Forum post: Axel Bruns at UNSW Produsage and Beyond: Exploring the Pro-Am Interface
Produsage and Beyond: Exploring the Pro-Am Interface
Thursday 29 October, 2pm-4pm
Seminar Room, 3-5 Eurimbla St, UNSW
(between Prince of Wales Hospital and main campus)
Speaker: Ass. Professor Axel Bruns, Creative Industries Faculty, QUT.
The concept of produsage (Bruns 2008) describes the user-led collaborative approach to content creation which is prevalent in open source, citizen journalism, and the Wikipedia, as well as many other social media spaces. While many produsage projects have emerged initially to challenge dominant players in industry, their successful establishment as viable and sustainable alternatives also opens the door for an exploration of manageable cooperative arrangements between industry and community. Many challenges remain for such Pro-Am (Leadbeater & Miller 2004) models, however – not least an often deep- seated sense of mutual distrust -and successful Pro-Am models may be most likely to succeed when sponsored by trusted third parties (public broadcasters, NGOs). This presentation explores pitfalls and possibilities in the Pro-Am space.
Axel Bruns is a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi) and an Associate Professor in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. He is the author of Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (2008) and Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (2005), and the editor of Uses of Blogs with Joanne Jacobs (2006; all released by Peter Lang, New York). He blogs about user-led content creation at produsage.org, contributes to the gatewatching.org group blog on citizen journalism and e-democracy with Jason Wilson and Barry Saunders, and more information on his research can be found on his Website at snurb.info. Bruns is General Editor of M/C – Media and Culture (www.media-culture.org.au).
Dr David McKnight,
Associate Professor,
Journalism and Media Research Centre,
http://jmrc.arts.unsw.edu.au/
