Speaker by Various Artists

Scoop.co.nz is a website with which I am sure Public Address readers are familiar. New Zealand's largest independent online news publisher by audience size, Scoop reached 324,791 NZ users over the last 31 days.  Over the past four weeks we have been running a crowd-funding campaign for something we are calling "Operation Chrysalis", which as the name suggests, is about transformation. 

The intention of this post is that the comment thread be used as an Ask Me Anything  opportunity for you to ask questions you have about Scoop's ""Operation Chrysalis" plans.

We will be promoting this post and discussion on Scoop and encourage you to share the link with people who you think will be interested in the future of Scoop. And please do ask me anything. I will - to the best of my ability - respond directly and succinctly.

Scoop's Dilemma - How To Support The Tree

The easiest way to explain the origins of the "Operation Chrysalis" project is to use a metaphor.

Think of Scoop as a Tree.

And think of the central "professional” value provided by Scoop as its Fruit, ie:

a) access to a large influential audience;

b) a complete set of timely information;

c) a rich accessible database of content.

Scoop’s users (and the government and society broadly) benefit from these Fruit.

The Fruit only exists because access to the Tree is free - both to contributors and readers.

But unless there is a Tree there will not be any Fruit.

So how can we get Scoop's readers and contributors to support the Tree?

The objective of "Operation Chrysalis" is therefore to find a method to sustainably fund the tree - i.e. Scoop's free to access and free to publish publishing operation.

A New Ownership Structure & A New Business Model

Operation Chrysalis has two main legs.

1. To reboot our relationship with our contributors and readers - and to make it more commercial and sustainable;
2. To restructure Scoop as an organisation so that it better reflects the reality of the situation - i.e. that Scoop is a cooperative effort;

The Scoop response to Leg One is our idea of an "Invisible Paywall" - an aspect of "Operation Chrysalis" which has to date had only minimal exposure.  I deal with in the next section of  this post.

Meanwhile Leg Two is the reason behind our decision to turn Scoop into a not-for-profit news organisation - we also hope this will build a stronger trust relationship between Scoop and its readers. This was the basis of the Pledgeme crowd-funding campaign which hit its initial target $30,000 last week.

The Business Solution To "Operation Chrysalis" - An Invisible Paywall

Towards the end of February an article - somewhat ironically published behind NBR's paywall  - contained the Scoop on Scoop's plan to solve its long term sustainability problem.

Campbell Gibson's article revealed that Scoop intends to begin charging its at-work professional users -  those who regularly use Scoop for work purposes  - for accessing Scoop.  We are calling this initiative an "Invisible Paywall".

Scoop first discussed its "invisible paywall" intentions  at Nethui in 2012. But as 2015 begins - and online advertising revenues continue to tank - we now intend to pursue them more vigorously.

We acknowledge that the "Invisible Paywall" is a novel approach to online content monetisation and that it is likely to raise a few eyebrows. That said, Scoop's - free to publish,  free to search and free to read - news release publishing model is also as far as we are aware novel.

Companies, individuals and organisations which use Scoop are being informed that if they use Scoop routinely as part of their work that they need to have a license to do so. License fees start at $420 pa  for organisations with up to 20 staff and increase to $2940 pa for organisations with up to 4000 staff. If you regularly use Scoop as part of your work consider yourself informed.

Organisations and businesses who choose not to pay have the choice of not using Scoop and/or blocking access to Scoop from their networks. However we are hoping that  if the full circumstances around our "Invisible Paywall" are explained, enough businesses and organisations will be willing to contribute to make Scoop sustainable.

That said, so far the introduction of this new approach has been a fairly steep learning curve.

At the end of January we wrote to Universities and Technical Colleges about our change in policy and suggested they start paying us. Universities are among our biggest users. The universities response which arrived via an article behind NBR's paywall -  was to claim that they do not use Scoop. We thought somewhat disingenuous given the significant levels of university usage shown in our logs.

As Jan Rivers pointed out in this column, Universities routinely pay huge sums to access databases of news and other content shows and clearly understand the importance of being compliant with copyright law. 

In the end the success of "Operation Chrysalis" will likely be dependent on us convincing "business" users of Scoop like Universities to pay for the value that Scoop provides them. If sufficient numbers are willing to do so - at a relatively low per-user cost - then Scoop's future will be assured. If not then we will need to come up with a plan B.

Either way we will find out in the next few months.

Conclusion

After 16 years of daily publishing Scoop has become part of the NZ internet furniture, a constant feature of the place that everybody expects to be around forever.  Russell has described Scoop as "The Home of the National Argument" a description which captures the fact that Scoop seeks to be a big-tent containing the views of all sides of all arguments. 

It is the Scoop team's sincere hope that Scoop will continue to be this big tent for many years to come - to enable every voice to be heard in NZ's public policy debates - and to provide a window for the public to view these debates as they occur.  We have always believed that in providing these things we are strengthening NZ's democracy. And it is for this reason that we have for so long fought tenaciously to keep Scoop alive and independent.

And this is the objective of "Operation Chrysalis".  I hope you support it. 

If you do I encourage you to say why in the comment thread below. A compilation of endorsements may assist us in convincing the establishment of the merits of our "Invisible Paywall" approach.

You might also consider contributing to our Pledgeme campaign.

As I say in the video and blurb for that campaign - I strongly believe Scoop is the best chance an emerging independent online news internet community in New Zealand has of establishing a platform for news capable of withstanding the heavy weather our industry has ahead.

A Movement is a series of 10 themed art books collecting the remarkable music photography of Ian "Blink" Jorgensen from 2000 to 2015. Jorgensen has been an artist manager, tour manager, festival promoter, record label owner, author, publisher, musician and music provocateur. But before all that, and through all that, he was a photographer.

Ian has kindly given us 11 key images from A Movement that tell his story in music. You can see, touch and purchase the full set (and hear some great music too) at the launch tour through until April 4.

There are also a few screenings of an accompanying film, Movement.

thinkScience began with a Twitter conversation between me, Auckland Arts Festival chair Victoria Carter and Robin Hickman, about how to make new ways for New Zealanders to connect with science.

We  have been working on this for over a year, and are hugely excited that thinkScience will make its public debut with three events at the 2015 Auckland Arts Festival on March 14, as part of the festival’s White Night and family weekend.   

First up on the day are the Science in the City panel discussions in the Spiegeltent, exploring how science predicts and shapes the future of the city.  They'll be convened by Jon Bridges and the topics are "What makes the city work?" and "How can ideas change our world?"

Panelists include Tim Hazeldine (University of Auckland, Economics), Victoria Crone (Xero, Managing Director), Steve Pointing (AUT, Ecology), Ella Henry (AUT, Te Ara Poutama), Lillian Grace (Wiki NZ), Shaun Hendy (University of Auckland, Physics), Vend CEO Vaughan Rowsell, Cather Simpson (University of Auckland, Physics and Chemistry). This will be a smart discussion about the future of Auckland, so Public Address readers should feel at home here ...

The headline thinkScience event is New Zealand’s science superhero, Nanogirl (aka Dr Michelle Dickinson), live in the Auckland Town Hall, taking you and your family on a super-ride in an unpredictable science performance. Nanogirl will show us how much fun it is to create science magic. The show is a big production, coming to the Festival direct from Nanogirl's laboratory. It will an awesome event, and things will definitely explode ...

And in the evening, microbiologist and glowworm enthusiast Siouxsie Wiles is overseeing Biolumination. In Q Theatre Siouxsie and selected artists will be displaying works made with glowing bacteria. Aotea Square will play host to a photo booth with a difference, where people can step into the dark to be photographed by the light of bioluminescent bacteria, and you can even try your hand at making your own glowing art in a petri-dish.

Personally, I can't wait for the Festival events, and thinkScience has exciting plans for the future. Come, enjoy the day, and stay tuned for what happens next...

Four years on from the worst Christchurch earthquake, we are still living inside the great disruption that Christchurch life is now.

I've done big thinkings about the big picture  before in other places, this time I just want to do small thinkings about the daily grind of life in our evolving city. Few of the constants you take for granted in First World life are consistent in a post-disaster city.

When we talked through where it's at now in our household, the one you know as Hebe on Public Address said it was the inconsistency and constant change that gets to her most. So many changes, in every area of this family's daily lives. All near unthinkable four years ago.

 Traffic routes change, roads are dug up, routes squeezed, easy road trips turn into traffic jams overnight. The pop-up shops of the post-apocalyptic landscape vanish to be replaced with steel and glass blandness. In “Town” you get lost because everything has been bulldozed and there are no landmarks to see. We get a beautiful new supermarket (I went every day for the first week) but the local library is now a weedy, windblown vacant lot.

We live close to the epicentre of the February 22, 2011, city-flattening earthquake – 3km away near the pond by Rapaki Track – and St Martins did get seismically kicked around for a couple of years. Near 15,000 quakes since September 4, 2010, with The Noisy Neighbour, the Port Hills Fault, ponying up a good number of them. 

Our neighbourhood is on the uptown side of south  Christchurch, with tree-lined well-gardened streets, sheltered by the Port Hills, and the meandering Heathcote River that has a flair for the occasional evil flood. Think Midsomer without the visible human carnage. 

We moved in from the beach six years ago, buying this well-loved little cottage  because it was within walking distance of the Steiner school that looked like it would see our teenage sons right through from the magical kindergarten up to high school graduation. After the February 22, 2011, earthquake the boys' best friends left town. Abruptly, last year, the boys left school too,  after 10 years in the previously-strong community of children and families.

Just one wee world among many blown apart.

They love their new school, but it is right across town by the University of Canterbury in Ilam. The school itself is readjusting to four years still out of its inner-city home and many changes in staff and students. Luckily their bus route survived the weird pogrom that the local government people did to the bus routes that has turned many commutes into much longer and drearier trips.

Quite early on Hebe and I became infuriated with the EQC fantasists that looked at our house and their reports, and we decided to await decisions about the status of the land. 

One son was badly traumatised by the February quake, my knee was shredded in escaping from my office in Manchester Street, and after a feverish bout of projects, we all got sick. More good reasons to wait.

Telescoping several years into a paragraph is not easy but from this vantage point we've watched the passing parade of repairs and renovations in this area: the exterior painting of a nearby house as the snow fell, the jacking and packing of piles, the glueing back together of ring foundations, and the endless painting.

Along with most of Christchuch the preening, keening, posturing and wrath of the inner city dramas is totally peripheral to our lives. Christchurch devolved to residents living in their villages post-quakes and in many ways it has stayed that way, even with a unifying City Council in place.

While the backdrop of daily life has been one of constant change, there has been an inherent assumption in the mix that somewhere, somehow a new normal is on the way. Except that it is not.

We had thought from our very good gossip and data networks as befits ex-journalists that things were slowly getting sorted on the home fronts. Not always the results people sought, but a gradual inching toward some sort of resolution.

Our own barometer of change, the dump next door, deserted since September 2010, is still there but now slated for demolition. We've grown used to the rats in the garden, and our cats' hard work to keep them down. I cut the overgrown lawns when the grass seed throws Hebe into a full-blown allergy attack and the fire risk soars.

We have all learned to be ready to duck when the roofing iron blows off in the howling Canterbury nor'wester. When the hazard team turned up to kill off the black mould infestation inside the dump, we even had the reason for our own dragging-down health explained.

This year we find another house nearby has gone from EQC repair to over-cap and possible demolition. Skip one house, and a large solid-looking beauty is said to be in the firing line.

A good half a dozen homes within five minutes' amble along the riverside dog walk route have abruptly gone “ping ping ping”. Some looked rough but one I can recall featuring in a kitchen style feature in the local paper just five years ago.

This very morning Miss Dog and I stopped in amazement as we watched an apparently intact 90s horror vanish under the teeth of the digger. This had been one I had glared at many times, thinking “why you” while the arts and crafts houses of my  fancy bit the dust. Now by evening it too has gone.

The peaceful neighbourhood has turned into a sort of “renovation Rapture” in reverse where the weak and the flawed are the ones wiped from the face of the Earth. Like many boomers, Hebe and I have made our real money buying and doing up homes. Now we find ourselves in a city-wide version of Changing Rooms, a do-up show featuring an entire city.

These are not caring and sharing demolitions. Because the money from recycling is less than the money for a quick bulldoze of everything, that's what they do; drop the lot.

We don't have a great roof because we don't know if it's worth replacing it yet. I've seen the roofing iron to replace it bulldozed into scrap countless times just on my own street.

What the accrued effect of all this change is you end up with a vague sense of exile in your own city. A city well served with the new wave of colonisers “here to help with the rebuild”. Intellectual hustlers so bereft of nous they fail to see the irony inherent in their generous offer.

What hurts is that the new vision and city taking shape risks becoming so much more timid and conformist than what fell. I'm talking paint colours for new builds like grey, sand, beige. I wish they'd drop the artifice  and put out one called “cringe”.

This week they put the uber-coloniser John Godley back on his plinth in Cathedral Square, where he can glare at the acrimonious pigeon roost formerly known as Christ Church Cathedral.

I liked him better when Hebe found him a couple of months after the February quake face-down in a council storage area, where in a brassy, pukka kind of way he had become just folks like the rest of us.

In August last year, I attended the Women in Innovation Summit organized by the National Advisory Council on the Employment of Women. We discussed various issues that prevent women from choosing careers in technology, and from advancing their careers. But what touched me the most were facts mentioned by two of the speakers.

Frances Valentine, the founder of The Mind Lab, said that hardly any girls are enrolled in their after-school robotics classes, instead they do design and art. The sad fact is that this divide happens as early as four years old. Girls’ mums decide that “techie” things are not appropriate for their daughters, simply because this is something they are not familiar with themselves.

Hon Jo Goodhew, Minister of Women’s Affairs, revealed a shocking statistic that came from surveying New Zealand schoolgirls about their future career plans. The top two most-desired careers are airhostess and hairdresser. The lack of ambition is disheartening, and it comes most likely from the fact that these girls have not been exposed to other possible career choices and have not been encouraged by their mothers to achieve more.

I decided to do something about this. Together with The Mind Lab and Futureintech, an organisation that promotes careers in food technology, biomedical engineering, software development and forensic science, we have come up with a concept for an educational career event called “STEAM ahead”

STEAM is a variation on the commonly used acronym STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths), which adds an “A” as in “Arts” in between these fields. Girls excel at many fields that fall into the Arts category, and if they combine these skills with Science, Technology or Engineering, this will open up more career choices for them. My personal career in a field called Natural Language Processing is based on studying both Linguistics (I hold a Master of Arts) and Computer Science. Apple has used a creative industrial design strategy to create products people love using. Girls need to be aware of ways to combine their strengths in careers that are future-proof.

The “STEAM ahead” events don’t just educate girls, but also their mothers about such career opportunities. The tag line is “Bring Your Mum (or alike)”, which makes it into a fun mum and daughter event. Dads are also allowed if mum is not available.

The first pilot event, sponsored by Serato, engaged 20 girls and the feedback from parents was encouraging:

“As a parent it was great to have an event that had young women, telling their pathway stories, who were not much older than the girls present. For my daughter, (17 yrs old) at least, it demonstrated well that many industries, that she could relate to, require IT experts.”

Our next event is called “Superheroes STEAM ahead” and it will use the powerful imagery of superheroes to speak to both girls and their mothers. The first speaker, Michelle Dickinson, calls herself  Nanogirl and has been actively promoting science to school kids with initiatives like the 100 Days Project. The second speaker, Jenine Beekhuyzen, founded the TechGirlsMovement and has published a book called “Tech girls are superheroes”, which uses fictional stories to tell girls about the lives of women who work in tech.

This event willbe held at the Neon Foyer at the School of Engineering on February 27th, and was made possible through a crowdfunding effort published through PledgeMe. In just a couple of weeks we raised more than $2000 from private people, companies and organizations, which shows how much interest there is in this cause. A female CEO called me and said it’s her New Year's resolution to support causes that get girls into technology.

At “Superheroes STEAM ahead”, apart from listening to two inspiring talks, girls and their mums will also have the opportunity to talk to women who work in a variety of companies and organizations at a small career fair, featuring Vend, Orion Health, Westpack, Entopix, Skills, SumerOfTech, and She#. They will also find out about courses at The Mind Lab, the Gather Workshops, Code Club Aotearoa and other opportunities to get started while still in school.

I am myself the mother of a two year old girl, who is "girly" in many ways. She is fascinated by jewellery and shoes and likes to play with her dolls. But she is also interested in playing with nuts and bolts. Once we found her gliding a stud finder along the wall, just like her grandad a day before. It would be a shame to discourage her from such activities just because they are not suitable for her gender. I’d like her to try things out and choose for herself. With the STEAM ahead initiative, I’d like to show mothers who think in terms of “girly careers” that there are many more options out there for their daughters.