Blogboat 1.0: Also dog bites man is news

Four more thing about blogboat 1.0:

1. Quote of Dan Gillmor:
“Traditionally it’s news when man bites dog. But it’s also news when dog bites man. Especially when you know the man and the dog is yours.” Referring to the relevance of hyperlocal news.

2. Quote of my former boss Rudy Raymaekers, visionairy and working for a media company for more than 30 years.
“Working together is a problem. In the newsroom people sit together, but they don’t talk. Citizen journalists don’t work together either, their egos are too big. And the people in the newsroom aren’t working together at all with the citizen journalists.” I love this quote because it’s so recognizable, considering the challenges I had starting the citizen journalism project HasseltLokaal at Concentra Media.

3. During the afternoon session, Dan Gillmor made a plea against (most) anonymous news. According to him, it has not much credibility. Therefore, Gillmor defends Sarah Palin against the anonymous ‘cowards’ that accused her of not knowing that Africa is a contintent. More via this blog entry of Luc Van Braekel (in English).

4. The attendants of the afternoon session were asked in advance to write a discussion paper about the future of citizen journalism. So that’s what I did, and I liked it. Yet, writing is more my thing than presenting. So when I was asked to present mine, I got soooo nervous. I even didn’t have a copy with me :-). Anyway, I put my discussion paper on this blog. I titled it ‘Citizen journalism and how context can become king’.

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discussion panel, with Rudy Raymaekers second from the left, pic by lvb.net

More blogboat pictures via this link.

Team Flanders?

Tomorrow the Flemish minister president Kris Peeters is visiting our company Concentra. He will talk about the project ‘Vlaanderen in actie’, with which he wants to win the future of Flanders. Therefore he counts among others on the talents, the creativity and the innovative skills of the Flemish people, the excellent position of Flanders (in the middle of Western Europe) and the flexible Flemish government.  That’s at least what I read in the summary of the plan.

Our company will have some time to present innovative projects we are working on and my project HasseltLokaal is one of them. That’s why I am preparing a presentation right now. I will emphasize that HasseltLokaal brings people, clubs and schools together on a virtual platform and as such increaes social cohesion.

I will also mention that we’ve been working together with research groups from universities, other companies and the city of Hasselt, which makes the project quite unique. It is something I hear and read a lot (also in the Vlaanderen in actie plan): universities, companies and governments should cooperate a lot more instead of staying safely on their own islands. 

As a matter of fact, I also had a discussion about it at the Brussels Girl Geek Dinner with Ann Laenen of K&L. We concluded that lots of undertaking people in Flanders are very frustrated about the huge gap between those three entities. Innovation is hard like that, innovators have to climb a lot of mountains before the can achieve ‘something’.

Nevertheless, an interdisciplinary approach helps everybody. It’s something I see within the i-City project, in which the government, companies and young undertaking people meet. I’ve seen people building bridges there and as such making money – together. I do know that there’s a lot of potential in Flanders and that there are so many great ideas that maybe one day can be put in a business model. So the sooner there is a ‘team flanders’ the better, I suppose.