written from Kazakhstan (or perhaps about Kazakhstan) and profile that site, being sure to address how the site is or is not an example of OPJ in Kazakhstan.

Please ask me if this is unclear to you.

Your individual weblog assignment, due by 5 pm Friday 9 November, is to write a brief profile of one of the websites you identified as a possible example of online participatory journalism in Kazakhstan.

Your profile should look at a site we have not discussed in class, but rather one you found on your own.

Your profile should include basic information about the site as well as your analysis about whether the site is an example of participatory journalism, and why you say it is or is not. Be sure to link to the site you discuss in your entry.

Your entry should be about four paragraphs long. You may use the profile guidelines we used for our group profile assignment if you wish.

Today in class, we will discuss the sites students looked at for the assignment we began on Wednesday.

After that, we will continue the process of looking for signs of participatory journalism in Kazakhstan. The second part of the project will be to use the tools we have available (search engines, blogroll links, existing networks and knowledge) to come up with a list of potential examples of online participatory journalism in Kazakhstan. These may include weblogs, forums, listservs, standard websites, and so on.

Your assignment: Each student should come up with a list of potential sites to investigate (at least five) and post a link to that site by class time on Monday.

Required Reading: For next week (due for class Monday 5 November), read “Internet Governance in Kazakhstan,” pages 119 to 131 in the OSCE report, Governing the Internet. Note the link is to the entire document, but you only have to read one chapter.

Participatory journalism, and particularly how participatory journalism is practiced online, has been one of our key interests in the course so far. You will remember the definition offered in the We Media report:

• “Participatory journalism: The act of a citizen, or group of citizens, playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information. The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires.” (We Media, pg. 9)

The We Media report is concerned with looking at how New Information Technologies can be used to promote participatory journalism online. In other words, its authors argue that NITs are making it possible for the audience to take an active role in the process of creating news rather than simply receiving news produced by professional news organizations. They further argue that the new media ecosystem enabled by NITs is changing the nature of journalism and democratizing the process of creating news.

We Media looks at how a number of different online technologies (discussion groups, user-generated content, weblogs, collaborative publishing, RSS syndication, and so on) help users provide commentary, filter and sort news, check facts, engage in grassroots reporting, and other news oriented tasks.

There are many examples throughout the report showing this process in action at various websites. However, the sites in the report are mostly based in the United States and are exclusively in English. This makes sense for the report, which is concerned with presenting a recent phenomenon in the context of the practice of journalism in the U.S.

The problem for us, though, is that this presentation is too limited. It doesn’t tell us about the potential for online participatory journalism outside of the U.S. And particularly, it tells us nothing about online participatory journalism in this region.

We have looked a bit at online participatory journalism in Kazakhstan and Central Asia, primarily by exploring the neweurasia.net websites. However, this tells us only about the neweurasia (English language) sites, and not much about how people are using NITs here. For one thing, this is just one set of sites, and although there are a number of people writing for the neweurasia sites from this region, others are located far away. For another thing, Kazakhstan’s dominant languages are Russian and Kazakh, and sites in English cannot fully represent the experiences of people here.

Our task now is to discover whether there is something we might call online participatory journalism being practiced in Kazakhstan, and to try to develop an initial profile of that practice. We will begin this process by working in groups and creating profiles of a few weblogs. (Each group will examine one weblog. Post your profile as a comment on this entry by 1 pm Friday, 2 Nov. and be prepared to present it in class that day.)

1. ru.kazakhstan.neweurasia.net, neweurasia’s Russian-language weblog on Kazakhstan
2. kz.kazakhstan.neweurasia.net, neweurasia’s Kazakh-language weblog on Kazakhstan
3. adam-kesher.livejournal.com, Adam Kesher’s Russian-language Livejournal site
4. Askar Shushekov’s Media Support Center site (rus)

Provide the following information about the site you are profiling:

1. Site name and URL
2. Language(s) used on the site
3. Who authors the site? Is it a group weblog? Individual weblog? Are full names available? First names? Pseudonyms?
4. Where is/are the author(s) located?
5. How long has the site been active? How active is the site? (How many entries per week, on average?)
6. Does the site allow users to comment? If so, are there many comments? Or few comments?
7. Does the site provide an RSS feed?
8. What community does this site connect with? Look at links in entries, at the blogroll, and at the comments section: What are the sources of information the site uses? What sites does the author consider important?
9. Overall content: What kind of topics are addressed at the site? Are they personal? News oriented?
10. Impressions: Is the site engaging in participatory journalism in the sense described in the We Media report? What qualities does it have (or lack) that make you see the site as an example of online participatory journalism?
11. What else of interest do you observe about the site?

Remember that our quiz is coming up on Wednesday 17 October, and will be held in room 131 Valikhanov, rather than our regular lab.

The quiz will cover readings (including this weblog) and course discussions, lectures and activities.

Format will combine multiple choice, fill-in, and matching.

To review, look over the course weblog, especially the material tagged with the Concepts and Terms category, and look over the course readings, which you can find (again) following the link for Required Readings in the sidebar. Ask me if you have any questions.

On Monday in class there will be opportunity for review, which will continue for as much of the class period that you have questions.

In the last class we discussed collaborative and open source production, and we introduced Wikipedia and compared it to standard academic encylcopedias such as Encyclopedia Britannica. I want to make the comparison a bit more explicit.

Both Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica are examples of collaborative production. They are publications that are created through the cooperative efforts of many people. Similarly, in both cases these group efforts aim to produce something similar: an encyclopedia–a publication that is intended to provide authoritative information on a wide range of topics.

Both Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica are also available online. Keep this in mind, because it indicates that the use of internet technology is not the determining factor in the fundamental characteristics of each project. Part of what it means to refer to the internet as a socio-technical network is that the character of the network (the things it allows us to do, for example) depends both on what the technology makes possible and on the social arrangements (the decisions people make) about how to use the technology, or how to allow others to use the technology. Both these projects use the internet, but the project organizers have made different decisions about what they should allow people to do with their projects while using the internet.

What we will focus on today is how each of these projects is an example of an open or closed production model.

In general, an open production model has the following characteristics:

• Fewer barriers to participation in the production process;
• Access to materials produced is relatively unrestricted

In contrast, a closed production model has these characteristics:

• More barriers to participation in the production process;
• Access to materials produced is more restricted

Today we will examine Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica and try to gather specific examples that indicate how each process might be following one or another of these models. We will also try to see how each project attempts to demonstrate how its chosen production model helps to produce an authoritative, credible resource.

We will work in four groups, two looking at Wikipedia, the other two at Britannica. For the purposes of this exercise, the Wikipedia group should look particularly at About Wikipedia and the Britannica group at About Britannica (and associated links), though each group should also explore their respective sites further.

On your individual weblogs, write a brief entry this week (due at the beginning of Friday’s class) in which you consider, using at least a few specific examples a) how your assigned site is an example of an open or closed process, and b) how the project’s process might produce an authoritative, credible resource.

We will examine the sites today and have our discussion on this issue on Friday.

Some questions to consider:

• How do you get access to information at the site? Are there restrictions on access?
• Who produces information? How is participation in this process restricted?
• Are there different rules for different types of information?
• How does the project try to ensure the information produced is accurate/authoritative/credible?
• Britannica blog
• Open Britannica
• Britannica Board, terms of use,

Today in class we will continue our discussion of community. Begin by visiting some other students’ sites (you can use the Links page to get there or, if you have subscribed to individual course sites using Bloglines, use your account there to check) and seeing what they have written about community. Then, at your own site, post an entry considering what you have learned reading their entries. (Be sure to post a link to the entries you discuss so the site gets “pinged.”) Some things you might consider (you might think of others):

• What do communities have in common, or how are they different?
• How formal or informal are they?
• How do we as individuals relate to our community(ies)?
• Are communities of equal importance?
• How do online and offline communities compare?

Or just respond to what the person wrote…