Episode Notes

Andy Carvin (@acarvin) is digital strategist for National Public Radio. He has helped NPR create their pioneering online presence, coordinated multiple crisis camps, and he’s organized the PublicMediaCamp unconference. In recent months, Andy has engaged in a globalized twitter-enabled form of tummelled journalism as he has curated, fact-checked, and shared news from the Arab democratic revolutions (and other international stories).

Heather Gold writes that Andy Carvin may be the most “successful” tummler on the web:

We’ve wanted to have Andy on for some time. I got to know him a while back and noticed how involved he was in the tech community , how open and vulnerable he was on twitter about his own life and things he’s personally coped with and how much he seemed to commit to crisis camps, in which web and IT folks get together and hack on problems to help an ongoing humanitarian crisis, such as the recent earthquake in Japan.

Andy’s commitment and knowledge about the web, community and human rights all converged into a really critical moment for the web on twitter at the end of 2010 as revolution began bubbling in Tunisia. Andy tummeled the hell out of what was going on there on the ground. He then became a key point on the web and for western journalism (possibly beyond the west too, but in the spirit of Andy’s work, we could not verify this so we’re not asserting it). Andy connected first person sources, organizers, social media participants, journalists and many regular folks around the world who just became all of these things as the world was astonished by the organizing and democratic movements that swept through Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Yemen and Syria.

In doing so, Andy showed by example, how to create community, connect people, verify and ask for verification about news. And rather than just being a digital strategist and community advisor at NPR, he now seems to be a journalist and a story as the web, revolution and tummelling shift what all those things mean.

Enjoy our conversation with Andy!

News and Notes

• The Huffington Pose: Using the seductive and tantalizing tricks of a modern-day courtesan, the new media mogul puts a brave new world under her spell – Hephzibah Anderson in ADWEEK
• Here Comes Everybody – Tummlers, Geishas, Animateurs and Chief Conversation Officers help us listen – Kevin Marks at Epeus’ epigone
• The Human Blog – 2006 profile of Arianna Huffington by Emily Nussbaum in New York magazine
• Conversation is the New Attention – Christopher Fahey and Timothy Meaney at A List Apart
• The “Donahue” app – “Ideas and Experiments in the Art of Presenting”
• Heather Gold on Unpresenting
• My Sarah Jane: Remembering Elisabeth Sladen – Tor.com

At 18:08 in this episode, we starting diving deep into Andy Carvin’s work. Here are some links and stories related to his global tummelling:

• We highly recommend you check out the Chirpstory transcript of twitter conversation during the recording of this episode.
• Twitter and the Anti-Playstation Effect on War Coverage – Zeynep Tufekci (@techsoc)
• Report: “Digital Natives” a Myth – Suw Charman-Anderson at ComputerWeekly.com
• Marshall Kirkpatrick on Apple, Google and other socially awkward companies – TummelVision Ep. 33, Sept. 2010

While you listen, you can follow the smart comments from our lively chat room by replaying the CoveritLive discussion.

If you’re interested in hearing more conversation with Andy, check out the supplemental discussion in episode “62.5.”

Episode Notes

After the recording of our “official” episode 62 discussion with NPR’s Andy Carvin, we continued for another 45 minutes of in-depth conversation about his work, deeper themes of connectedness, and some insights on the tools and mobile phone Andy uses in his work.

Episode Notes

From SxSW in Austin, Heather Gold and Kevin Marks talk with Howard Rheingold, who has been studying and writing inspiringly about virtual communities since the 1990s, and has been online continually since the mid-1980s. His The Art of Hosting Good Conversations Online is the original Tummler how-to guide.

Enjoy this conversation with the godfather of online tummlers!

Episode Notes

The guest this week is Juliette Powell, media strategist, author of 33 Million People in the Room and co-founder of The Gathering Think Tank.  Juliette is a natural-born Tummler who catalyzes  ideas and people across business, media and culture.

Juliette and the gang offered some practical tummelling tips, discussed collaboration across disciplines, leaderless revolution, and the social dynamics Dutch schoolchildren (really).

Check out Juliette’s recent  discussion on the impact of the social web on the Middle-East revolution[s] with Internet skeptic Evgeny Morozov on BBC’s WHYS blog. Bonus: She is a fellow Canadian along with Heather.

What I’ve been saying a long time. The premise of TummelVision is that everythign is made of people. We make everything we have. Only Alex, a brilliant technologist (thank him for twitter to some degree and the upcoming bank simple which I will switch to in one second) spells it out as well as why we need to regulate tech. What motivated his post?

As part of their reporting on recent events in the Middle East last week, NPR ran a story called Internet Freedom and the US State Department. The story is an interview with Alec Ross, co-founder of nonprofit technology provider One Economy and now Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

While dodging hard questions about US companies selling restrictive or invasive technologies to repressive regimes, Mr. Ross made a statement that jumped out at me from my car stereo:

“[T]echnology itself is value-neutral. It depends on how a government chooses to use these technologies.”

I believe this is an unproductive, misguided, and all too common way of thinking about technology.

The rest of this essential post.