Micro Publishing

The Key to Creating a

Vibrant Grassroots Media

The idea driving Open Media Center's Micro Publishing Initiative is to enable community organizations to successfully use free (open source) online publishing technologies. To this end we aim to

• evaluate our client's organization to determine which of the available open source technologies will best meet their needs and objectives
• successfully integrate the identified technologies into their operations with installation, testing and content migration services
• follow up with training and support to enable them to use these technologies effectively

In our society, the public discussion is dominated by large corporations and government bureaucracies. Driving this discussion are public relations departments, lobbyists, "think tanks" and other well-funded agenda promoters. These organizations distribute their information to for-profit media companies who disseminate it to the public as "news." But quality news and information is the lifeblood of a healthy democracy. That's why the news media is called the "Fourth Estate." Whenever news and information a society receives is dominated by powerful interests and well-funded agendas, genuine democracy suffers.

Small community-based organizations--such as churches, cooperatives, schools, unions, political and activist groups--generally can't afford public relations departments, highly-paid lobbyists or big investments in technology. Most rely on a cadre of committed volunteers and a small, modestly-paid staff.

Almost all community organizations, however, can afford free technology. In just the past few years a variety of powerful and freely-available online publishing systems have become available. Known as open source or free software, some of these systems are equal to or better than their expensive proprietary counterparts. The key is to raise awareness among community organizations about these freely-available resources, integrate them into their work-flows, and follow up with training and support.

One of the most promising of these free technologies is Mambo, an award-winning web publishing and content management system. It's used to manage dynamic web-based communities. Some of its capabilities include document and media management, content scheduling, organization and syndication, multiple language support, discussion boards, weblogs (blogs), event calendars, surveys, polls and mailing lists. In other words, the Mambo online publishing system is more capable--by orders of magnitude--than the typical website representing most smaller organizations.

The bottom line is to provide communities, and the organizations who represent them, the tools to publish and distribute news and information vital to their own interests. This would have the effect of inserting a grassroots-generated "mass reality" into the corporate-dominated mass media. The greatest beneficiary would be our communities and our democracy.