Posts by Alastair Thompson
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Speaker: Scoop.co.nz's Operation…, in reply to Jan Rivers,
Hi Jan,
In terms of the Governance Structure for The New Scoop that is still very much a work in progress we imagine there being an editor and possibly a commercial manager in the business with a board supervising them.
Depending how the ownership structure is set up there might also be some trustees involved in appointing directors.
Beyond that we see roles for two methods of working with the wider community of Scoop contributors, allies and readers.
At a business level we are keen to form a new kind of Scoop Media Cartel group which would consist of media partners, and media businesses of various kinds which work with Scoop. Some might have sell services alongside Scoop, or like cartel members at present, pool advertising capabilities.
We also see a role for Guardians/Champions to act as conduits to key stakeholder groups who work with Scoop. This group might meet once or twice a year and respond to a report from the Scoop Board on activity. Each guardian/champion would have a responsibility as a connector to a particular group, for example there might be someone from the PR Industry, someone for the Union Movement, someone from the Community and Voluntary Sector and someone from the business, arts, environment, local body sector. These roles would be voluntary and in some cases might be formally representative of the group that they represent. It would be nice for example to have a member from Parliament on the group.
The responsibilities and roles of Guardians are yet to be determined but might include a role in setting goals and objectives for the organisation, providing a channel for communication to the editorial decision makers, and perhaps making reccomendations about board appointments. Importantly as the name suggests Guardians/Champions would be expected to also provide support and defend the organisations editorial freedoms if they should come under attack.
In answer to your second question If we were able to raise $100,000 in the short term it would enable us to refresh the front end of Scoop and mobilse the website. Raising this sum would also make the transition process to new entrepreneurs significantly easier. With $250,000 we would be able to add additional functionality to our subscription products and thereby make them more attractive to paying clients. Currently on the drawing board is the idea of adding features like:
- the ability to send releases from Scoop to media organisations in a targetted manner;
- the ability to curate releases, link them to related content and add images and multimedia files to them;
- adding anlalytics telling people about the level of exposure their content is receiving - who is linking to it, how much social media impact it has had;
- and ultimately the ability to track the pickup of releases.Alastair
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Speaker: Scoop.co.nz's Operation…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Hi Hillary,
Technically yes though we do have special rates for NGOs and community groups (40% off) as part of our community.scoop.co.nz initiative with Comm Voices.
I have just emailed you a presentation we have just made up to introduce this whole concept to the Community, NGO and Voluntary sector.
It would be nice to offer the 4th Sector an exemption from this new policy but we can’t afford to do so – and we are now becoming part of that sector ourselves anyway. As you can see from the huge amount of content on Community Scoop I think we are now the defacto communication channel for the sector, both internally and to and from Government.
Alastair
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Hi Duncan,
Well that is certainly not what we want people to do. Though that reaction has occurred elsewhere.
Accessing Scoop while at work is not the same as using Scoop for work.
The former is allowed and fine. The latter is what we are attempting to sell licenses for.
Practically speaking we would only expect you to pay for a licencse either after you actually hear from us - asking you whether you use us for work (which is only likely to happen if we notice you are a large user in our logs) - or alternatively if you decide of your own volition that your company does indeed use Scoop regularly enough to warrant your paying us a license to access us.
I hope this clarify matters a little.
Al
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Howdy Public Adress Community,
The Scoop version of this post (with a bit of extra material) is available here.
Russell has warned me that it may be a little quiet around here today and over the weekend but I will be dropping in regularly to answer any questions you may have about what Scoop is up to.
Alastair
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We have just posted Peter Dunne's Speech.
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Mass Data Collection is Mass Surveillance. As soon as they want to find you and track down your friends and family and associates they can. As soon as someone with the right level of access wants to destroy your life by trawling through your secrets they can. Nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.
And because of that dissent becomes dangerous and the people become more pliable. Before you know it people will be discouraging you from discussing contentious subjects on account of them - to use Mike's words - being a non-subject.
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I am very glad you wrote this Keith. There is a mode of thinking which is gaining currency among our editorial leaders that if the public are not overly concerned about at thing - such as mass surveillance - then we shouldn't be either.
For me the issue is this. Thanks to the invention of the smartphone and cloud computing we (everybody with a smart phone or an web-mail email account) are effectively wide open to Government surveillance. Sitting ducks as it were.
The smartphone followed 911 and in the period of madnesss that followed the CIA / NSA received its record everything, keep everything, partner everything mandate - along with a mandate to torture people.
This mandate was embraced with such enthusiasm that upon it has been built an extraordinarily powerful trans-national network of spies - five eyes - which has eyes on the entire globe. When Nicky Hager wrote his book about Echelon in the 1990s this was what was imagined. Edward Snowden risked his life to warn us that it was no longer an imagined thing, it was fully operational.
As you say, protecting our freedom to expression, to political thought, to protest, and to have a strong democracy is why we fought both WWII and the Cold War. Now it seems that we have given this idea of freedom up for the sake of security - without being asked - and certainly without legislative permission.
What's more those who don't want to concern themselves with the matter seem to take some comfort in the idea that the people with this extraordinary power are the good guys.
Even if that were certain (and there is plenty of reasons for saying that it is demostrably false - JTRIG, the deliberate building of backdoors to encryption not to mention the illegal spying on journalists in the UK to name just three recently revealed examples ) this apparatus once in place will be impregnable, and who will be in charge of it next.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely & those who fail to learn the lessons of history are destined to repeat them.
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Hard News: Friday Music: The Two Sevens Clashed, in reply to Russell Brown,
That makes me feel so fucking old!
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Merry Christmas Russell. Hopefully we'll catch up over summer, if it ever arrives. Which reminds me. Laneways - I may break my habit and attend this year for a change.
Al
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I hope the NZ Herald will.post the presentation. I wish I had been there. Was it videoed by them.