Jessica Clark Director of the Future of Public Media Project and Pat Aufderheide, Director of the Center for Social Media have written a very well documented report on participatory public media experiments drawing on hundreds of real-life examples of both public broadcasters and public advocacy organisations.
Go here for the Executive Summary of the report: Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics.
Amongst the many examples cited, these are worth exploring:
* World Without Oil
“The Independent Television Service (ITVS), part of public broadcasting, attracted almost 2,000 gamers from 40-plus countries to its World Without Oil (http://worldwithoutoil.org), a multiplayer “alternative reality” game. Participants submitted reactions to an eight-month energy crisis via privately owned social media sites, such as YouTube and Flickr—and made corresponding real-life changes, chronicled at the WWO Lives blog (http://wwolives.wordpress.com).
* Facing the Mortgage Crisis
As the mortgage crisis hit home in every community, St. Louis public broadcasting station KETC launched Facing the Mortgage Crisis (http://stlmortgagecrisis.wordpress.com), a multiplatform project designed to help publics grappling with mortgage foreclosures. Featuring invited audience questions and on-air and online elements that mapped pockets of foreclosures, the project directed callers to an information line managed by the United Way for further help. Calls to the line increased significantly as a result.
* Pro-am Storytelling
Professionals and nonprofessionals are working together via new tools and platforms to craft narratives that inform public issues. Filmmakers such as Deborah Scranton of The War Tapes and Anders Østergaard of Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country have based their films on footage shot by amateur contributors in high-pressure situations. Other projects reveal the narratives of groups that have been suppressed, such as Mapping the Third Ward in Houston. (http://www.storymapping.org/thirdward.html), which features personal stories underpinning gentrification, or the National Black Programming Consortium’s Masculinity Project (http://www.blackpublicmedia. org/catalog/channel/masculinity), which features the work of film professionals such as Byron Hurt alongside youth media productions and nonprofessional commentary and contributions. The work of WITNESS, a human rights organization that features video contributions documenting violations around the world, also exemplifies the power of storytelling by combining the strengths of professional and nonprofessional.”