We Media (and Fringe event)

This week, I’ll be attending the WeMedia 2006 event in London, which bills itself as “collaboration through conversations, connections and shared knowledge. We organize conversations with individuals and organizations who are using the Internet as a collective force of unprecedented power.” It has an impressive list of attendees from the news/tech industry and NGO sector, such as David Sifry (Technorati), Jeff Sachs (Columbia University), and Michael Tong (Netease.com).

I’m fortunate enough to have received a fellowship which supports the US $795 fee and travel expenses, so for that I’m grateful to the American Press Institute. (Check out the Media Center blog, Morph, for a live update on what’s happening at the conference.)

However, for a conference that is focused on citizens media, it’s too bad it’s prohibitively expensive for many, and that the seats are limited. That’s where the WeMedia Fringe event comes in. It’s a renegade parallel event organized by Robin Hamman of cybersoc.com, specifically for those who cannot get a seat at WeMedia or find the price too expensive. In the spirit of collegiality the organizers of WeMedia are “amazed and humbled” by the Fringe event, and Media Center director Andrew Nachison has sent words of encouragement.

WeMedia Fringe is a bit clandestine though. It will be on the evening of the first WeMedia event, on May 3, and they will only say it will be in Soho, London. I’ve sent them several emails, so hopefully they’ll let me know when and where it will be. There is a neat diagram created by TallSkinnyKiwi to show the relationship of the entities involved with WeMedia06:

He also lists some of the speakers for the Fringe event:

* Suw Charman, Executive Director, Open Rights Group
* Paul Evans who blogs at nevertrustahippy.blogspot.com
* Michael Tippett,founder of nowpublic.com
* Neha Viswanathan (withinandwithout.com and globalvoicesonline.org)
* Tim Ireland, online marketing expert and activist who blogs at bloggerheads.com
* Dr Chris Yapp, Head of Public Sector Innovation, Microsoft
* Ben Metcalfe (benmetcalfe.com / backstage.bbc.co.uk)
* A political blogger who goes by the name of “Quido Fawkes” (order-order.com)
These types of parallel “unconferences” are a growing trend. A similar thing happened with Tim O’Reilly’s Foo Camp, when a number of folks were not included in the exclusive invite-only event in California. In response, BAR Camp was created as an ad hoc meetup for anyone in the Silicon Valley area, by Ross Mayfield of SocialText. Good to see that grassroots media fosters grassroots meetups that go beyond the standard panel-oriented conferences.

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 1st, 2006 at 11:38 am and is filed under Citizen Journalism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.