Digital innovation
I get excited by and have an instinctive knack for innovation, so digital is my ideal space for this type of thinking and play. I'm a creative person at heart, and combined with my social anthropology-schooled brain this tends to result in my yearning to test boundaries no matter what role I'm in.
As a journalist, I was at my experimental best when under the pump, especially in emergency situations or when in a thinly resourced high-octane reporting situation. As a strategist, I've had plenty of opportunities both within and beyond the scope of my roles to test all kinds of ideas (for which thanks to supportive managers are very much due!).
I keep an eager eye out for boundary testing ideas not just in media but among many sectors, the common thread of interest (for me) being that digital innovation sits at the heart of the solution.
Some tasters of ideas I've had are below.
Disaster management
I had had my eye on innovative solutions to emergency coverage issues for some time, and was hoping there might come a time when the ABC could experiment with crowdsourcing in its coverage mix.
That time came sooner than expected when, midway through a more pedestrian trial of the crowdsourcing platform Ushahidi (which we were testing for more serious considerations such as emergencies), Queensland was hit by severe floods and an opportunity presented itself for a large-scale, real-time trial.
Together with colleagues in the ABC's Innovation division, I crafted our approach to Ushahidi for the floods in a 24 hour period, and we continued to shape and form the idea as we went along, liaising with the Ushahidi team, Queensland and national emergency services, government agencies and volunteer bodies.
The idea behind the trial was to capture vital on-the-scene information from members of the public - allowing them a digital contribution option beyond the traditional phone call - and couple that with all the verified information the ABC could obtain from official sources.
The site was a victim of its own success, melting Ushahidi's servers and requiring an internal emergency response of our own! In the 24 days it was live (covering part of the recovery phase also), it clocked 230,000 unique visits.
“The work of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in the recent floods in Queensland has been nothing short of remarkable. ABC was in the middle of piloting some of our new products internally when a true disaster struck in the form of severe flooding in the north eastern Australian state. In a matter of hours their trial of our products escalated to an actual emergency deployment, with their staff, and our own racing to assist the victims of the flood, as best as our technology allows.
”What was different about the Queensland deployment for our staff, was that ABC was the first organization to embrace the new Ushahidi ecosystem of products in a big way. This included SwiftRiver, Sweeper, SMSSync, Crowdmap, and Ushahidi 2.0. Some of these products were direct responses to inefficiencies we’ve faced in the past as an organization, others were completely untested at this scale.”
Digital innovation catalyst
While a member of the ABC's Innovation division, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to raise ambitious project ideas during creative off-site days, several of which went on to be delivered.
The most memorable of these is the ABC's Campaign Pulse, an attempt to capture the vast array of social media chatter happening about the 2010 Federal Election, and present it in a compelling, digestible, relevant way.
The project broke new ground in this space, pre-dated only by some simpler ideas delivered by others for the preceding US election. The ABC Innovation team I was a part of worked to a tight deadline and with modest resources to create a layered and personalised experience that incorporated social media into maps, graphs, pie charts, scaling relative boxes, live feeds and comparative bar charts.
The ABC Campaign Pulse project was a finalist in digital innovation at the 2010 AIMIA awards.
Industry innovator relationships
I'm always interested in new platforms, but take particular pleasure in distilling the characteristics of a platform and re-imagining how it might serve other purposes.
Soundcloud is an example of this. I led early discussions with the Soundcloud team to discuss using the platform to encourage a completely different, nuanced form of audience interaction, at a time when the platform was still only used by musicians.
These days it's a completely different picture - media organisations are a prolific presence on the platform.
I also led the ABC in its experimentation with and incorporation of Storify as a way to depict a social media narrative. Our success with this platform pre-dated many larger global media organisations, something that occurred not infrequently, as it happens.