The Institute for New Economic Thinking

Next Agenda can provide a wide range of innovative uses of video, and in this project with the Institute for New Economic Thinking, we demonstrated all of them, and continue to do so. First of all, we used our unique video approach to immersively cover the Institute's inaugural conference, in which it gathered 200 of the world's top economists, including five Nobel Laureates at King's College in Cambridge, England in the spring of 2010.

The gathering was extremely important for the nascent organization to both explain its ambitious plan to challenge the reigning economic paradigm of free-market fundamentalism and to empower the next generation of economists to fundamentally re-think a new economic paradigm better suited for the 21st century of globalization, climate change, and other unprecedented challenges that the world now faces. They wanted to capture everything that happened in the proceedings and then to open it up to the world and allow the next generation of economists to feel connected to it and understand what happened so that they could join the community online and start to build on these initial ideas over time.

Next Agenda brought a team of video experts, including a new breed of video journalist who can both shoot video, edit video, and produce video. These video journalists can think on their feet and react to what happens in order to produce compelling stories. While they are shooting, they become familiar with the event so they can collapse the time it takes to edit the video, making it much more cost-effective as well. We covered all of the program, which included more than 50 speakers making 20-minute presentations, and we covered it with three cameras, which allowed us to both get the general back of the room shots, but also get shots of the crowd, angles on the speakers and the stage, and all interaction and discussion.

Capturing the program was just the beginning - we also interviewed 50 other attendees who did not give presentations but had many insights and big ideas that we wanted to share with the online world. In the side interview room, we used two cameras to shoot in-depth interviews, and we also had a roving video team that was able to interview people out in the environment for shorter but still incisive interviews. On top of that, we also captured much of what happened in the hallways, conversations, dinners, receptions, and events around the actual programming.

In the end we were able to produce an extremely compelling story made up of some very elaborate pieces, including a two-minute emotional encapsulation of the event, which acts much like a movie trailer, and a ten-minute edited version of some of the best bits of the talks that allowed people to get an overview. We also did a ten-minute long documentary based on the interviews that allowed us to tee-up a lot of the big ideas behind the conference, even ones that did not get fully articulated on stage.

Coming out of the conference, the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) was able to re-create, as close as possible, what actually happened in those momentous three days, for those who later wanted to pick up and build on what happened. They could also use the short but highly produced pieces to spread the word through the web to people who potentially want to joint their community, or funders who might want to help support the effort.

Collaboration

Central to INET’s mission is to build a community of economists, academics, policymakers, and particularly young, up-and-coming grad students who share in the goal of transforming economics to make it much more suitable for the 21st century. The organization’s ambition is to build a large community and one that crosses the borders of countries. They acknowledge that they are limited in what you can do physically in terms of how you can gather people in one single room in one single country for a limited number of days. So from their point of view it is very crucial that when they did gather people, particularly prominent people – world-class, famous professors, economists, and policymakers – that they opened this up to the larger community that they are trying to build and have them participate to some extent. And that takes place online. Next Agenda, from the beginning, shot the video with an eye towards this large goal of building a community and spurring collaboration on the web.

Once we produced the video, we then moved it onto the website that we built and customized for the client. We were hired to build the entire website based on a collaborative platform that we had already developed prior to the engagement. We had spent the prior year developing special tools and a web environment based in Drupal's content management system, which is open-source and one of the ones that nonprofits and political organizations increasingly use.

We developed a special interactive blackboard that allows a viewer to see everything that took place at a conference in one visual overview. You then can drill down a bit into this special piece of Flash software, you can see all the talks from that session and be linked into discussions and more written material deeper in the site. Check it out here.

We built a special question and answer forum, which allows you to pose important, provocative questions of interest to your community and then allow anyone in the community who is a registered user to give their answer to it, and the larger community can read it and vote it up or down so the best-ranked answers get pushed to the top while the ones that are more mediocre fall to the bottom. We tailored that to INET's needs and used that as a way to generate interaction and excitement in their community.

We built into the site a lot of the interaction of other Web 2.0 sites, such as the ability to comment on pages or on blog posts, the ability to take any of the material you can find on the site and very quickly and immediately post it to Twitter, to Facebook, and to all the various sites around the web. And any registered user can easily connect his or her account on Facebook so that anything they find interesting on the INET site they can seamlessly post on their wall in Facebook and push it through their network of friends in that environment as well.

We've also now opened up a tailored version of discussion boards to allow a subset of the INET community who has been invited or properly screened to discuss with more nuance, and more complexity a lot of these important issues.

We continue to work with INET in developing even richer and deeper forms of collaboration as their community starts to coalesce and mature. We are looking to introduce the ability to work on common documents, such as in Wikis, and to have some real-time online gatherings as well.