Proposed Project: Who Said It? A SourceWatch.org for Aotearoa

Another approach is a Watch The Watchers project we tried to get going at NewsRoom last year, and are still chipping away at. Given our little 'pond' in AotearoaNZ the SourceWatch would be very manageable, and for scale would probably benefit from including AU linkages. Would be keen to back it as a shared project.

Watch The Watchers was about close tracking of all the transparency/accountability trails left by official statutory bodies from the OAG through to PCE etc etc... This would mesh nicely with SourceWatch.

Source Watch represents a building block of public information, maybe the left hand corner than the right, but a building block nonetheless.

We need many more building blocks like this.

SourceWatch is about as "left hand" as Wikipedia, but just as that project has its right-leaning equivalent in Conservapedia.com, SourceWatch has right-leaning equivalents like keywiki.org. The key thing is that if all of these sites use the same license (CC-BY-SA), verified information can be easily propagated through all of them, and unreliable information weeded out by cross-referencing.

The technical requirements for this project are fairly low; a domain name, a server running MediaWiki, and bandwidth (I'd guess no more than $20 worth for the first year). I can organise these.

What I really need though is:
* an organisation (or a coalition of them) willing to be the stewardship organisation; own the domain name, run the minimal costs through its books etc (as the CMD does for SourceWatch)
* a collective of people willing to commit to sharing the editing duties; pulling in relevant content from other CC-BY-SA sources and checking links and references, writing new entries, updating and expanding existing ones, checking edits made by new volunteers etc

@stephenolsen on the topic of your Watching the Watchers project, are your familiar with FYI.org.nz?

Strypey, FYI is great, but sourcewatch approach also valuable for research on the background to various organisations and personalities.

Which raises the question - do we actually need a separate website with all the backend admin etc ... or should we just use www.sourcewatch.org?

It's a good question Jason. I have tried to get a login for SourceWatch in the past, with no success, which is why I started 'Who Said It?' instead (which I admit is pretty "left-hand" at present with me as the only contributor ;) I think they're very busy, and for obvious reasons, very cautious about who is allowed to edit their wiki.

Existing SourceWatch editors could pull in anything they want to if we use CC-BY-SA for a local spin-off, but I think there is value in having content written and edited in Aotearoa, with a local focus, for a local audience. as I say, the technical requirements are fairly low. My question remains, is there a group around PublicEyes who would participate if I went to the trouble of getting the infostructure set up?

Ah, that makes more sense, then.

Hadn't actually tried to edit anything on sourcewatch, but imagine they are as resource starved as any other media project on the planet.

Which kind of answers your question, along with the similar lack of response to this and related journalism groups here on Loomio.

I've also noticed on subsites such as the so-called Kiwi Journalists "Association" (unincorporated) that most people are looking for light relief, and restrict themselves to intense debate over inconsequentialities: grammar, headlines, etc, and avoid substantive issues such as the journalism crisis.

My only suggestion might be to target an oft-neglected demographic - our retired media people, who possess a huge wealth of institutional memory, but who are usually discounted and dismissed because of agism, whatever.

Not exactly sure how we target that demographic but ... I dunno ... a dedicated group on FB, initially, through which projects such as this can be proposed?

Maybe that demographic, for want of a better word, is also an ideal target for rebuilding formal journalism structures in this country, such as the New Zealand Journalists Association, which last met nearly 30 years ago, in 1987.

There is a serious need to update professionalism standards and approaches, given that we are no longer the last bastion of media and informational freedoms - we have now been joined by a host of online groups, and can perhaps afford to loosen our resistance to any kind of oversight (due to our previous role as the only guardians of freedom of expression etc)

Let's keep kicking this around...

ps: anyone have any success using markdown code? I tried bold but only got asterisks.

ps: anyone have any success using markdown code? I tried bold but only got asterisks.

The markdown for embedding links works for me (usually), as does the single '>' for quoting. Still learning markdown though.

So there are no other symbols you use? Just those ones? Mark me down as markdown dumb :)

​. . .

​​jason brown
+64224340831

editor, pacific freedom forum
​
facebook.com/PacificFreedomForum ( http://facebook.com/PacificFreedomForum )​​

correspondent, islands business
islandsbusiness.com ( http://islandsbusiness.com/ )​​

secretary PIMA Pacific Islands Media Association (NZ)
facebook.com/groups/PacificIslandsMediaAssociationAotearoa ( http://facebook.com/groups/PacificIslandsMediaAssociationAotearoa )​​

. . .​​

Date: Sat, 3 Oct 2015 09:18:43 +0000