Some of you may have read — either here or elsewhere — about one of the social-media projects that I’ve been involved with at the Globe, a joint venture with the Dominion Institute known as the Public Policy Wiki. We started the wiki in January, as a way of soliciting input from concerned Canadians about a range of public policy issues, and the first issue we launched with was the federal budget. Almost a thousand people signed up in a matter of two weeks, and we got dozens of excellent “briefing note”-style policy proposals submitted, commented on, voted on and promoted in the forums. On the day the budget was released, we took the two most popular proposals and sent them to the Finance Minister in Ottawa.

Our second issue was Afghanistan, and while we got a lot of people reading the prepared analysis and commentary by Major-General Lewis Mackenzie and Janice Gross Stein, as well as the prototype briefing notes submitted by students at the School for Public Policy and Governance at the University of Toronto, we didn’t get a lot of submissions from readers concerned about Canada’s role in Afghanistan. Why? That’s a good question. It could be that we didn’t get word out to enough people about the wiki, or that the issue — while important — just wasn’t urgent enough to compel people to prepare policy proposals related to it, whereas the budget was very top-of-mind for readers.

In any case, we are launching our third issue today: Climate Change. We hope that people who feel strongly about this issue on either side of the fence will come to the Policy Wiki and read the prepared analysis we have from both Dr. David Suzuki — one of Canada’s pre-eminent environmental advocates — and environmental consultant Ian Morton of the Summerhill Group, as well as an overview from Mark Jaccard of the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University and former CEO of the British Columbia Utilities Commission.

Having read these analysis and overview pieces, readers can check out some of the links to background material, white papers, research documents and Globe and Mail commentary and news stories put together by the Dominion Institute and the tireless researchers at the Globe (thanks, Marjan!). And then they can either vote for the analysis they agree with most, comment on any of the pieces we have prepared, post their thoughts in the forum, or edit an existing briefing note and/or create their own briefing note using the wiki’s built-in tools. As we did with the budget, we will pass on the most popular proposals to the federal Environment Minister.

If you are concerned about Canada’s role in climate change, and what the federal government is (or isn’t) doing about it, please contribute your thoughts through the wiki, and pass on the URL to anyone you think might be interested. If you have any thoughts, please contact me on Twitter (@mathewi) or by email at mathew [at] mathewingram.com.

The photo that captured the incredible survival of the passengers of U.S. Airways Flight 1549, a shot of passengers standing on the wing in the middle of the Hudson River and sitting in an inflatable life raft, was taken by a guy named Janis Krums, who was on the ferry that was going to pick up the stranded passengers and snapped the pic with his iPhone. Within seconds, it was on Twitter, and within a matter of hours it had been viewed by almost a hundred thousand people (I reloaded the Flickr page several times, waiting about two seconds between clicks, and the number of views went up by 50 or 60 each time).

As with the Mumbai bombings, the Chinese earthquake and many other similar events, I and plenty of other people first heard about the plane crash on Twitter, and Krums’s photo was the first visual record of the event that I saw. But that’s mostly because I happened to be in front of the computer and not a television. Plenty of other people said they saw it on CNN long before it was on Twitter, although I have no way of knowing if that’s true. But does it really matter whether a photo and Twitter report from Janis Krums “beat” the traditional media or not? I can’t see how, really.

That kind of “who got the big scoop” question was a big deal back when newspapers ruled the media world, and it still is to some extent with papers and even TV networks. But you know who really cares about that kind of thing? Journalists, that’s who. Normal people can’t even remember most of the time where they heard something or saw something first, nor do they care. In the case of the plane crash, CNN had reports and so did other networks, Twitter had messages and photos from people like Krums — who was then interviewed on TV and in the newspaper — and so on. Now there are YouTube videos and 3D New York Times graphics of the event.

My friend Steve Safran said something very perceptive on Twitter during the event, after people started arguing about whether Twitter beat the mainstream media on the news. The US Airways case, he said, was “an excellent example of witness media and pro media cooperation. It’s not about the ‘versus.’” He’s totally right (and so is Peter Kafka at MediaMemo). Cellphones and video-cameras and Twitter and YouTube and lots of other social-media tools allow more people to contribute eyewitness reports during a crisis or news event, and that’s good. But they don’t replace journalism, any more than the invention of bicycles removed the need for the U.S. Army. The two can work together to make journalism better.

I’ll give the last word to Janis, who was hailed by many as the latest “citizen journalist” to report via Twitter:

“I think it is incredible that anyone at any point can have such an impact by simply posting a picture online. Anyone with a camera phone can report breaking news. I don’t think that twittering, flickering, etc., will replace traditional news coverage. But, it can be a great aid for the traditional media channels.”

Well said, Janis. Or as Peter put it in another MediaMemo post: “Mainstream media to webheads: Thanks for the free content!”

The always excellent Jason Kottke has a post up that got me thinking about the “broken windows” theory and how it applies to online communities. The theory — articulated in this piece from The Atlantic in 1982 — states that crime and bad behaviour of various kinds tends to proliferate where there are obvious signs of neglect, such as broken windows. In other words, if people perceive that no one cares or is looking after a place, the odds of vandalism increase, and The Economist has some hard evidence to back up the theory. The obvious corollary is to online communities or group discussions, Kottke argues (and I agree). As he puts it:

“When forums, message boards, and blog comment threads with more than a handful of participants are unmoderated, bad behavior follows. The appearance of one troll encourages others. Undeleted hateful or ad hominem comments are an indication that that sort of thing is allowable behavior and encourages more of the same.

Those commenters who are normally respectable participants are emboldened by the uptick in bad behavior and misbehave themselves. More likely, they’re discouraged from helping with the community moderation process of keeping their peers in line with social pressure. Or they stop visiting the site altogether.”

This, in a nutshell, is the kind of thing I think we are dealing with a lot in the comments on news stories at the Globe and Mail (the newspaper where I have taken on a newly-created position as communities editor, for those of you just joining us). We were one of the first newspapers in North America to launch comments, but they currently suffer from too little moderation — in part because we simply can’t moderate the 5,000 or so we get every day (we got almost 10,000 on Monday), and not all readers are motivated to click the “flag this comment” link we include nearby. I wrote about our challenges with comments in a recent post that ran at the Globe website.

We are working on adding Digg-style comment voting, and some other features that I hope will help solve this problem, as well as ways of identifying and elevating the intelligent and thoughtful commenters in our community and giving them more profile, or deputizing them in a way — a way of helping to fix the windows, in other words (in addition to removing flagged comments quickly), and of taking responsibility for the conversation. That’s part of what I tried to do with a recent post, in which I read the 2,000 or so comments we got on two news stories about the political meltdown in Ottawa and tried to pull some of the representative comments out.

I can’t do this all by myself, obviously — which is where you come in. If you read anything on the Globe and Mail website that you honestly believe shouldn’t be there, I’d like you to let me know either by flagging it for me on Twitter (I am @mathewi) or by emailing me at mathew (at) mathewingram.com. If you think we’ve made a mistake, or there’s something else wrong with what we’ve written, please do likewise. And if you see someone say something about the Globe or one of our stories (or one of our reporters) on Facebook, or a blog, or Twitter, or anywhere else, I’d like you to let me know so I can respond. It doesn’t have to be bad — it’s nice to get positive comments sometimes as well :-)

(Note: the video embedded here is of an interview with long-time online community expert Randy Farmer, which I got from a link at Kottke’s blog)

Andy Baio, otherwise known as Waxy (I don’t know why) is an independent journalist and programmer who lives in Oregon, and in addition to maintaining one of the most interesting link blogs on the planet he periodically takes on research projects — including an exhaustive investigation of all 300 or so samples used in the new Girl Talk album. In order to compile that data, he used Amazon’s “crowd-sourcing” engine known as the Mechanical Turk, and became fascinated by the idea that hundreds of people were spending their time doing small research jobs for him anonymously through the service. So he posted a request that Turkers take a photo of themselves holding a piece of paper, with the reason why they like to Turk. The results? Photos of 30 people, 10 women and 20 men, mostly young and white. Some Turk for the money, some for the “lulz” (or laughs), some just because they are bored. Thanks, Waxy.

There are plenty of efforts at “citizen journalism” underway in various places, including CNN’s iReport and Vancouver-based NowPublic, but Spot.us is a little different: In this case, the citizens aren’t the ones doing the actual reporting (although they can potentially do so under Spot’s model). Instead, they’re being asked to finance the reporting, by contributing to a kind of virtual tip jar. Founder David Cohn is a tireless young journalist who has been active with several leading citizen-journalism experiments, including Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net and the Off The Bus election-reporting joint venture with Huffington Post. But is “crowdfunding” really a viable model for journalism?

One potential weakness of such an approach — the chance that worthwhile story ideas won’t be pursued because they might impact the site’s revenue model — shouldn’t be a big factor where Spot.us is concerned: the site is a non-profit venture that is being financed by a grant that David won from the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge. According to an interview that the Spot.us founder did with Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch, all the stories that wind up getting reported on will be freely available, unless a media entity buys exclusive rights (which creates an interesting opportunity for newspapers to outsource their investigative reporting).

I’m not convinced that crowdfunding is going to work all that well as a way of encouraging investigative journalism. I may be overly pessimistic, but I think the vast majority of people would probably rather talk about the stories they would like to see covered than actually cough up money to make that a reality. I hope I am wrong, in part because it would be nice to see an alternative to the existing business model for news, which doesn’t seem to be working all that well. One thing is for sure: if anyone can make something like this happen, it’s David “DigiDave” Cohn.

Update:

Dave has some thoughts about his new venture here, and Ethan Zuckerman of the Harvard Berkman Center’s Global Voices project calls Spot.us one of “the very coolest ideas” funded by the Knight News Challenge, although he says he does have some concerns as well.