Give the public access to public records

In this 8-minute video interview I conducted Wednesday at the NetSquared conference -- notice the venue: Cisco, not a media company -- founder-CEO Michael Schnuerle discusses Louisville-based YourMapper.com, a young startup that hopes to make a business in part by helping the public gain public access to public records. The company has already licensed its mapping technology to at least one news publication.

Central to YourMapper's plan is an open API, which can prove incredibly powerful when paired with the proper datasets. Schneurle even waged a months-long battle with Kentucky officials wielding only the Freedom of Information Act before the state attorney general came down on his side.

As I said in my new post at the IdeaLab, it's time to give the public true access to public records. Oddly, that rarely happens now, with media organizations playing a gatekeeper role and releasing stories through the editorial process -- but rarely releasing the raw data itself.

News organizations ought to create their own open APIs that give users access to public records in their communities. And this is the important twist: Instead of just making the data available internally, for its staff to analyze and reinterpret, news publications ought to bring readers and users into such efforts.

As I said in Tuesday's post, this is all about enlisting users in a collaborative effort to tap into rich sources of information about what's happening in local communities. Political contributions, birth records, neighborhood crime, housing sales -- data is cool and interesting when interpreted and presented in an engaging way.

Call it data jockey crowdsourcing. I'll wager we'll see scores of such efforts in the coming years.

Cross-posted to SocialMedia.biz.

iCare pairs donors with disaster victims

At the NetSquared conference in San Jose this week I met Ephrat Bitton, founder of iCare, a new peer-to-peer initiative that enables people to offer material donations for disaster relief. iCare pairs donors & victims in the aftermath of a disaster.

Here's a 3-minute video, conducted with my Nokia N95 cell phone, of Ephrat outlining iCare's mission:

Watch the video (H.264) on Ourmedia

Watch the Flash version

NetSquared: enabling social change organizations

Here's a 9-minute video interview I conducted a couple of hours ago with Marnie Webb, co-CEO of TechSoup and NetSquared, at the close of the third annual NetSquared conference in the conference center at Cisco in San Jose, Calif. (This year's theme was "remixing the web for social change." Here are links to the sessions and attendees, and here are the 21 featured projects voted on by the community out of hundreds of nominees.)

Marnie talks about the kinds of community and corporate contributions to these groups that NetSquared and TechSoup (160 employees) help enable. NetSquared has become a huge event in the nonprofit and social change communities, drawing dozens of speakers and 400 participants over 2 1/2 days.

My partner at Ourmedia.org and I will be meeting with management of TechSoup in the coming days to discuss how we might be able to collaborate.

Apologies for the noise in some parts of the interview.

Watch the video (H.264) on Ourmedia

Watch the Flash version

Breakfast with Jeff Pulver and friends

I have a big backlog of videos I need to get up soon. Here's a video I took on my Nokia N95 cell phone of tech entrepreneur Jeff Pulver during our blogger/citizen journalism tour of Israel in April. Jeff threw a breakfast at the start of the Marker conference showing off elements of social media -- such as tagging -- taking place in the real world, and says in this two-minute video that he plans to patent the method. Jeff's tech breakfasts have become a must-attend event.

See video (H.264) on Ourmedia
See Flash version

Independent Television Festival

Here's a 6-minute video interview with AJ Tesler, founder of the Independent Television Festival, that we did poolside at Digital Hollywood earlier this month. The Independent Television Festival is a showcase for independent producers who produce video for the Web or television.

The deadline for this year's festival is Wednesday, so get those nominations in!

Felten on the Future of News conference

Here's a quick video I did today with Prof. Edward Felten of Princeton University (famed for his opposition to black box voting) about the Future of News conference I'm attending (speaking tomorrow). He also mentions his new Center for Information Technology Policy. The video was conducted with my Nokia N95 cell phone.

Ourmedia page

Watch on YouTube

Israel's social media scene

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Social marketing expert Ayelet Noff talks about the social media and Web 2.0 scene in Israel during this 9-minute video interview I conducted with her during our blogger posse road trip to Israel. A former New Yorker, Ayelet is a rising star in Web 2.0 circles in Tel Aviv and helped us with all phases of our trip. (Apologies for the lighting — this was the first interview I did on my Samsung hi-def camcorder.)

Watch video in H.264 MPEG-4 on Ourmedia
Watch in Flash on Ourmedia
Watch video in Flash on Veoh (with ads)

Cross-posted to SocialMedia.biz.