Hamburg.
The next speaker at Alcatel-Lucent Foundation / HBI 2009 is Volker Agüeras Gäng from Politik-Digital.de , a new online platform which has recently focussed especially on a Dutch policy programme to support digital pioneers. He begins with a statement by Ariana Huffington, saying that journalism will not only survive, but flourish: users surf and use search engines to identify, and collate quality content which is updated on an ongoing basis. This new model is based on the networking and interlinkage of content.
The upshot is that people are now used to content coming from a wide variety of sources, no longer only from professional producers. This variety also requires new ways of sorting and filtering such content, also driven by users; this also increases the quality of content as better user feedback becomes available, and indeed also increases demand for content in the first place. This is socially driven innovation.
The future, then, lies in a combination of conventional journalism, search engines, online advertising, and citizen journalism, supported and driven by social innovation. This has provided a great range of new tools, as well as effective new content distribution mechanisms. The innovations emerging from this need to be supported and utilised, and the Dutch Digital Pioneers project is one example for this. It supports individuals and small and medium enterprises in a straightforward manner that minimises red tape, and Volker points out that more than 80% of businesses in Germany are small and medium enterprises, so there's plenty of opportunity for a project like this here, too.
This supports social innovation from within civil society, it supports media pluralism, and it supports electronic participation possibilities; it also supports the development of better ICT and media literacies and competencies. The low barrier to entry to this project is an especially important aspect, and has led to a great variety of projects being supported - such as Wireless Leiden, a project for the development of a free wireless network in the town of Leiden; an open source 3D animation software which has been used for an animation movie already; the Maroc.nl project which enables the development of online communities even for illiterate immigrants; and a project which measures noise pollution by military planes.
Such support for social innovation can easily be translated to the German environment, but it must take place across sectors (and across the competencies of specific government departments). The amount of money involved needs to be kept relatively low, in order to avoid red tape, and projects should not be funded for more than 12 months in order to avoid funding dependency and encourage the development of sustaiable business models. Transparency and immediacy in the funded projects are especially important. The best days of media are yet to come, if such projects take place.
