Produsage: Implications

Axel Bruns. "Exploring the Pro-Am Interface between Production and Produsage." Paper presented at The Internet Turning 40 conference, Hong Kong, 19 June 2010.

The emergence of Web 2.0 and social media sites and projects has highlighted the development of new forms of social organisation that facilitate online collaboration between peers. Major projects such as Wikipedia embody the fundamental principles of an approach to distributed and communal content creation that is best described as produsage (Bruns 2008) or commons-based peer production (Benkler 2006), and these principles - which trace their origins back at least as far as the emergence of open source software development, but have antecedents in the offline world, too - are beginning to promote innovation and change in an ever growing range of intellectual practices across the content industries.

Axel Bruns and Adam Swift. "g4c2c: Enabling Citizen Engagement at Arms' Length from Government." Paper presented at EDEM 2010, Krems, Austria, 6 May 2010.

The recognition that Web 2.0 applications and social media sites will strengthen and improve interaction between governments and citizens has resulted in a global push into new e-democracy or Government 2.0 spaces. These typically follow government-to-citizen (g2c) or citizen-to-citizen (c2c) models, but both these approaches are problematic: g2c is often concerned more with service delivery to citizens as clients, or exists to make a show of 'listening to the public' rather than to genuinely source citizen ideas for government policy, while c2c often takes place without direct government participation and therefore cannot ensure that the outcomes of citizen deliberations are accepted into the government policy-making process. Building on recent examples of Australian Government 2.0 initiatives, we suggest a new approach based on government support for citizen-to-citizen engagement, or g4c2c, as a workable compromise, and suggest that public service broadcasters should play a key role in facilitating this model of citizen engagement.

Axel Bruns. "Produsage and Business: Sharing Your Brand with Users." Paper presented at next09, Hamburg, 6 May 2009.

Relations between brands and their users continue to be affected by a traditional perspective that sees the producers and consumers of goods and services as inherently different animals. In the emerging information and knowledge economy, and especially in online contexts, this model is no longer sustainable. Instead, spearheaded by the Web 2.0 phenomenon, there is a trend towards the fusing of production and usage as a new, hybrid process of produsage.

Axel Bruns. "Blogs und Bürgerjournalismus: öffentliches Nachrichtenforum oder Startpunkt für neue politische Bewegungen?" Keynote at the conference "Das Internet zwischen egalitärer Teilhabe und ökonomischer Vermachtung", Zentrum für Medien und Interaktivität, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, 24 Oct. 2008.

Blogs, die sich mit politischen Ereignissen befassen, werden zumeist als neue, von Bürgern in Selbstverantwortung betriebene Alternativen zum traditionellen Journalismus dargestellt. Internetnutzer aktieren hier nicht mehr allein in einer Rolle als Informationsabrufer, sondern beteiligen sich in mehr oder weniger großem Umfang als Produzenten von Inhalten - insgesamt also in einer Mischrolle, die als 'Produtzer' (engl. produser) umschrieben werden kann.

Axel Bruns. "All the World's a Library: Produsage and User-Led Curation." Keynote presented at the Arts Libraries Society Australia and New Zealand conference, Brisbane, 9 Oct. 2008.

With the continuing growth in user-led content creation, or produsage, comes an increase in user-led information management, organisation, tagging, classification - in short, a growing trend towards user-led curation of the digital media universe. What Mark Pesce has described as 'coolfinding' is now no longer an isolated activity conducted in small-scale networks of friends, but - through the tools of Web 2.0 - has become an organising principle for the entire Web. Specific social media spaces from del.icio.us through Flickr to the Wikipedia are leading the way, but their increased networking and interconnection is making Pierre Lévy's once utopian vision of the 'cosmopedia' appear more and more like a realisable possibility.