ABC Pool

» see pool.abc.net.au as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The public broadcaster I grew up with is TRT, and for most of my life a slice of every electricity bill in the country went to it. It has never once asked me to send it anything. That is not a complaint about TRT specifically, it is the normal relationship between a state broadcaster and the people paying for it. They transmit and you receive, and the only participation on offer is a phone-in.

ABC Pool was the Australian Broadcasting Corporation trying the other thing. It opened as a public beta in August 2008, run out of Radio National's multi-platform department, and the pitch was that you could upload your own audio or photographs to a site owned by the national broadcaster, license it under Creative Commons, and have other people build on it.

The part that made it more than a submissions inbox was the return path. Contributions gathered around themed projects, and producers cut the best of that material into fifty-three minute features that went out on 360documentaries. Somebody recorded something in their own suburb and it came back through the radio in every other suburb in the country, credited.

It also ran the other direction. In 2009 Pool became the first place the ABC released archival material under open licenses so the public could pull it apart and make something else, which for an institution of that age is a considerably braver decision than it sounds.

~ the record ~

~ what pool actually did ~

The structure was tiered rather than flat. Visitors could browse and download. Members could start projects, upload work, set the license terms on their own contributions, and follow other contributors. A layer above that, community editors chosen from the membership decided what got featured on the front page, which put editorial judgment in the hands of the audience inside a broadcaster whose entire identity is editorial judgment.

There was a community manager sitting in the middle of it doing what the academic write-ups later called cultural intermediation, which is a heavy phrase for a simple job: knowing which contributor was about to make something good, and connecting them to the producer who could get it on air. The site collected an ABC Digital Media award in 2008 and a Government 2.0 award in 2009. In 2011 it ran MyBurb, an augmented reality project mapped onto the Sydney suburb of Redfern.

~ the creative commons part ~

Creative Commons was the load-bearing piece. A broadcaster cannot let strangers remix its material or put amateur audio to air without an answer to the rights question, and the license was that answer: attribution stayed with whoever made the thing, and the content could still move across programs and platforms without a lawyer being consulted each time.

Remember how unusual this was for a national broadcaster in 2009. The default position of every institution of that size is that its archive is an asset to be protected rather than material to be handed out. Pool put footage of a zombie walk under an open license and let people do what they liked with it, and the sky did not fall.

~ what the abc kept ~

The site went offline in June 2013 with no drama attached. The reading from the researchers who had worked on it was that the corporation was moving limited money and limited people to areas it rated more productive, which is the polite institutional way of saying a custom-built community site is expensive and its numbers will never look like a television number.

What replaced it was not another site but a practice. ABC Open kept the regional contributor work going, and audience participation stopped being a destination you visited and became something the corporation did on other people's platforms, where the audience already was. That is the sensible answer and it costs something real. On a Facebook page the broadcaster owns neither the archive nor the relationship. Pool owned both for five years, and then it did not.

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