[Digital-Mentor] CN Group boosts hyperlocal websites

[Clare-Marie White]

Certainly I'd build a discussion about ownership into mentoring or workshop
training. It's important people understand the trade-off between the free
tools that are being provided for us and the ownership of the content they
provide. They can then make up their own mind.
It's an interesting experiment by a newspaper group and it might be a better
time to try than it was when the Beehive sites were about. If newspapers
themselves provide support for hyper-local mentors to help develop the
communities then it could be very successful.
However, my suspicion is that they will cut corners with the funding,
thinking this is a way of saving money on reporters. This could lead firstly
to underpopulated hyperlocal sites which nobody looks at because they will
fail to get enough people out into the communities to engage them.
Secondly, while the likes of Google and Wordpress can distance themselves
from the content, newspaper publishers need to be much more cautious about
what they publish. Again, if they cut corners on the moderation the sites
could either run out of control or be locked down at the first sign of
trouble. Newspapers have grown adept at developing flame-ridden,
argumentative communities and I very much doubt they can switch that to
develop the type of collaboration that is needed unless they really put some
resources into developing something with ownership. Not knowing the group, I
can't say whether they could do this - it would be nice to see a mainstream
newspaper group give it some real investment.
Clare White



2008/10/17 Mike Amos-Simpson <mas at yomo.co.uk>

> This maybe leads slightly to whether theres a need for an 'ethical debate'
> - should mentors simply provide awareness of whats out there & let people
> choose themselves (well actually definitely yes!), but in terms of sites the
> mentors use themselves in their services with people maybe there is a debate
> to be had about whether certain kinds of sites should be avoided and if so
> for what reasons.
>
>
> Mike Amos-Simpson
> Director of Development
>
> mas at yomo.co.uk
> +44 (0)208 133 2878
>
> www.yomo.co.uk
>
> Building the Capacity of Young People to Participate in Society - Practical
> Ideas for Participation!
>
> YoMo is a registered Company in England & Wales number 06579500
>
> YoMo
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> 29 - 30 Horse Fair
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>
> On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 6:35 PM, MJ Ray <mjr at phonecoop.coop> wrote:
>
>> "Mike Amos-Simpson" <yomocic at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> > I'm assuming the relevance of this is that within the digital mentor
>> role
>> > there needs to be some consideration to helping people understand what
>> > happens to their data/information and how it may/can be used (and this
>> would
>> > include social networks etc. too)?
>>
>> Yes, that's exactly it.  I feel digital mentors would do better to add
>> sites to distributed, sharing-allowed sites like ODP http://dmoz.org/
>> and http://geourl.org/ and encourage other websites to use them too.
>> Most Social Networks are a sort of digital Hotel California: you can
>> check your data out any time you want, but it can never leave... and
>> they ban you if you try to download all your data on the way out:-
>>
>> http://uk.techcrunch.com/2008/01/03/facebook-blocks-scoble-for-downloading-his-contacts/
>>
>> Hope that explains,
>> --
>> MJ Ray (slef)
>> Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small
>> worker cooperative http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
>> (Notice http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html) tel:+44-844-4437-237
>>
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-- 
Clare-Marie White
Tel: 07860 870789
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