This past Saturday, July 12th, ipHouse sponsored PublicRadioCamp with Minnesota Public Radio. The event was held at the UBS Forum at MPR in downtown St. Paul. The goal of the event was to corroboratively remix and mashup MPR’s content, data, audio, and meta-data. ipHouse’s Eric Snyder joined the public, MPR employees and Jon Gordon of Future Tense in finding innovative new ways to use MPR’s resources.

The attendees self-organized into groups based on similar interests. After lunch a “science fair” style show-and-tell was held. The four groups and their ideas are summarized below.

Data heads: This group was interested in MPR’s raw data, tags, etc. They settled on the idea that MPR needs an API (Application Programming Interface) to give the public access to this data. The API inputs were centered around the idea that if you provide a location, time, and keywords you could be presented with information in new ways. One possible use for such an API would be for listeners to type in their favorite presidential candidate as a keyword, define a geographic location, and possibly time frame and see a sort of “track” of what they did, who wrote about it, etc. Or simply input a location and see all that happened in and near that location.

User generated content group: This group came up with the idea of providing resources and possibly tools to listeners for creating their own journalism or contributing to existing and developing MPR stories. This could allow someone to contribute information to an article without having to actually write or edit it. One interesting use for this came from MPR employees who stated that often they get feedback after a story or article is written that may be very interesting, but not warrant a rehash of the story. This type of tool may be a great way for the public to continue with a story and may be useful to MPR to gauge future interest. For example, if the followup conversation of a particular story lasts weeks perhaps the story should be back “on the radar” for future articles.

Visualization: This group focused on different ways MPR could visualize their content and user generated content or comments. For example, this group took the text from recent MPR RSS feeds and made a wordle out of it. The wordle could change as new content is produced – sort of a weather ball of recent MPR stories.

Nouveau Radio: This group focused on what radio was, what it is today, and what it might be in the future. One challenge of radio is to balance the interests of a wide listening audience with detailed information for those more enthralled. An interesting idea presented by this group was for “side channels”. These side channels might even be user-generated content broadcast on alternate HD channels or available by other means. There was a great appreciation for the medium’s strength: radio connects emotionally with the listeners and any new content must maintain this strength.

An interesting trend became apparent during all of the different group presentations: A thirst for user generated influence, feedback, and access to content. While we feel MPR does a good bit of this already, hopefully some of the practical ideas discussed will help with MPR’s planning. We are sure it will be a seed for some interesting internal discussions and projects.

Learn more about PublicRadioCamp: PublicRadioCamp Twitter Summary, An attendees’ Wiki, and Bob Collin’s newscut blog post.

- Eric Snyder