PSFK Conference SF: Make it With Us

At PSFK Conference SF, Ezra Cooperstein (Current TV) and Andrew Hoppin (NASA) discussed how collaborating with consumers and navigating bureaucratic systems have helped them become more agile. Some highlights:

- NASA is experiencing a crisis, poor retention, poor awareness, bad follow through - Needs to change

• Held events for public collaboration
• Had a NASA rave (Yuir’s Night)
• Rented a house and made it open for all
• held BarCamp type events
• Super Happy Dead House, invited hackers to write space related software
• Twitter, SecondLife
• Getting NASA scientists to interact with entrepreneurs (SecondLife to get around red tape)
• NASA CoLab program, learning from external technophillic communities
• Taking the program national, asked to duplicate program to other government org’s (EPA)
• Biggest Challenge - Needed to get internal buy-in that there was a problem - the most successful way was getting outside tought leaders to come in and talk about their experiences with other organizations
• Create a community for NASA
• Making people feel a part of the NASA experience, not just NASA.gov, conversation not push
• We’re very good at pushing our message out there, but we’re not very good at listening
• When we open up we feel the impact from the public who cares about what we’re doing
• We have the right to know what NASA (any government organization) is doing, from the biggest to the most minute details

- Current TV started by Al Gore and business partner as an opportunity to democratize television

• tell the stories that are being ignored by mainstream media
• how do you make user created content into compelling television?
• Biggest Challenge - How do you democratize televions pre-youtube? Constantly iterating a model. Constantly thinking about how to do it better.
• This was a powerful idea. Not top down control. You organize mechanisms for bottom up participation. Meritocracy - best producers of content make it to television
• Means to an end - the end is informing viewers, the means is wide production
• A powerful production model, pushes the costs away from the network
• The model blew out the traditional production scheme. We can tell a story differently than anyone else
• never gone below 30% viewer produced content
• from people who are doing it rather than a reporter telling you about it
• Super Users create the majority of the content. 80/20 rule. 20% making just enough to live off making content for Current
• How do we constantly lower the bar for entry? User created advertising messaging. More popular than traditional ads
• Not CNN telling us what the important stories are today, users tlling us what they care about today
• Participation makes for a better product. We want to be at the forefront of participation.