Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

[written and sent off some days ago-- for the deadline, Dec 1 maybe?]

Next year, we do it right.

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Visions Unite: Everybody's Voices, Nobody's Noise

$200,000

2 years

$600,000

The greatest power possible to all people over their own lives may not be the first goal of most other projects talking about improving news media, but for us this is the point, and key to keep in mind.

Visions Unite is a movement for people who want the news to matter. At first for the people most passionate about improving their communities, Visions Unite provides the means for more and more people to become involved as they see the potential to change their and others lives for the better. This project creates a method and tools for people who care to pool their resources in getting the word out about the topics they care about. It provides a fair process to turn everybody's voices into a manageable level of incoming information. The technical hack is simply random sample voting on what news items are important enough to be promoted in a given cycle. This cycle would start off long, every month, but become more frequent as more people become involved. People and organizations who join propose and choose news through online tools– a web site with integration to mobile technology. The promotion of this news and information, however, would be done first and foremost offline and in person. All who participate in the selection and spread of the news are also able to suggest news items to the network. Organizations that may be at odds on some issues will be able to collaborate because both benefit from the greater reach of their ideas, and the process of choosing what is promoted is fair and transparent. People and organizations that have messages they want to get out now form a much larger communications network with the real possibility of reaching every person in a geographical area.

Existing dialog-promoting means of communication have time and attention limits to the number of participants, leaving one-to-many media as the dominant transmitter of news and information. VU combines equal access for all, democratic control of publishing, and collaborative delivery of content to produce a many-to-many communications network that scales.

Most people who care about the state of their neighborhood, town, or larger community already seek to reach other people with news and information. Visions Unite offers a framework for collaborating, and the potential for reaching all people provides additional incentive to join in getting word out. Vision Unite's fair and transparent method for choosing news and information allows people who are ideologically at odds to collaborate in delivering the news of the day. Mass involvement is both possible and made more likely.

People don’t just receive news about their local community and information about things that directly affects them, but actively choose news pieces that are most relevant and suggest what others should know about. Whether or not one’s ideas make the cut of being promoted by others in person, all adds to the knowledge on the website, and collaborators may be found.

In the competition to see where people get their news and information, the answer the media organizations may receive – for both their online and their offline operations – is nowhere. People cannot be expected to care about news that doesn't affect their lives, except as entertainment, and solid news reporting doesn't survive long in that environment.

The need for accurate and in-depth journalism isn't in doubt, but the commensurate need for people to support it is not being met.

Some news organizations pursue crowdsourcing— for the laudable goal of involving people in the work of understanding their world and for the less laudable goal of cutting costs. However, dedicated reporting resources, including funded full-time reporters, isn't what needs reducing. It is the publishing power and to a lesser extent the editorial control which needs democratizing.

Visions Unite makes possible a collective discussion on the scale of an entire geographic community– a discussion in which all participants have a baseline knowledge and equal opportunity to speak. By democratic filtering, an equal-access communication channel can scale to mass media levels– even a local newspaper is mass media compared to a town hall meeting, and Visions Unite puts out that chance to hold the microphone to everyone. (Though actually, the guy who always goes off about the same stuff at town meeting would most likely be filtered out.) Furthermore, as a network first and foremost of people who want to get their message out about making their community better, Visions Unite directly involves people spreading this conversation, democratically filtered to a manageable size, in the real world, door to door.

It leverages the passion of people who care about news and information as tools to make people’s lives better by enabling them to join forces to reach the maximum number of people in the community that they can possibly reach. The ability to vote about which piece of news is relevant, and at what scale, for a neighborhood or a region, makes Visions Unite the first practical many-to-many media.

People in the communities first adopting Visions Unite tools, both virtual and physical, will have a baseline community knowledge about the news their fellow community members care about. The most powerful media organization in these communities will not be controlled by any editor, advertiser, or publisher but by the people themselves. The more powerful this media network is, the more people will want to be involved in it, and the more democratic it becomes.

People everywhere will begin to see news as an integral part of changing their lives for the better, and will have the infrastructure and human networks in place to support quality reporting.

Our team has strong connections in journalism, activism, and technology efforts. The people developing Visions Unite have a rich history of forming and leading organizations and together possess the passion for better journalism and the diverse skills and experiences needed to launch Visions Unite, Boston. Involved directors include a founder of the NewStandard which produced a daily hard news online paper for five years without advertising, corporation, or government funding, reporting the news from the standpoint of ordinary people, with every article including multiple perspectives and rigorous editing; a key organizer of support for reporting and journalism education initiatives in Mexico; an advocate for equal access to communication and a member of the Free Speech Radio News board of directors; a grassroots activist and law student; an innovator in social work services in St. Louis and Udaipur, India; a student and police officer; a founder of arts, cultural, and community resource organizations in New York City; and an accomplished marketing manager. Active volunteers include founders of youth organizations in New Hampshire and India, technologists, advocates for many causes, an athlete and inspirational speaker, and community leaders. Our technology volunteers' involvement with open source free software, in particular the Drupal content management system, equips us to build the underlying technology for Visions Unite in an effective, reproducible, and scalable manner.

Democracy.
Equal access.
Fair.
Transparent.
Many-to-many communication.