Since the beginning of August and until the end of January 2011, I am in Finland, at the Journalism Research and Development Center of the University of Tampere, collaborating with good friends in an exciting international project, codename MediaAcT. We are researching media accountability and transparency practices in Europe, the US and the Arab World. The project is an endeavor of researchers from 14 universities and we intend to explore how the Internet can foster best practices in media accountability.
This is the first time that an international effort is undertaken to investigate and disseminate the practices that make journalists accountable for the quality of their work. We believe this can help strengthen and spread media accountability, as we will publish a directory of best practices, cases and experts, as well as develop recommendations and guidelines.
In the phase of the project I’m involved in we will conduct interviews with experts during October and November in half a dozen of countries. Prior to that, we are using an innovative approach to gather data about existing practices and media events that triggered innovations in media accountability and criticism. The technological platform we are using, Etherpad, is an open source collaborative document platform, much more robust than Google Docs (no wonder why Google hired the creators of Etherpad so that the project is now discontinued, though still available).
Our idea in using Etherpad is that several experts can put together much more fruitful and accurate data if they work on the same document than through separate surveys. One of the purposes of this project is building up a lively network of experts committed with the quality of journalism, and this collaborative documents are the first step. Please, let me know if you want to participate.
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