Opening Government to Open Media

Find the Rabble.ca version,, CommonGround version, VUE Weekly version, TheTyee version.


There was something different in the air this time. The room still screamed of bureaucracy: the decorative flags at the front of the room, the plain suits, the stenographers. But the July CRTC hearing on traffic management (a.k.a net neutrality) had a dynamism to it that seemed foreign to the walls that contained it. Normally a hearing like this would be reserved for so called "stakeholders." This time around there was a buzz in the room, and that buzz was literally the twitter of public discussion that forced its way into a hearing.

The CRTC's traffic management hearing attracted an exceptional 11,000 submissions from people across Canada, an important number that I stressed in my own presentation before the commission. However, the public comments represent only a small facet of a larger constellation of citizen engagement that collectively appears to be opening up the CRTC's processes.

Prying open bureaucracy

Usually at hearings, citizen groups present their positions, send out a press release, and hope that the media relay the public-interest perspective. Even when the media does cover the public-interest perspective, citizens are brought into the discussion as onlookers to a representative-based discussion rather than as equal participants.

At this particular hearing, citizens made it very clear that they were not just going to sit passively but that they were going to actively participate in the discussions via social media tools. Net neutrality advocates like legal scholar Michael Geist, and citizen groups like the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) "live tweeted" and blogged about the hearing, while hundreds of people from across the country tuned in, discussed, and debated as the hearing unfolded over the course of a week.

There was such a strong awareness of cyber participation that before Michael Hennessy, Telus senior vice president or regulatory and government affairs started his presentation, he gave a shout out to everyone on Twitter. Later in the hearing, Michael Geist invited citizens to post questions that they thought the commission should ask Bell Canada -- it appeared that at least one of the commissioners was following online and utilized citizen input when dealing with representatives from Bell.

Read the rest at:
http://thetyee.ca/Mediacheck/2009/07/27/OpenMediaOpenGov/

Steve Anderson is the national coordinator for the Campaign for Democratic Media. He is a contributing author of Censored 2008 and Battleground: The Media and has written for The Tyee, Toronto Star, Epoch Times, Common Ground, Rabble.ca and Adbusters.

Reach me at:
steve@democraticmedia.ca
http://www.facebooksteve.com/
http://www.steveontwitter.com/
http://medialinkscolumn.com

Media Links is a syndicated column supported by CommonGround, TheTyee, Rabble.ca, VUE Weekly

Media Links by Steve Anderson, CommonGround, TheTyee, Rabble.ca, , VUE Weekly is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License. You must attribute this work to Steve Anderson, CommonGround, TheTyee, Rabble.ca, VUE Weekly