NCMR 13: A little self-promotion for good measure

I am putting together a "self-organized" session during the conference. Tentatively looking at using the Sunday, 9:30-11 slot. If you're reading and interested, I hope you'll come. The outline is below...


Understanding Collaboration in Media Change Movements

Organizations that work to create a better media system through media policy advocacy, grassroots organizing, media literacy training, and independent media production are increasingly working with each other across organizational boundaries to attain shared goals, leverage the respective strengths of their partner organizations, and build a more interconnected, robust and responsive movement that reflects the diversity of our communities and strategies. While we rightly celebrate and learn from the positive outcomes of our collaborative endeavors, we rarely reflect on the process of collaboration itself. Besides evaluating the "end product," how do we know if a collaboration has moved our larger strategic goals forward? What are the challenges, costs, and opportunities of collaborative projects? If successful collaborations rely on the relationships between the individuals involved, how do we evaluate and document the practices that make collaborations successful to share that learning with new collaborative partners and to ensure that our organizations can call upon institutional learning with or without the presence of the original players?

In this session, we will have an interactive discussion and begin to earnestly assess how we go about planning, implementing, evaluating, and documenting our collaborations. This conversation will lay the groundwork for a long term project to produce a document that organizations can use to enhance their collaborations, including a taxonomy of collaborative models, a set of "best practices" guidelines, and an evaluation and documentation framework .