Keynote: Barrett Brown
Feeding from the Multitudes: Writer and activist Barrett Brown will speak on the potential and perils of reporting with the crowd based on his own remarkable experience.
Several decades into the information age, our most crucial institutions are still operating along lines established centuries ago. And while mainstream journalism has adopted a range of useful tools and practices from the internet, it has yet to truly profit from the most important fact of our era — that theoretically, any individual may now collaborate with any other individual on the planet. Crowd-sourced research has already proven itself to be a viable supplement to journalism's traditional writer-editor model; its greatest successes are all the more exciting for having been necessarily haphazard, making use of platforms and mediums that were not even designed for such activity. Brown will talk about both the potential and the perils of crowd-sourced research, with an emphasis on presenting a practical way forward that will benefit outlets, reporters, and the public at large.
