The great thing about Corrigo is that there are so many people encouraging us to carry on with it. You probably would not expect two guys bothering to set up a whole website, a facebook and twitter account, publish their thesis online, take part in a Mozilla contest – without a real plan. I mean: a strategy.

The truth is: We gave up the whole project more than once. There has never been a real plan – just a vision, or rather a wish. But people kept asking us questions about Corrigo and how it developed. They invited us to great conferences to have the opportunity to get to know even greater people!

So if not for ourselves, we had to carry on at least for all those nice and cooperative people. So let’s do it, or as it read in several of our presentations:

Let’s make it hacken!

And this time be assured: We do have a plan! Ladies and Gentlemen, dear Coders, please save the date:
February 22nd / 23rd 2013
ZEIT Online, Berlin

We are so happy and humbled to present you the renowned ZEIT to be our host!

We are planning a hackathon, so to develop a first protoype and will provide you with more details later.

If you are interested (you do not necessarily have to be a programmer!) in joining this special event, please register here (the corner on the righthand side) with our newsletter so that we can keep you updated.

So, who is in?

MediaWise, the EU MediaAct project and the NUJ New Media Industrial Council organised a “weekend of debate and discussion” in Bristol – and we are very happy to announce that we have been asked to present “the Corrigo technique” to a wider audience. And wider it is:

The participants

Joan Canela Barrull - manager of www.mèdia.cat

Steve Baxter – New Statesman www.newstatesman.com/blogs/steven-baxter & Enemies of Reason www.enemiesofreason.co.uk

Gilles Bruno– L’Observatoire des medias www.observatoiredesmedias.com

Sean Dodson – senior lecturer in journalism at Leeds Metropolitan

Ronnie Grob – contributor to www.bildblog.de

Gary Herman - NUJ New Media Industrial Council

Philip Hunt – member of the National Union of Journalists’ New Media Industrial Council, blogger at www.shoeman.eu

Tim Ireland – www.bloggerheads.com

Mike Jempson – Director, www.mediawise.org.uk; senior lecturer in journalism, UWE; lead researcher for UWE on www.mediaact.eu

Eleanor Lisney - member of the National Union of Journalists’ New Media Industrial Council

Kristine Lowe - founder of Norwegian Online News Association (NONA),    blogs at http://kristinelowe.blogs.com

Will Moy – Director, www.fullfact.org

Sian Norris – http://sianandcrookedrib.blogspot.co.uk

Sylwia Presley – GlobalVoices http://globalvoicesonline.org/author/sylwia-presley

Steve Riley – www.fivechinesecrackers.com

Martin Robbins – The Guardian’s Lay Scientist www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay-scientist

Tom Schaffer - www.zurpolitik.at / call for input

Tim Tarrant – senior lecturer in Filmmaking and Creative Media at UWE Bristol

Judith Townend – journalist and researcher www.jtownend.com

Christina Zaba – journalist

The outcome

The overall aim is to eventually create an international forum / platform for and about bloggers. We will tweet from the conference and hope to count you in for some additional input. And now we have to pack our bags :)

When we first got this e-mail from Colin Porlezza, I felt like I’ve read his name before. I talked to Tobias about it. And then it fell into place: We cited him in our thesis! More than once.

Some months later, we are happy to attend the conference “Media Accountability – Potentials and Pitfalls in the Era of Web 2.0” organised by Prof. Stephan Russ-Mohl and Colin Porlezza at the Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano.

As if it wasn’t already an honour to be invited to this distinguished conference they also asked us to contribute to it as speakers to speak about Corrigo. We accepted immediately.

The conference has been organised in collaboration with the research project MediaAct which has been a great help to our thesis and so we are also glad to meet again with Tobias Eberwein who will chair our panel on Saturday morning – and who has been cited by us a lot, too!

And that’s exactly what we think would be sufficient regarding Corrigo.

The technology Corrigo is based on is as old as the internet itself (cf. Peiwen, 2008: 2 ): web annotation. We chose web annotation because it brings some advantages which are crucial for Corrigo’s core functions:

• highlighting (good for pointing to the paragraph in question)
• annotation (e.g. sticky notes)
• independence from the annotated document

The two first points are important for the user experience because it will show annotations right in context at the article. The last point is important because it really gives the power to the people. We want to crowdsource media accountability and encourage free speech. That’s (only) possible if we do not rely on any implementation on the part of the publishers.

Another nice feature is the fact that the user does not have to pro-actively click on a button such as “Show me annotations for this article” because the browser add-on would automatically load any annotation when there’s data to that specific URL.

Funny enough, all this already exists. The probably best known service using web annotation is Diigo. But there are (or often: were) many other web annotation systems.

Also the idea of reporting “media bugs” is not new, but either depends on the pro-active clicking of a bookmarklet or on a (wordpress-)plugin installed by the publisher.

In our research we could see that there were many good projects – but none of them ever got to the critical mass. We think, this is why:

• most web annotation services are too powerful
  users were probably overstrained by the large feature set. Proof: check any “big” site like Google’s front page and enjoy the public Diigo annotations…
• fact-checking services like Mediabugs are a click too far away
  users have to actively check for new comments but are not pointed to the information upon clicking an article

So how could we do things better? Well, by tailoring and stoating these two smart approaches:

We take the technology of web annotation but limit its use to reporting errors in news articles.

What Zuckerberg later explained was that you cannot “create” a certain community because the community already exists. All you can do is to provide “smart tools” that help people to connect and communicate.

We often thought about this simple but important theory. Before starting to evolve the concept of Corrigo we did a big deal of research / market analysis. What we found were concepts that were never realised, venture capital driven start-ups that did not survive its seed funding or even projects that still exist but certainly could use more user interaction.

So in the end one thing became clear: Critical mass is, well, a critical subject. To us this result was not that surprising as we experienced, built and tested several (journalistic) projects that failed to reach a sufficient audience.

But regarding Corrigo, we see at least two “communities” that we have to think of. Besides the user who is supposed to mark and correct factual errors, there is also the undefined group of hackers that we hacks do count on.

One thing is clear: This group has to be the open source community as Corrigo has to be open source. In our thesis, we follow the idea that media accountability has to rely on the people and thus could not be the product of a privately held company. We think, this fits the spirit of the open source community.

Long before we applied for the Knight-Mozilla challenge we read through the Mozilla Manifesto because we wanted to understand how “they” feel about open source. Chris Heilmann also referred to this manifesto and described Mozilla as the “Red Cross of the Internet”.

I like this comparison in terms of openess, image and usefulness (not so much in terms of fundraising though :)). Still, the fact that the idea of Corrigo and the spirit of open source  fit quite well, this “does not guarantee that hordes of active developers will suddenly
volunteer their time” to our project.

For reaching the critical mass among the hackers we already know the wrong question: “How to build an open source community for Corrigo?”.

But fortunately there is a good “homework” to work on for the final of the Knight-Mozilla learning lab: a software product proposal.

See these many buttons up there? We probably did the worst thing you can do about buttons: We printed them on paper.

Of course we also put them into our presentation, being the essence of our thesis, which explains its functionality by telling a little case scenario. But eventually this is not satisfying anymore. We want to click these buttons!

Or like Aza Raskin stated in our first lecture on Monday: The value of an idea is zero unless it can be communicated. And a great way of communicating is to make people touch it. Aza illustrated (well, not he himself actually) his credo by providing a nice little cartoon which led him and other participants to the conclusion: Prototypes are like the tits of software design.

Well. As we are virgins in terms of software design this really is a challenge. During the whole course of writing our thesis we were kind of sad about not having the possibilty to easily code a rudimental prototype. It is nice to sit together brainstorming and dreaming about a certain idea that you believe in. But it is nothing you can really touch. And when you cannot touch, it is hard to get others involved or simply get some feedback about your theoretical construct. It is okay that the outcome of three months’ work is “just” some mock-ups as we did know that prototyping would have gone beyond the limits of our study.

But hey, study is over! Now is the time to make it real. With the motivation from our first week  at #MozNewsLab we are now thinking about how to get Corrigo clickable.

We will certainly talk to the few coders we already know. At the same time we like the idea of a “maker space” where people can start hammering on sofware ideas. It is our job to inspire participation now. So if you want to share your tool box – we are happy to provide the work bench.

We are done.

No, don’t worry – we are still kind of pre-seed in terms of Corrigo, the product. But we are done with our studies. And to proof that we are officially through we proudly present you our diploma thesis! As some of you had asked how things went we like to humbly add that we achieved a “1,0″ for the whole thesis as well as for our “defence”.

As we graduated from German University of Applied Sciences h_da the whole thesis is written in German. So if you don’t bother or just want to enjoy the shiny pictures (pp. 107 ff!) you’re welcome to download the

full version of “Corrigo – Conception of a Crowdsourced Media Accountability Service” (pdf!)

P.S.: After having researched the great universe of errors we are completeley convinced that there has to be at least one error among these many pages. So if you find one, please tell us – so that we can correct our mistake :)

One hundred sixty-two pages – that’s our final output of four years of online journalism at h_da University of Applied Sciences. And it’s also all about our visions and whishes that constitute Corrigo.

We already passed our oral exams and are now looking forward to our graduation (party!). By Friday you can call us Diplom-Online-Journalisten.

And there’s even more we can celebrate: We actually made it and can advance to the next stage within the Knight-Mozilla challenge “Beyond Comment Threads”!

We are really proud to be chosen to join 60 other participants attending a four-week learning lab. There will be two mandatory lectures (entirely online) each week – including speakers like John Resig and Jeff Jarvis. Awesome!

It all began with that sticky idea: Geek comedian Tom Scott couldn’t stand “dodgy” journalism anymore. So he created some “warning labels” to put them on free papers he found on the London Tube.
It’s clear: If you can put stickers on newspapers, it should be possible online more than ever. Studying online journalism, we made this the subject of our diploma thesis. For three months, we analysed quality (control) in German and American journalism. We learned a lot about fact checking, accuracy and (failed) attempts to involve the public in media accountability.
Now we put all these learnings together and conceived a proper service: corrigo
It helps you flag and correct factual errors in online media – directly at the article.