[Foundation-l] Report from South Korea

[Erik Moeller]

Hello all,

as some of you may know, I was in Seoul, Korea, from Wednesday to Sunday 
to visit the OhmyNews International Citizen Reporters' Forum and give a 
presentation on Wikinews. Two reports on this event with lots of photos 
are now online at:

http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/OhmyNews_citizen_reporters_meet_in_Seoul%2C_Korea
and
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/OhmyNews_forum_discusses_experiences_in_citizen_journalism
[The second one has just been posted, so it may not be quite up to snuff 
yet.]

For those not familiar with OhmyNews, it is an extremely significant 
website in South Korea known literally to the entire young generation 
there. It popped up five years ago as an alternative to overly 
conservative traditional media. 80% of stories are written by "citizen 
reporters" and vetted by a professional staff of editors. Many people 
say that OMN was responsible for putting the current President in power, 
and indeed, he granted his first interview to OhmyNews.

Behind this fairy tale, there's also the truth that there's a lot of 
money invested into OhmyNews. It's a for-profit endeavor, sponsored by 
advertising and subscriptions, and enjoys good relationships with Korean 
industry and politics. The "citizen reports" are often so-called "life 
stories", the kind of thing you would find in a blog, but edited 
professionally.

The project has recently launched an "international" (really English, 
but from many different countries) edition, which it sought to boost 
using the International Forum. Even people who had just written a 
handful of stories were, with generous sponsor support, flown to Seoul 
to share their experiences.

In my presentation ( http://www.scireview.de/temp/wikinews.pdf ), I 
invited the OhmyNews community to share content with Wikinews through 
compatible licensing, and to find other ways to collaborate, such as 
common communication channels. I had agreed with Jimbo on the night 
before on my strategy to continue these discussions privately with 
OhmyNews founder Oh Yeon Ho. Yeon Ho is seeking to build a "global 
citizen journalism alliance" and asked me what it would take for 
Wikinews/Wikimedia to join such an alliance. I responded that this would 
likely only happen if the alliance itself was a non-profit project not 
governed by a single entity.

We also briefly discussed the issue of free content -- currently all 
OhmyNews content is under traditional copyright, and indeed, due to the 
editing process, citizen reporters lose the right to distribute their 
own stories in the published form. Yeon Ho didn't seem to know about 
free content licensing -- he had never heard of Creative Commons -- so I 
am going to follow up on this privately. I also hope that some citizen 
reporters will begin to publish their stories under Creative Commons 
licenses; it would be interesting to see how and if OMN reacts to that.

All in all, I think it was a productive and valuable visit, and I hope 
that Oh Yeon Ho is serious about bringing citizen journalism projects 
closer together.

Best,

Erik