Connection Factory Launches

The EPSRC funded feasibility study into into the project "Building Collaboration and Engagement for Media Professionals and Academic Researchers"  has been underway for a little over 2 months now. BBC R&D is a main stakeholder, and overall the project will run for 8 months, ending on 25 September 2010. The star of the whole thing is Connection Factory, and it's inaugural event - Public Service Media in the Digital Age -  took place on Thursday 25th March in the august surroundings of the University of Westminster's Board Room at the Regent Street campus.



There are 229 members of Connection Factory now and the number's quickly growing. Trends indicate that the network has become more international than we expected with members from the US, Asia and Eastern Europe. It's attracting the usual suspects from the BBC and Channel 4, with a strong presence from academia, social startups, media enterpreneurs, people running websites with a clear public service and social justice focus such as OpenDemocracy.net.

The next big event is called Public Engagement for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Researchers. We're also hoping to run an event in Manchester/Salford/MediaCityUK, probably in June which will be called 'Doing Good with Social Media'.

The network's main attraction  is that it's so diverse, both geographically and in terms of scope and members' professions that there are  amazing opportunities for collaboration on the site. Check it out, and spread the word so we can spread the net. Meanwhile, here's a great blog post from one of the attendees at last week's event, Alice Bell.