Adrian Monck of City University of London’s journalism education program. He has launched a collaboration with Sky News developing a group of citizen correspondents and a resource that allows the public to track their FOI requests.

Martin Huber of MyHeimat.de which combines printed magazines with an online platform for hyperlocal communities and a network of 5,000 contributors/citizen reporters.

Robin Hamman curates BBC’s blog network. He also blogs at Cybersoc.com. “I guess you could say that I’m the back-office blogger-in-chief.”

10:36 – McIntosh: asks Hamman to describe difference between the UK and US online communities.

10:38 – McIntosh asks about MyHeimat’s emphasis on the free sheet.

Huber: When a media company has to deliver in the hyperlocal community is not so much content as a service, to share information. We learn from our community, we always have to learn what the community wants and we have to implement that very quickly.

10:43 – Monck: discussing partnership with SkyNews which attracted applicants from around the world. There’s another model that interests me, networked reporting:
There are interagency stories. Stories that cross borders like terroristm You need to be able to report things like this in a much savvier way. Creating networks is an important role for journalism.
We kind of need to move with the times on that.

Speaking of international, complex stories like rendition, he asks:

“How do we keep the public interested in things like that?”

10:45 Hamman: on user-generated content. “Give people the call to action, but ask people to put it online themselves and put it in a pool. I think it’s a much more honest approach than, send it to us and we only use one half percent of it.”

10:47 Travis Henry from YourHub.com asks Huber about services that make community a better place and how that works at MyHeimat.com.
Huber: we see it as a media application. You can scale this solution, if it is specific for local communities.
“It’s not only the people trained in networked journalism, but it is also the piece of software that is exactly the need of what’s out there.”
We see it as part of the user interface. The barrier to entry for some users is lower with the print free sheets.

10:51 – A question from the audience on the onerous work of maintaining and encouraging community participation.
Monck starts off by talking about disaggregating, but also says he’s of two minds
“I don’t know from enthusiasts and cheerleading to the world-weary cynics.”

McIntosh then asks Hamman about the idea of produce less, gather more. “Is that a message that people are starting to get?”

Hamman: “It’s vastly expensive to run an online community if that isn’t your core business. The ‘send us your stuff’ model is also vastly expensive.”
He says that news organizations need to do more cheerleading to show people how to post there stuff, then go find the best of it, then what to do with it once it is there.

10:59 – Chris Anderson of Columbia asks: British media landscape is very different from American media. Does that have an impact on what bloggers do?

Monck – UK media is incredibly centralized. He points to the BBC and says: on one hand it is fantastic, but on the other hand its sort of like a nanny. “Why blog when everything is provided for you?”

You can’t deny that BBC does wonderful things, but on the other hand it kind of disempowers people and says this is only for big guys.

Hamman (of the BBC) responds by talking to the BBC blogs trial and changes to the BBC homepage.
We are starting to turn things around a bit.

Hamman then talks about DailyKos and HuffingtonPost visitorship going upwards of 500,000 unique visitors a day.
“I think, my god, our whole blog network gets that much.”
The audiences for blogs in the US are huge and that’s a big difference between US and UK.

I’m a Senior Broadcast Journalist/Producer for BBC English Regions and I blog at Cybersoc.com. At the moment I spend most of my time looking after the BBC’s external facing blog network and giving presentations about social media and blogging across all areas of the BBC.

These days I actually do very little journalism or production but I hope, and the evidence seems to suggest that, my ideas are helping inspire BBC journalists, program makers and editors to embrace social media.

Over the years I’ve worked with developers to create or improve various discussion platforms and have given editorial training for those managing those services or integrating them into their programs.

My primary focus at the moment is looking after the BBC’s network of around 40 blogs, running training courses for those bloggers and encouraging them to think of blogging not just as a publishing tool but as a technique that involves finding, tracking and joining into the conversation with other bloggers.

I’ve also been behind a pilot project in Manchester where we work with local bloggers, helping them to building their audiences whilst, at the same time, giving us the opportunity to highlight and editorialise the very best of their content for use online and on-air.

I’m also involved in a project with BBC Leicester where we’ve recruited members of staff, as well as some volunteer members of the public, to help us create weather content using a clever mix of 3g cameraphones, yahoo’s experimental zonetag software, flickr and twitter. This effort should be launching publicly any day now.

What are your goals?

To help BBC journalists and program makers think creatively about how they might embrace social media, technology and blogging in their work. (Often times a large element of this is simply telling people it’s ok to take risks and it’s ok to use third party services!)

* To encourage BBC people to participate in social media without forgetting that the emphasis is on social rather than media.

* To have fun, and show other peole how to have fun, playing with this stuff!

What are some of your notable achievements?

I’d like to think that I’ve influence the thinking of quite a lot of people within the BBC – in the past in helping them to build and manage successful audience communities on bbc.co.uk and, these days, to get them to think of the whole web, blogs and social media services included, as their canvas (hat tip to Tom Loosemore).

Lesson you’ve learned (including mistakes you’ve made)

I believed, and a lot of others thought, that with the BBC Manchester blog we’d come up with the holy grail – a way to build positive, honest relationships with audience contributors whilst, at the same time, avoiding the usual legal, technical and editorial risks involved with that. I still think the model has some legs to it but we’ve also learned some lessons:

* even cherrypicking content from RSS feeds takes a lot of time
* it’s difficult to motivate yourself to plow through content that isn’t of personal interest, even if that content would be great in the eyes of your audience
* being local requires actually being local (one member of the team, Richard Fair, is based in Manchester whilst I am based out of London)

I think the thing that surprised us most was the reaction from local bloggers who were at first a bit sceptical but who, once they’d seen the model we were using, fully embraced us as part of their community and even helped us where they could.

Are you getting revenue for this? How?

The BBC is funded by the public through the license fee. Jeff Jarvis reckons it’s a pretty good business model…

What’s next? What do you need to get to the next level?

I’m particular interested in seeing how other people are using aggregation models that involve the filtering, listing and – importantly because I think this is where organisations like the BBC can and do add a lot of value – editorialising content that’s being created and published on third party platforms and services. I’d also like to learn from others who have worked directly with the public, encouraging and nurturing their content production skills, in ways that brings value to participants whilst also reaching editorial aims.