ABC’s Radio National has recently launched an online collaborative social media project entitled ‘Pool’. The project is a collaboration between ABC Radio National and RMIT, UTS and Wollongong Uni (and some involvement from COFA) and uses the open-source Drupal Platform (Content Management / Blogging / Collaborative Authoring Environment). The Pool project is notable, from the perspective of innovation in public/national scale newmedia projects, for the fact that the work focuses quite explicitly on the (perhaps underdeveloped) social aspects of production and engagement with experimental video and sound design, video and sound art, documentary, interviews atmoshperes, and bascially any kind of content that lays outside the musical and video blogging focus of the major commercial social media sites like Myspace and Youtube.
Users can upload and download a variety of raw and processed, unmixed and remixed audio, video, images and text all under various incarnations of Creative Commons. The site is divided into user accounts or profiles which have information and background about the user (much like existing social media sites) and where they upload their work, name, categorise, genrify (well ‘genrification’ is a word) and tag it for perusal by site member and non-members, but also importantly to act as source material for further downloading and reworking and remixing by other members. There are also ‘projects’ which are works in progress at any one time which on site members can collaborate and also the capacity to search members by skills and interest areas for collaboration and networking etc.
There are certainly many interesting questions raised here in the production of open-source new media content and related aesthetic concerns and the ways that these might intesect with a national-scale broadcast media network, and the various kinds of feedback (social, technical, cultural) within the network ecologies that may emerge from or be drawn into this.
Another question to investigate would be how might the relationship between the metadata such as tags, genres, geolocation etc and the actual AV/text content on the site be used in other innovative and interesting and dynamic ways?
There are some interesting people on the project who might be worth talking to:
The Pool Team
Editorial:
Executive producer: Sherre DeLys
“Sherre DeLys has developed playful dialogues with some of her favourite writers and musicians to create radio art which displays an intense regard for listeners’ own imaginative involvement. She has collaborated with sculptor Joan Grounds for more than a decade– their sound sculptures enter into a call-and-response with the botanical environments they inhabit.”
Producers:
John Jacobs – John is an ABC broadcaster, social media activist, electronic and mechanical inventor, bike rider, vegan cook, performer, promoter, composer, and enthusiastic life hacker. He is a founding member of the Indymedia movement and also part of the team that devised and produces Radio National’s weekly remix program, The Night Air.
Gretchen Miller – Gretchen Miller is a writer, radio producer, composer and maker of audio arts. She works at ABC Radio National. Her work has been broadcast in Germany and France and reworked for live performance at the Studio, Sydney Opera House. She has a passion for travelling into the Australian inland, camping rough and collecting sounds from the natural world, tales that float across the landscape.
Pool education consortium:
Ross Gibson, Norie Neumark, Shannon O’Neill, and Darrall Thompson from University of Technology, Sydney; Marius Foley from RMIT; Brogan Bunt and Terumi Narushima from University of Wollongong; Tom Ellard from UNSW College of Fine Arts.
Also: the Production Manager is a person called Peter Jackson – ?