Dear Bill,
As you know besides cherrypicking through blogs, A Fifth Estate includes many other subsets of grassroots journalism and experimental systems. These are taking hold in the business and academia worlds. Results of A Fifth Estate are creating new opportunities in IT help desks, scientific research, job connections, niche products, at online universities, in college classrooms….

Crowdsourcing is “the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group of people or community, through an “open call” to a large group of people (a crowd) asking for contributions.” (Wiki)

This internet enabled, compound of crowd and outsourcing is growing in human resources and corporate learning. In retail establishments, Affinity Groups are being used to crowdsource new products and services. (see “Best Buy Tests New Appeals to Women” Wall St Journal 6/16/2010).

In 1997 at Oxford’s Centre for Values in Business and Education, I presented on Electronic-Boardroom TMVi(r) Solutions along with the first graduate from an MBA online university. Today’s classrooms have a lot more controversial tools. See ( http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2010/07/10-awesome-examples-of-crowdsourcing-in-the-college-classroom ). In the past decade, the internet has enabled creativity, voice and transparency. The crux of A Fifth Estate is freedom of expression and freedom of information which enables democracy and participation. OII’s research for UNESCO is groundbreaking. A Fifth Estate is a challenge in governance and accountability for the next decade.

Suggestion: Please link this Fifth Estate Blog to the Fifth Estate Website. http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/?id=57

June Klein, CEO Technology & Marketing Ventures, Inc.
jklein@electronic-boardroom.com

Thanks for posting the article and hosting this blog. I personally believe that this Fifth Estate will reshape the way individuals and organizations work together to solve problems and that this will ultimately reshape the way we think of communiies and government. As your research shows there are still small numbers of people moving in this direction, but through the sharing of information, groups of purpose will grow.

I’m in the senior citizen category so may be an anomality because of the way I’m using the Internet. I believe in many to one, and practice this in the way I host information on http://www.tutormentorconnection.org that people from throughout Chicago and the rest of the world can draw from to make decisions about where and how they get involved with youth in poverty.

My network extends around the world, as this post on your blog demonstrates. I’ve connected with people at Oxford via the http://www.socialedge.org forum hosted by the Skoll Foundation. My goal is to connect students, faculty and alumni from various universities with each other, and with myself, in a decentralized network of leaders who share information and work toward a common goal.

If you search “tutor mentor” on Google, my sites come up in the top five, which is a result of applying this strategy for the past 10 years. It’s also part of the effort to constantly share what we know with others, while enabling many more who are concerned about the same issues to find us, e.g. many to one.

I hope that in future updates on the fifth estate you’ll point to research, and web hubs, where models like what I’m trying to do are posted. Thus, the network of networks in the 5th Estate will be connected to each other in ways that accellerate our growth and encourage others to either join us, or duplicate us.

I look forward to connecting with you and others in your network.

Dan Bassill
Tutor/Mentor Connection
Chicago

One theme from the talk was the comparison of well researched and thought through information patterns of the 4th, compared with the unresearched and unbalanced nature of the 5th. For example one person with “an agenda” could write a powerful blog that can help to bring down an organisation. Before the 5th, the only effective answer for the common man was in a court of law and a large bank balance. Now the myriad of technologies and services of the 5th estate enable any common man to speak and be heard, and heard effectively. Perhaps every corner of the Internet in fact a Hyde Park speaker’s corner? “Well researched” and “thought through” all take time and money and often where money speaks there exists some 4th estate agenda.

Just the other day a topic on the radio was whether the Sun newspaper might drop its support for the Labour party at the next election. When Margaret Thatcher won her victory, backed by the Sun the Internet was but a dream. Now it is a reality and I feel reassured that the UK / British / English nation (whatever that is) is not quite so dominated to the same extent by a newspaper editor.

Even academic institutions have agendas. They generally do research according to funded directions and to some extent the agenda for debate is controlled by that fund.

“Congratulations on an excellent lecture Bill. Very thoughtful and informative.

I have been wondering: was the 5th estate a ‘provocative theme’ for the lecture, or are you proposing it as an analytic category for research?

Isn’t the point of speaking about ‘estates’ really a rhetorical device making a claim about where power resides in society? To what extent does the 5th estate have to have some kind of agency and be analytically distinct from the other estates (if they still exist). It seems to me as I look at newspaper industry figures that the 4th estate is being slowly consumed by your 5th estate.”

Anon.

My response: I hope the Fifth Estate is both a provocative theme and a useful analytical construct. I view it as a synsitising concept — a theoretical construct that provides a way of bringing the reader or audience into a pattern of concrete observations at the empirical level. I do not think the various estates are entirely separate and the boundaries are blurred with many cases illustrating boundary spanning examples, such as the e-petitions case being a government site that enables a fifth estate function.

I wonder if the 4th Estate is being consumed by the 5th or transformed as the Internet in creating more competition among news outlets – local and global competition within the Fourth Estate.

The issue of agency is important and I need to focus more attention on addressing it. My short answer would be that I do not see that it is necessary for individuals and ‘networked individuals’ that compose the Fifth Estate to see themselves serving this role. In fact, I would expect that the aims and objectives of the various individuals and networks are more concrete — stopping a neighborhood project to supporting a political movement. Let’s discuss this.

I had hoped that if people see the role the Internet plays in establishing a Fifth Estate, that issues of Internet governance would be viewed in a different light. The questions you raise illustrate the importance of seeing the Internet from a different perspective.

My hypothesis – buried in my talk – is that the legal paradigms of the other estates have enabled the Fifth Estate to emerge in most nations albeit not necessarily by design. The worry is that efforts to govern the Internet in new ways as a response to issues such as spam or cyber bullying and the like could undermine this new basis for social accountability.

Bill

So with the emergence of the 4th estate, we saw the development of new legal structures generated in response to its emergence. One can think of copyright, freedom of the press, reporter shield laws, etc.

Your talk made me wonder if there will be similar legal developments in response to the creation of a 5th estate. And what happens if, for example, the culture of the 5th estate is in conflict with the legal paradigms of the other 4 estates (especially with the 4th estate)?