Public Media Camp

Since going to Rootscamp in 2008 just after Obama won the presidential election, I have been addicted to unconferences.

Since Rootscamp I have averaged practically an unconference a month for the last 10 months and I am extremely excited to work for an organization that is planning an unconference next month - Public Media Camp.

I was fortunate enough to get to here Andy Carvin talk about Public Media camp this past week at DC Media Makers.

Andy Carvin - NPR's senior social media strategist - gave a short presentation on Public Media Camp, a quickly approaching unconference based at American University (October 17-18th).

Along with PBS’ social media guy Jonathan Coffman and Peter Corbett of iStrategyLabs (who helped run DC’s Apps for Democracy), Carvin hopes to fundamentally redefine the relationship between the public and public media organizations.

Andy suggested that folks at public media organizations are great at asking for financial support but not extremely good at harnessing human support (e.g. time, technical expertise, excitement).

Public Media Camp is an unconference designed to harness these other resources (e.g. social capital).

According to Carvin, well over 200 folks have registered and some are coming in from as far away as Alaska.

If anyone is interested in watching Andy Carvin's talk, Alex Howard, a local tech journalist and amazing guy, archived his livestream video here.