In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, you’ve encountered this persistent conversation about the future of news and journalism in a digital world. A Senate sub-committee spent three hours on it recently and most cities in the U.S. have had their share of panel discussions and one-day workshops focused on the topic.
While discussions and presentations serve a purpose, some folks are ready for more action and less words.
Enter GonzoCamp, a one-day event in Seattle tomorrow, that will bring together tech-savvy journalists, programmers, designer/developer/UI people, entrepreneurs and college students. Using a barcamp-style unconference, the goal is to pitch ideas and work in teams to build a functioning prototype of a new digital destination or platform in one day.
Will it work? Will we end the day with something functional and useful? It’s a longshot, but I guarantee the event will be worthwhile to all 35 people who registered.
The event mostly “sold out” in two days (it’s free, but space was limited to the size of the room), meaning there is plenty of interest in moving this discussion from PowerPoint presentations to a sort of code sprint.
The idea first came up for me in a conversation with John Cook and Cory Bergman a few months ago following an ONA panel discussion. (Cook blogged about it here.) As I asked around Seattle I discovered several other people were thinking about such an event, too. (Fortunately, those folks will be at GonzoCamp tomorrow.)
So I convinced my company, Serra Media, to co-sponsor the event. Then the University of Washington’s Masters of Communication in Digital Media program joined as a co-sponsor and is providing us a great room at the UW.
So we’ll see how it turns out. There are no guarantees, of course, but there are some amazingly smart and talented people on the registration list. So even if we aren’t able to produce something tangible in a day (actually about half a day of actual work time), I have no doubt everyone will benefit from working with other people from different backgrounds with different talents.
Discover, play and learn. It’s how innovation is born. And tomorrow we’ll see if a new event called GonzoCamp can produce it with lots of smart people working with a limited amount of time.
(Note: You can follow along by using the #gonzocamp hashtag.)
Mark Briggs 
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