I feel as though it’s easy to want to present a definition of civic media that calls to mind images of change, influence, and nobleness. I hesitate, however, to go beyond a very boring and un-romantic assertion that civic media is any channel (be it vetted or otherwise) that informs an individual about her community—from town to global village—and vice versa. As part of this definition, I outline the following principles:

1. Civic Media need not require action on the part of the consumer

In this week’s readings I noted the repeated mention of “engagement.” Jenkins, for instance, argues that civic media itself is defined by that which “fosters civic engagement.” I’m not comfortable with this connection, however. Engagement with one’s community implies action, or at least a link that goes beyond simple information sharing. I don’t believe Jenkins means to exclude local newspapers or blogs, but I want to make sure my definition is inclusive. Be it Boston.com’s Your Town section or BBC’s World News, teaching media consumers about the community of which they are part is the most basic of principles for civic media.

2. Civic Media can be a one- or two-way communication

User generated content and social network activity are often tied to civic media, mostly because both phenomena are based on the individual and her being in a certain place at a certain time. CNN provides this type of content, albeit highly curated, via its iReport product. But to be considered civic media, information channels do not necessarily need to include content from the consumer. The New York Times does not allow comments on its news articles, for instance, only content from its blogs.

If a news organization does wish to encourage a dialogue amongst channel constituents, there are third party products which can help keep that dialogue relevant and focused (unlike the White House’s Open For Questions/NORML fiasco). For instance, the team at Localocracy (a Boston based startup) facilitates discussion and debate while restricting the discussion to only those to whom the topic is relevant (based on location).

Additionally, tools allowing individuals to inform their communities are becoming more available with applications being developed by groups like Code for America’s fellowship program. Locally in Boston, we’ve also seen applications like Citizens Connect that let you call out the needs of your community directly to civic government.

3. Civic Media may relate to a community defined by something different than physical proximity

I think that Henry Jenkins makes a good point when he notes that communities need not be defined by traditional means. Excuse me, however, as I go off on a brief tangent: Reading the summary of Jenkins’ (and others’) talk at the forum brought to question how one should be approaching this source of material. That is, the virtual community landscape—as well as so much more of what digital media looked like—in September 2007 was vastly different than today. Facebook was still tiny (relatively speaking) and Twitter was in its absolute infancy as a mainstream service. So I began to question whether we should read these sorts of pieces with historical context in mind, or as absolutisms.

All of that said, thinking about virtual communities did bring to mind an organization in the commercial realm called Communispace. They provide “white label” communities for companies looking to “engage and intimately understand their customers.” This example ultimately undermines my fourth principle, below, but I struggle to find a similar product (white label virtual communities) with purely non-commercial motives. Perhaps I haven’t been looking long enough, however.

4. Civic Media channels may have commercial interests, but the information being shared must not be relevant only to those interests.

I admit that I struggle a bit with the wording here. What I hope to assert is that it’s okay for a private organization to present news—it doesn’t have to be not-for-profit like NPR or user generated like CNN iReport. At the same time, learning about a sale at your local Sears is not civic media. The information shared should not have the sole purpose of promoting a commercial cause.

According to the speakers at the SXSW 2011 Panel entitled “Changing News Rooms and News Consumers” (audio available here), between 1992 and 2002, the sizes of editorial staffs at news organizations was reduced by a third (a trend continuing today, according to The Economist) while the number of public relation specialist positions across the country doubled. The panel spoke of “churnalism,” or the efforts by news organizations to make their process more efficient by simply spitting out what they are given by PR representatives. In response to this, churnalism.com was built to compare bodies of text with press releases from its database.

This trend encompasses the overall mood of the readings from this week: overtly pessimistic when it comes to the outlook for our current media options. I can’t say this is surprising at all, however. As an MFA candidate at the Dynamic Media Institute at MassArt, my work has been focused on the way that dynamic media can elevate the level of public discourse in the country. By studying the participants, rituals, influencers, and representatives all involved with our national dialogue, I am trying to find or create tools that help us move beyond the extremely polarized nature of discourse today.

Understanding how we arrived at this place is important, so the report from The Economist and the FCC’s “The Information Needs of Communities” present a strong contextual background for my thesis. And it’s this context which I hope to build throughout the semester. On the other hand, my undergraduate education is in business and I’ve spent the past five years in the advertising industry, so the commercial perspectives presented in this week’s readings are certainly familiar. I’m looking forward (albeit cautiously) to gaining more exposure to the theoretical and philosophical elements of the topic.

So it comes as no surprise that when offered the chance to combine my love of emerging technology with some sort of competition, I’m, um, game. Enter: social gaming.

Social gaming is the use of social media for competition. You’ve seen it already: games built on social media platforms (Farmville, Mafia Wars), social media platforms with game layers (Foursquare, Whrrl), and games built on their own platforms (SCVNGR).

Completing a SCVNGR Trek Activity. Noooooorm!

Last week I had the opportunity to try SCVNGR at the AdClub’s Hatch Trek, a hunt around the city of Boston, culminating in a cocktail hour to introduce the judges for the 50th Hatch Awards. My partner in hunting, John Park, and I moved through the city, completing certain tasks and answering trivia questions.

The team over at Allen & Gerritsen have put together a great recap of what SCVNGR does well and what it does poorly but here’s my quick summary: It was a great way to learn about the city, showcase the event sponsors (each stop had a tie in to a sponsor), and get out on a nice (albeit muggy) evening in Boston. The problem is when it came to announcing a winner. John and I completed every task, answering all trivia questions. But if we didn’t type in the answer exactly as the administrator expected us to, it would lock us out after a few tries. And while I was on a team, there was no real way to connect John’s SMS interaction with the system and my iPhone app based interaction.

These points seem minor. And they were. Like I say, we had a lot of fun and eventually ended up at the cocktail hour to network and enjoy some post-game refreshments. But even these small flaws in the system highlight something important about social gaming: it’s still a game. I mean, I wanted to have fun…but I also wanted to win an iPad.

We’ve already seen plenty of discussion about how platforms like Foursquare are working against “cheaters.” The CEO of SCVNGR, Seth Priebatsch, spoke at TEDxBoston 2010 last week and said that “the previous decade was about social, this one is about gaming.” He’s probably right – just take a look at Google’s recent acquisition of Slide.

People are competitive. They like a challenge. In fact, the reason some Apple Stores were built with a false floor is because once someone takes a step on to the six inch incline at the entrance to the store, they want to complete that challenge and come all the way in. But with competition comes other problems. I hope Priebatsch is right and we’re about to see a huge expansion in the social gaming sector. I’m extremely curious to see how these problems get worked out.

Of particular note in the not-so-excellent column was the first session I caught featuring reps from a couple of Boston’s biggest ad shops, sitting on stage with their large financial clients (the companies are large…not the clients themselves). I had an overall positive experience that day, so I’m not going to harp on the negative too much here, but let’s briefly review why this panel was brutal:

Did anyone learn anything here? How can we trust anything either of these parties say? Clients gush over the agency, agencies gush over the clients.

Financial clients. Behind car accounts, these are the cornerstone of the traditional agency model. And if not for some amazing fumbling by a large British oil company right now, they’d still be the target of some serious public ire. But there they are, sitting, smiling, pretending like they could do no wrong, as long as their trusty agency partner sits by their sides.

We got to watch a bunch of TV spots. And who doesn’t love TV spots? Especially when discussing this town’s ability to innovate. To be fair, they did show a few iPad screenshots. iPads are hip and innovative, right?

Ok, so I’ve gone on a bit longer than I hoped. And please don’t get me wrong: while I don’t work for a big shop, I can’t say I never will again (some of them know what’s up). But these guys were pretty rough to sit through.

In stark contrast was the small agency panel featuring founders from PJA, Pod Design, Small Army, and Beam: this one falls under the excellent category. The four guys up on stage were smart and – most importantly – candid about their shops, their clients, and their industry. My only disappointment was where the panel was scheduled: right after a brutally out of place session on socially responsible architectural design and right before a coffee break that those who hadn’t left yet couldn’t wait to take.

The juxtaposition between this and the big agency panel was made even more evident by a couple quotes I thought were quite poignant. First, David Batista of Beam pointed out that “it’s easy to please clients…what’s hard is to make something that humans actually want to use.” Can’t say that when your client is sitting right next to you. Secondly, Jeff Freedman of Small Army pointed out that “the traditional model is dead, traditional media is not.” And he’s right.

But what both of those quotes really bring to light is the fact that small shops get it: this isn’t about just trying harder at what has been done for years. This is about doing what’s been done for years in a different way.

Last night I attended an event co-sponsored by MITX and MassDOT featuring the Massachusetts Open Data Initiative, MA government’s effort to make its data available to the public in a meaningful, secure way. We heard from a number (a large number, in fact) of members of the MA government from the Secretary of Transportation (the first real part of the initiative is live MBTA bus feeds) to the GM of the MBTA to a gentleman named Tim Vaverchak from the Mass IT department.

Mr. Vaverchak’s talk was last and, as there were so many speakers, each presentation was relatively rushed. But I felt that what Vaverchak was able to outline in the short time he had was intriguing. He spoke of the goals of the MA Open Data Initiative: move beyond just transportation, focus on business & constituent needs, don’t just provide data for data’s sake, allow users (constituents and developers) to rate the value of a data set. These goals were extremely reasonable – even surprisingly so: one doesn’t necessarily expect that from government.

But what the entire evening had me thinking about was an extension on the question of how government can provide data to the public and do it well: how can they do so in a manner that scales? By scale I mean both across departments within a state/local government, but also on a pure numbers basis: how can what MA does here be a model for nationwide data feeds?

In advertising we constantly struggle with producing something that is both ground breaking and results producing. An out-of-home installation or 2 week online stunt could certainly garner buzz. But what does it do to move the needle? What does it do to return the investment of those who paid for it? So sitting at the event last night I kept thinking about the usefulness of it, but also its limitations in terms of scale Sure, I can produce an iPhone app that shows me how late the 39 bus is going to be and that’s great for tinkerers or proofs-of-concept. But I want to use this data and provide my users with real value – and do so efficiently. I want more bus routes (we’re getting that by end of the summer), I want trains (that’s a much harder problem to solve), I want to be able to tie it in to road closings, weather and historical data. And – I want to build this so it can be used by anyone in the country.

A few of those problems aren’t too hard to fix. And some of it is already available. But that last point – true scale – is going to be much further down the line. The National Weather Service came together in 1870 to help the military. It wasn’t until 1890 that it was identified as useful to civilians. I’d like to see the MA Open Data Initiative move to a national model a bit quicker than that.

I spoke with one of the gentlemen who helped run the MassDOT Real Time Data Developer Challenge about this, Chris Dempsey. He mentioned that there are currently two private organizations that are running different metro transportation data sets (the first was NextBus, the organization providing the MA data set…I admit I can’t remember the second). He said that other states are working on this, but certainly not too many (according to data.gov, only a handful of states and municipalities are providing “machine readable” data sets to the public). He also mentioned – and rightfully so – that MA wants to get it right at home first. Then they’ll work on a model for other states.

Internally, I struggle with one more question: SHOULD scale be provided here? Scale leads to commercial interests and sponsorships. Clearly I’m ok with that from a professional standpoint. And this is certainly nothing like a corporation sponsoring a presidential candidate. But should I look up at a screen in a bar and see “You have 45 minutes until the next bus arrives…enough time for a Bud Light!”? I’m not sure.

Thoughts?