One month ago, we announced that we were going to award 10 PublicMediaCamp scholarships to PBS and NPR stations that would allow them to send up to two people to PubCamp this weekend, as well as receive a $2000 stipend to help defray the costs of their own local PubCamps.

We’ve now confirmed that the following stations will receive scholarships:

Georgia Public Broadcasting (Susanna Capelouto and William Overall)
KETC TV, St. Louis MO (Lauren Schwarze and Kate Shaw)
KLRU TV, Austin TX (Shane Guiter)
Maine Public Broadcasting Network (Chris Sweet and Nick Woodward)
Mississippi Public Broadcasting (Thomas Broadus)
Oregon Public Broadcasting (Rob Vincent)
UNC-TV – North Carolina Public Television (Jen Jones and RL Watson)
WFWA TV, Ft. Wayne IN (Mark Ryan)
WLRN TV and Radio, Miami FL (Stephen Malagodi)
WOSU Radio, Columbus OH (Susan Meyer and Andrew Miller)

Please join me in congratulating them for winning the scholarship – we look forward to seeing you in DC and learning about your own PubCamps in the future!

Despite our best efforts to organize PubCamp during what’s usually one of the most beautiful months of the year in DC, it looks like our weather is going to be cold, dreary and wet. So what better way to cope with the intemperate weather than grabbing a beer Friday night with your fellow PubCampers.

Since we’d hate to leave you wandering aimlessly around the damp, dank streets of DC, we’re going to have an informal meetup/tweetup Friday at 5pm over at Buffalo Billiards in Dupont Circle. If you’ve never been, it’s a cavernous place full of pool tables, dart boards and even a few Wii consoles. This isn’t an official PubCamp event (read: we’re all going Dutch on this one; the beer is on us Saturday night) but at least it’ll be a place to congregate in some relative warmth and contemplate the chaos that’s about to ensue over the weekend.

Buffalo Billiards is located at 1330 19th St NW, one block south of Dupont Circle. If you come via Metro, take the Red Line to Dupont Circle and take the south exit; it’ll literally be across the street to the right when you come up the escalators. If you’re at Hotel Helix, it’s about a 10-15 walk or a five minute cab ride.

Once some of us get there, we’ll post some tweets with the #pubcamp hashtag letting you know exactly where we are in the bar. Hopefully it won’t be too hard to find us. We’ll likely be the geeks with the iPhones and the Flip Cams and whatnot.

If you work at an NPR or PBS member station, you can now apply for a scholarship to attend PublicMediaCamp, scheduled for October 17-18 in Washington DC.

We expect to award no more than 10 scholarships. Each of the station scholarships will cover basic travel-related expenses to attend PublicMediaCamp, as well as a $2,000 stipend towards that same station hosting a local PublicMediaCamp. One application per station, please.

Scholarship Travel: Each station scholarship will cover basic travel-related reimbursements for one or two participants designated by the station to attend the PublicMediaCamp occurring in Washington DC Oct 17th and 18th. If sending two individuals to the unconference, one should be an employee of the station, but you have the option of having the second be a representative of a community organization that you will partner with to plan and host your local PublicMediaCamp. Such travel expenses may include: airfare, lodging, food and other expenses allowed by CPB travel guidelines.

Local Event Stipend: In accepting a scholarship, the recipient station also commits to hosting a local PublicMediaCamp before September 1, 2010. An additional $2,000 stipend will be given scholarship recipients to offset organizing and hosting that local PublicMediaCamp. Note: Scholarship recipients (and all interested stations) will receive detailed information, documented processes, and tools to aid in hosting such events.

Criteria: NPR and PBS will be selecting scholarship recipients — pending CPB approval — based on the applicant’s experience with local community collaboration and ability to host a local PublicMediaCamp, and to create a balance of station market sizes and types (radio/TV).

Deadline: Applications will be accepted until 5 p.m. ET on Wednesday, September 30, though will be considered on a rolling basis effective immediately. Please submit your information using this application form as soon as possible. Scholarship recipients will be notified immediately after being selected, and will be provided with information and process for booking and reimbursement of travel.

One thing that’s impressed me about some of the unconferences I’ve attended is that they’re based on a simple charter. For example, PodCamp asks you to follow six basic rules when organizing a PodCamp, such as the event must be new media-focused and “All attendees must be treated equally.” Having a charter helps explain what makes your camp different than other camps, and sets some basic expectations on how it’ll be conducted.

In that spirit, I’ve taken a crack at drafting a 10-point charter for PublicMediaCamp:

1. It’s all about strengthening public media through ongoing collaboration with the public. That’s why we’re all coming to this thing.
2. There is no audience, only participants. Be prepared to take an active role in the event’s success: see rule #1.
3. All presentations and sessions at PublicMediaCamp are on the record; blogging, podcasting, tweeting, etc are all strongly encouraged, in conjunction with the tag #PubCamp or a local variant of it.
4. Any presentation materials shared at PublicMediaCamp must be released under a Creative Commons noncommercial-attribution-sharealike license so they can be used at other camps:
5. If you want to lead a session, you must write your name and describe the topic in a presentation slot, either on the pre-conference wiki or on the session schedule wall at the conference itself. Make sure you clarify whether you’re prepared to lead the session itself; if not, you should be prepared to help recruit the right people.
6. Everyone introduces themselves at the start of the camp, but you must be brief. Your name, affiliation, and no more than three more words summarizing why you’re there.
7. All sessions must obey the Law of Two Feet – if you’re not getting what you want out of the session, you can and should walk out and do something else at the camp.
8. Campers are encouraged to break up into teams and tackle projects during PublicMediaCamp, but they’ll have to report back to everyone at the end of the camp – including listing who’s doing what so we can start keeping track of projects after the camp.
9. Closing session wrap-up presentations, if you choose to give one, must follow the soft boiled egg rule: five minutes or less, and another two minutes for questions.
10. If you take notes, post them on the camp’s wiki so everyone else can benefit from them.

Please let me know what you think. Is having a charter worthwhile? If so, do these 10 points make sense?

Ever since the NPR API came out a year ago, we’ve toyed around with the idea of inviting local coders to NPR headquarters over pizza and beer to see what kinds of apps and mashups we could come up with together. It seemed like a fun idea, but we realized there was an opportunity for something even more powerful. What if we brought together all sorts of people interested in collaborating with public radio and public TV, to see what we could come up with, including digital tools, citizen journalism and other types community-centered initiatives?

As we talked with our colleagues across the public media system and beyond, it became clear we needed to host a really big camp – a national PublicMediaCamp, that is.

On the weekend of October 17th at American University’s campus in Washington DC, NPR, PBS and the AU Center for Social Media will co-host a two-day event that we hope will serve as the kickoff for similar community collaboration events around the country. PublicMediaCamp is going to be organized as an unconference – an event without a rigid, top-down programmatic structure, with the sessions organized by the participants themselves. We’re modeling it on other unconferences like Barcamp and Podcamp, which have successfully spawned similar volunteer-driven events around the world, as well as public media unconferences that have been hosted by Minnesota Public Radio and KUSP in Santa Cruz, CA.

All of these unconferences have one thing in common – giving all participants a chance to play a leadership role in the event’s success, using tools like wikis and Twitter to plan the event. (Our Twitter hashtag is going to be #PubCamp, to keep it nice and brief.) And that’s why we’re modeling this event on unconferences. Public broadcasters are well-established pillars within their communities that have inspired a special bond with the public surrounding them. We’ve been very successful at organizing financial capital campaigns – particularly in the form of pledge drives – but there’s still a lot more we can do when it comes to organizing social capital campaigns, in which local volunteers team up with public broadcasters because they’ve got specific skill sets that can strengthen stations and the community at large. And the only way we can explore the possibilities is to talk to each other, brainstorm and build things together.

At PublicMediaCamp, we’re hoping to bring together as many as 300 people from around the country – public broadcasters, coders, community technology activists, citizen journalists, neighborhood organizers and the like – to begin this national conversation. It’s hard to say how the two days will be spent; I wouldn’t be surprised if we see techies engaging in code sprints, bloggers developing community journalism projects, community activists proposing station-hosted townhall meetings, etc. But that’s what’s exciting about unconferences — they are each as unique and powerful as the people who decide to participate.

We’ll also be teaching public broadcasters how to host their own their own local PublicMediaCamps, to get the ball rolling in their communities. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is funding for a number of scholarships for station staff to attend PublicMediaCamp and experience an unconference for themselves. We’re also working closely with Peter Corbett of iStrategyLabs, host of many successful DC-area unconferences, to help us create a “PublicMediaCamp-in-a-box” toolkit that will help stations work with their communities to organize unconferences of their own. More info on this soon.

We’ll have a lot more to say about PublicMediaCamp in the coming weeks, including how to register, apply for scholarships and help plan the sessions for the event. To receive updates in your in-box, we’ve set up an email notification form using EventBrite, so you can let us know you’re interested in receiving alerts about how to participate.