Ari Heinonen, Maarit Mäkinen, Seija Ridell, Ari Martikainen, Mika Halttu, Esa Sirkkunen LOCALITY IN THE GLOBAL NET The Internet as a space of citizen communication and local publicness The final report of the project Locality in the Global Net (December 2000, pdf-formated) Summary Preface Ari Heinonen: Introduction: The global Net, locality, publicness Project description Maarit Mäkinen: The Internet as a community media Seija Ridell: Manse Forum - a local experiment with web-mediated civic publicness Ari Martikainen: Towards dialogical online journalism Mika Halttu: Local content production: hardware and software development Ari Heinonen, Seija Ridell, Esa Sirkkunen: Lessons learned from the project MANSETORI http://www.mansetori.fi/ JOURNALISM RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CENTRE http://www.uta.fi/laitokset/tiedotus/jourtutkimus/english.html Executive Summary 3 Executive Summary Locality in the Global Net The Internet as a space of citizen communication and local publicness The main outstanding features of Locality in the Global Net project were its local and grassroots orientation. The aim in the project was to explore the social meaning of new communications technology and information networks (and the Internet in particular) from the vantage-point of everyday practices, linking technology with people’s everyday life and communications needs. The approach adopted may be described as participatory action research, which in practice meant carrying out research interventions in local communities. Rather than contenting themselves with observing and reporting events from the outside, project researchers worked closely with community members, giving them the opportunity to use new communications technology and offering hands-on advice on how to use it. The study was organised in three projects, two of which focused on the development of local citizen communication and one on the development of local journalism by means of modern web technology. The publishing platform created for this purpose was the web site we named Mansetori or Manse Square (at <http://mansetori.uta.fi>). This umbrella site hosted Manseyh- teisöt or Manse Communities <http://manseyhteisot.uta.fi>, a site covering the neighbourhood component; Mansefoorumi or Manse Forum <http:// mansefoorumi.uta.fi>, the site for citizen debate; and Mansemedia or Manse Media at <http://mansemedia.uta.fi>, the local journalism site. In Oulu, a local community site called Raksila Online at <http://raksila.kaleva.fi> was also opened as part of the project and linked to Manse Communities and the electronic version of the local newspaper Kaleva. The idea in the communities projects (Manse Communities and Raksila) was to work closely with local residents to produce their own online publica- tions. Depending on the community, content production involved writing news items, publishing stories, introducing the local area, running online discussions or compiling local information. The local residents involved felt the project had helped to develop their neighbourhood, increased interaction, improved access to information and offered new publishing avenues. On the 4 Executive Summary other hand the new communications technology was so difficult to use that this effectively thwarted its broader use as a community publishing means. Indeed one of the main conclusions of the project is that the hardware and software required for online publishing needs to be much more easily accessible to people who want to use them. The main concern in the civic debate project (Manse Forum) was with the question of how the Internet is suited as a platform for local civic debate and more generally for interactive public communication. For this reason Manse Forum was designed and consistently developed in relation to local journalism. On the other hand the project also sought to challenge established communication practices in local administration. Among the most important objectives in Manse Forum were to develop and test different types of citizen communication, different web-mediated genres of civic publicness. Another focal concern in the Forum component was with the obstacles to the public use of the Internet at grassroots level. These obstacles are essentially reduced to questions about the control of the Internet as a ’place’ or ’space’, about the technology and skills required to access the Net and about the practical meaning and cultural definition of the Internet. The primary objective in the Manse Media project was to develop dialogical online journalism with a view to promoting public debate. At the same time the component was aimed at finding new ways of dealing with local issues by means of a concerted treatment of new ideas and the use of a wide range of different types of sources. The possibilities of the Internet were also used in the presentation and archiving of stories. Through their collaboration with Manse Forum and Manse Communities, active civic groups managed to make their voices heard in the public sphere of the Internet. A further concern in the Manse Media project was to broaden the traditional role of the journalist: the editorial staff involved in this component did not content themselves with monitoring events from the outside, but they joined forces with local residents to generate new ideas for stories and to produce those stories. One of the specific areas of work in this component was to develop a simple and easy publishing system. Experiments were also carried out in the area of multimedia journalism, including programmes that integrated radio and online journa- lism. Technical implementation in the Locality project was divided into three parts. First, the pilot phase involved a study of the technical background of Finnish online publications. This was followed in the second phase by work to create the general structure and design of the Manse Square web site as well as the pages linked to the umbrella site. The third phase involved developing and testing the publishing system designed to meet the requirements of the project’s basic concept. The system (which became known as Square) was Executive Summary 5 tested in student groups and developed on the basis of feedback received to make it easier to use. The lessons of the Locality in the Global Net project with regard to the possibilities of new communications technology can be summarised as follows: – Online community communication is a learning project. Lively exchange and debate at the grassroots level cannot be generated simply by placing the hardware at people’s disposal. As well as having access to the Net and the technology, people must also have the opportunity to learn the skills required by new communications technology. – New online genres can be created. The project developed new kinds of content models that serve as embryo forms for civic-oriented, local genres of online communication. These include interaction genres, information genres, influence genres, memory genres, service genres and synergistic genres. – New communications technology does not in itself generate activity and interaction, nor do existing technical solutions meet the challenges of citizen communication and local publicness. Hardware and software need to be developed from the vantage-point of the communications needs of local com- munities and local citizens and by working closely with civic groups. – The global Net can change local publicness. The concept of local network publicness developed in the project opens up new avenues for grassroots participation both in relation to journalistically produced local publicness and in relation to official publicness. The basic premise for this is the creation of an interactive, open and public space in the Net. During the course of the project the Manse Square website has grown into an important arena of local interaction in the city of Tampere, providing a public meeting-place for a wide range of different kinds of actors. It has evolved from a publishing platform developed initially for one research project into a significant public space that makes an interesting addition to the domain of local publicness. All this has been made possible by conducting the project in close collaboration with civic groups and local communities. The Locality in the Global Net project was carried out in 1998-2000 by the University of Tampere Journalism Research and Development Centre. Fun- ding was received from the National Technology Agency’s USIX programme. The project’s business partners were Alma Media, Kaleva, TPO and OPOY. Consultancy was received from MIT Media Laboratory researchers. 6 Executive Summary Preface 11 Preface In more senses than one the Locality in the Global Net has been quite a unique project. It has been a technology project driven by people and methods from journalism research and from the social sciences more generally. It has been a study that has not contented itself with recording and explaining what has happened, but it has taken an active and direct part in social life; it has created, it has explored, it has done. Nor has all the work been done by hired researchers, but a major resource, indeed a vital resource for the project has consisted of the networks created with grassroots communities. Finally, this has been an Internet project in which people have not been approached primarily as consumers or clients, but as active citizens through whom it is possible to find a social meaning for new communications technology at the local level. It is obviously no easy task to report this kind of complex effort. During a period of almost three years the project has seen many successes and many frustrating moments; it has made progress, paused to ponder, and made progress again. Although it is clearly impossible to convey all the steps and setbacks that have happened in the project, we have tried in this report to record most of what we have considered important and relevant.1 It describes the basic approach and concept adopted in the project as well as its main results. In the first chapter we describe the basic frame of reference and starting-points of the project.