National Writers Union Digital Media Conference Reportback

While it has been a long and busy couple of weeks for Open Media Boston staff, I'm gratified to report we managed to both keep our publication moving along and help pull off a useful event - the National Writers Union Digital Media Conference - on Friday and Saturday. I'm still processing exactly what I want to say about what I learned from my participation in the conference, but I thought I'd use this week's editorial to simply thank all the many people that volunteered their time to make it happen. First, I'd like to thank Suren Moodliar of the Organizers' Collaborative for plugging our effort into his group's larger effort to organize the 10th Annual Grassroots Use of Technology Conference. That allowed us to access a nice space at Northeastern University for the NWUDMC, and to bring together two closely related groups of people - progressive techies and progressive writers (and other creators). Registrants to our conference were able to attend the "GUT-C" (ar ar) conference and vice versa, which made the whole thing much more diverse and exciting than it would have been if the two conferences had remained separate. Suren, his organization's board, and their volunteers did a huge amount of work - and the conferences couldn't have happened without it. So big big ups to the OC. And also to Mass. Global Action - notably MGA's Alisa LaSotnik - which provided the effort with organizing acumen, material resources and access to its vast network of grassroots organizations.

[Note: Check out our coverage of the conference here http://www.openmediaboston.org/node/989/.]

Next I'd like to thank the national and local leadership of the National Writers Union for funding the NWUDMA - and providing resources, organizing experience and people power. Kudos to Larry Goldbetter, Jeanne Harnois, Barbara Beckwith, Charles Coe, Maria Termini, Lucy Sutherland, the rest of the Boston Chapter Steering Committee and all our site volunteers.

And I'd truly be remiss if I didn't thank Prof. Richard O'Bryant of the John D. O'Bryant African American Institute for hosting both conferences. Further props are due to our conference co-sponsors: Grub Street Writers, Women's National Book Association, and PEN New England for spreading the word and turning out attendees.

I'd also like to thank all the NWUDMA speakers - Joyce Bettencourt, Persia Bravin, Topper Carew, Larry Goldbetter, Dave Goodman, Jeanne Harnois, Fred Johnson, Sue Katz, Dan Kennedy, Jesse Kirdahy-Scalia, Lori Landay, Barbara Mende, Robert Mighty, Zach Seward, Felicia M. Sullivan, Rob Watson, Lisa Williams, and Gary Zabel - who did a fine job, according to many attendees went to the extra trouble of coming up to me and letting me know what a good time they had. And, in truth, despite the typical logistical hassles we had, I really did see people were having fun. Indeed, the most common compliment I got about the conference was how informative it was - especially for the many NWU members in attendance. Plus the Filipino/Singaporean lunch shared by conference partner Maria Lourdes was really tasty.

For me, the most interesting part of the conference was the Open Forum session that Larry Goldbetter, Sue Katz and myself held with a solid number of NWU members and other interested folks. We started coming up what seemed very much like a plan for digital rights campaign that could really help revive the union's fortunes, and start to organize a lot of creators - and not just writers, either. More on that when the NWU has some more fully formed ideas to discuss.

The most fun I had was participating the Intro to Virtual Worlds Workshop that Lori Landay, Joyce Bettencourt, Gary Zabel, and the anonymous avatar Persia Bravin put on in the Second Life virtual world (in fact, inside a huge building I built for the purpose of hosting such events in Second Life). The most engaging event I participated in was the Future of Journalism discussion that I ran with Susan Pollack and Sue Katz when the original speaker couldn't make it due to illness. The most challenging talk I saw was Fred Johnson on public funding for creators - in which he stated that our attitude towards the demise of traditional news media should be "good riddance," and that they should be replaced by better and more responsive democratic news media.

The most "wow factor" kind of experience I had was speaking on the Friday night panel we fielded to talk out "how creators can make a living when we're expected to work for free." I had purposely pulled together a group of people with divergent ideas about the topic, and thoroughly enjoyed the presentations of my fellow panelists Zach Seward, Lisa Williams, Topper Carew and Felicia M. Sullivan. The back and forth with the audience was also quite fun, and the fact that Dan Kennedy was a great moderator and made everything run really smoothly was certainly a bonus.

The only drag was that since OMB staff were so busy helping run the conference and participating in it, we weren't able to do much coverage of it. I'll make sure we add the photos, audio and video we got over the next few days; so that folks who missed it will get a better idea of how it went.

In closing, I can assure you all that OMB will always do as many public events as we can. I think it's really important for news publications to participate in public discussions and debates around issues of the day whenever possible. So, I want to make it clear that we'll keep them coming. And, as ever, that we're open to suggestions from our viewing audience about what kind of events we should stage - be they picnics or confabs.

Jason Pramas is Editor/Publisher of Open Media Boston and a Steering Committee Member of the National Writers Union/UAW Local 1981 - Boston Chapter. He was lead organizer of the NWU Digital Media Conference.