Good news from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) that they will fund a six-month feasibility study exploring how to create an online/offline knowledge network between producers of public service media and academics. The network will be mentored by the BBC’s Innovation teams in London and Manchester, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The research team are from the Communications and Media Research Institute at the University of Westminster (Professor David Gauntlett and the Director of Resesearch, Peter Goodwin) and myself, from the Communications Faculty at Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication.
The project starts now and it’s already gaining momentum through the acceptance of a presentation on the topic at the next MeCCSA Conference at the LSE. BBC Manchester are also going to run a Connect and Create conference which will aim to bring together a range of people in a crowdsourcing kind of way. At that conference Professor David Gauntlett and I will run a workshop about the new network…Lego may be involved at some point is my guess (David favours Lego, I like Plasticine). It’s going to be an exciting project, and should yield a good return for all involved; that’s the aim. My personal aim within the project is to encourage an ‘empty seat’ policy i.e. if any members of the network are running events at their respective organisations, and there are empty seats, then they could be offered. We will also start something online, probably on Ning. More later…
lizziejackson.cmo, how do you do it?