ONA13 Suggestion Box

Description
From open journalism and distributed pro-am collaboration to realtime crisis mapping, ambient sensing and distribution, wearable computing, predictive journalism, news AI (artificial intelligence), big data and beyond, this session examines emergent technologies’ ground-level disruptive impact on practical newsgathering, how they are being used, and what lies ahead.

Participants will leave with an understanding of seismic shifts to come and critical making for a practical, strategic framework to build the sustainable news services of the future.

QUESTIONS ANSWERED:

What disruptive change and technologies will shape news in the near to medium term?

How will change affect collection, production and markets for news?

What is a journalist’s role in making this happen?

How can journalists critically, and strategically lead and prepare for change?

How can journalists collaborate with citizen mappers to improve the quality of their coverage?

The presentation will be a blend of presentation, Q&A, hands-on design jam and/or exercises, modelling and “play” (as time allocation allows), and discussion.

This is you if you don’t attend this session:
http://j.mp/Y5jh5g

This is you during and/or after this session:
http://j.mp/ZNK6Gi

This is something you can do after learning from this session:
http://j.mp/ZV4RDj

Here is an audio stream to wrap your head around critical making:
http://j.mp/13KFGTU

Session Type
Workshop

Suggested Speakers/Presenters
Saleem Khan
Heather Leson
Matt Ratto

How does your submission contribute to the diversity of conference programming?
Session leaders offer diversity of ethnicity and identity, geography, thought, and experience. Two have no journalism background, but have experience and skills directly relevant to the shifts affecting journalism and media, and useful to modern and future journalists.

Saleem Khan is a Canadian Muslim journalist of South Asian ancestry who has worked on staff and independently in digital, print and broadcast as an editor and reporter for outlets that include the CBC, Toronto Star newspapers, Metro International, the Globe and Mail, and New York Times; former chairman and director of the Canadian Association of Journalists for a decade.

Saleem brings his Toronto-based startup experience, which is focused on conceiving, researching and developing next-generation news tools/platforms and their applications, using them to produce digital editorial content, and advising others on the same. In addition, he leads the Media and Journalism Working Group at the University of Toronto’s ThingTank Lab, which focuses on imagineering digitally enabled technologies for the Internet of Things, such as news drones and sensor-embedded objects.

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Heather Leson is the Director of Community Engagement for Ushahidi, an open source software not-for-profit based in Nairobi, Kenya. Using her diverse technical experience in digital response and open source communities, she builds programming and mentors social change agents in an open source development ecosystem. She brings her passion for community building, storytelling, and idea hacking on multiple continents, which continues her leadership organizing participant-driven “unconferences” and hackathons in global open-source communities such as Random Hacks of Kindness and CrisisCommons. Her career spans over 15 years in technical incident management, software life cycle development, customer care and communications in Internet technologies.

Inspired to help people gain access to, understand and apply information, Heather helps “do-more” disrupters find and use their voices.

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Matt Ratto is an assistant professor at University of Toronto, and director of ThingTank, an experimental space for hacking electronics. He’s a believer in what he calls “critical making” — the idea that we don’t really understand our technologies just by reading or talking about them, but by making them.“ [CBC]

His current research focuses on how hands-on productive work — making — can supplement and extend critical reflection on the relations between digital technologies and society. In particular, Ratto’s work addresses the movement of digital media and information from screens and into the material environment. This trend, known as ‘ambient’ or ‘ubiquitous’ computing, or more colloquially as the ‘Internet of Things’, is the primary focus of his work and builds upon the new possibilities offered by open source software and hardware, and the developing technologies of 3D printing and rapid prototyping. Since 2007, Ratto has carried out workshops in ‘critical making’ in Amsterdam, London, Canada, the US, and Scotland.

Submitted by Saleem Khan