Because there are different levels of participation, users are free in empowering themselves through creativity.

Problema

Journalism is in crisis and needs a new model. Not only that, people are not responding to each other and communicating, only when they hear what they like. Serious debate about our problems are hard to come by. Communities are not as cohesive and sometimes forget the problems they have in common. Therefore, communities need a space where they can debate, share, collaborate and create, while being able to eventually be trained by the amount of positive participation they partake in. Those who participate in a way that creates content that has a positive contribution (decided by other members) will have the opportunity to increase their understanding of how media works, as other members who are participating guide them through the process, and thus, fill a niche of information in a community where there was virtually no journalism of any kind at all. Community members can become journalists in Costa Rica, as they interact with the process in Amauta, and that is the need our community would address at the moment: that of disbanding the monopoly of information. For now, we are trying to interact with a small community of information activists, and experiment together in this process.

Solução

People, anyone, can contribute content freely in Amauta. However, freedom comes with consequences, and depending on your actions, you will receive feedback from other members of the community. Depending on how that level of positive participation is determined by the community through reviews and votes, members will be able to get more responsibilities and tasks to participate in the next level. However, when other members facilitate others' participation, that is also considered positive, and so, would hopefully, bring about incentives for people not to be left out of the process. As members progress in level (and find other people from outside to get included), they will get trained in the aspects of content creation, and also, in bringing communication to their community. We are, in this way, engaging in providing a platform where anyone can collaborate in, but also, in a system where someone can learn their way into the possibility of becoming more than just a mere consumer of news, but a true actor of information. While members progress in their levels, and have more to learn, they will become empowered and at some point, be able to create their own independent media. Also, the content created is measured in similar terms, where people vote through certain criteria to determine what should be highlighted at a particular moment, but always in a way, that this important information comes from different sources so there is a variety of voices. Since users decide how information is allocated as important, creative and such, they would be the beneficiaries of it.

Exemplo

Someone will write, and it will be published. Yet, whatever they write does not gain legitimacy until a certain number of people in their geographic community decides it speaks to them. If it does, it will go the next geographic (or topical) level, and so on. These are decided through certain criteria (credibility, creativity, etc) that can determine how this community measures quality. So if a person writes an article, it won't gain any ground, until other people from her community (geographic or topical) votes, reviews or gives feedback on her article (or other creation). Also, the person won't have a good measure of positive participation if they do not do other activities like comment, vote (which would be an essential activity), etc. The key would be to have a variety of tasks so there is also a variety of participants. Technology helps because it would create the framework and platform for this interaction. This would all be different from other types of collaboration that are measured in other systems because this one guarantees progress in capacity building and fuller empowerment of their media space, as long as there is constant positive participation (measured by the way it creates further debate than not). In other words, if users have difficulty at first with writing or other activities, they would still be able to participate in a similar level-playing field if their participation is measured not by just the quality of the information, but by the time, genuine effort and other factors determined by the community. Opportunities would open up through engagement.

Ofertas e demandas

Basically, all media are potential peers in the sense that, as organizations, they can participate in the collaborative system that we are trying to develop. At this point, open-sourced and collaborative media systems like Wikileaks, Wikipedia and social network sites like Twitter and Facebook offer some challenges because Internet users are already sucked into them. It is hard for them to move beyond their comfort zones regarding certain "trustworthy" media. In this sense, many of this systems that paved the way make it more difficult for up and coming social media to come through with new ideas. Unless, of course, they totally change the way media is created (as Wikipedia did), or the way information was distributed (as WikiLeaks did). In that sense, these past media systems are just helping us evolve their ideas. And I would believe there are no competitors because we feed from each other to learn from each other and grow, not to shut down good ideas.