Coverage of the Olympic Games is dominated by the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) contracted rights-holder and accredited major media conglomerates. However some feel there is a role for crowdsourced documentation of both sporting events and the cultural context in which it happens.

This expert panel discusses changes, challenges, and opportunities facing grassroots media makers around the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games.

From Northern Voice 2009.

Citizens On the Ground

Raincity Studios Sino-Away-Squad of Scales and KK, are on the ground in Beijing to cover and participate in the Olympic experience as citizen journalism, technology experts, social pundits and cultural ambassadors.

The Glimmer Twins’ tasks are diverse and their methods varied so here’s a preview:

• participating in the 9th International Symposium on Olympic Studies, in Beijing, August 5-7 with Olympic scholar Dr. Andy Miah’s
• documenting the scene for crowd-sourced new site: Now Public, Vancouver radio station: Crave 95, and BBC Interactive – among other media outlets



• shooting Creative Commons licensed photos delivered via Flickr
• extolling about the new, improved Bryght web community hosting product – available in free, cheap or fancy varieties
• meeting up with prospective clients to extol Raincity Studios’ status as an approved weblog vendor for Vancouver/Whistler 2010
• cheering for Team Canada at the Archery, Fencing, Women’s Softball, BMX and more summer games sports
• spreading international goodwill in the fun-loving/hard-working style they honed whilst at the Torino 2008 Winter Games.

Get Friendly

Follow along with their content via your RSS feeder, Facebook or whatever you prefer … or, if you are in Beijing, track Scales/Krug down for a photo walk, meetup, excursion, interview, geekout or just a tasty beverage. Leave a comment to or message via the arsenal of communication funnels at their disposal.

Scales’ coverage:

• Now Public – dispatches from Beijing
  episode 1: kk and Scales at the 2008 Beijing Olympics!
• Scales’ Beijing tag on Flickr
• Facebook videos (ask Robert to be your friend)
  
• Youtube videos
• Scales on Daily Vancouver

KK’s collections:

• Beijing 2008 photoset
• Facebook updates (ask Kris to be your friend)
  
• Youtube videos
• KK on Daily Vancouver

Chinese Theme and Version

Meanwhile, back in the tubes, … we are playing along with a Chinese
styled blog theme to celebrate the Games – birdsnest and everything.

Also worth reminding you that Raincity Studios’ site is
available in Mandarin for
Chinese readers. Even if you don’t read Chinese, you gotta say the site looks
really cool in kanji .

Also, the new improved Bryght hosting platform is available in Chinese for your international-minded web community hosting projects.

Approved Olympic Weblogs

In case you didn’t happen to know … Raincity Studios is an approved weblog vendor for Vancouver/Whistler 2010:

“Along with the good people at Raincity Studios, Bryght has been successfully passed an RFQ process to provide weblog services to the BC Olympic Games Secretariat.

We want to work with teams, countries, athletes, non-profits, and businesses who are preparing for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games and want to take advantage of emerging internet technologies.

We can help you get online, start blogging, podcasting, posting video, sharing images, building a community and sharing your news and messages with a global audience hungry for information about the 2010 Games.

We’re experts in syndication, aggregation, web development, community development, search, microcontent, blogging, online publishing, Drupal, PHP, CSS, ecommerce, content management and hosting.

We have an experienced network of partner companies who have also been approved as Olympic vendors who we work with to offer comprehensive integrated marketing and communication campaigns from your browser or mobile phone at the front end to the web server at the back end as well as normal, real world marketing and communications.”

Have a Luge team needing a communication platform? Maybe a site to keep athlete’s and families in-touch? An interactive training diary for your entire team? We’d be pleased to help.

No matter your idea, Raincity Studios is ready to deliver a top-notch performance. Contact Raincity Studios to begin the conversation.

Bonus: Archive & Related

• Beijing coverage at Daily Vancouver
• Torino coverage at Daily Vancouver
• Symposium on Web 2.0 and the Future of Sport – Torino 2008
• Coffee talk with Gold Medalist Ross Rebagliati podcast from Symposium in Vancouver 2008
• Vancouver 2010 – Official site for Vancouver/Whistler – Media Centre
• Web Services for International Sporting Events – Bryght
• China Access Eases the Way – Raincity Radio – podcast with Andrew Gilkes of China Access 2008
• Olympic Outsider podcast Blog – iTunes – Feed
• Mobile Muse
• Scales’ at 2010 New Media Day

I’ve mentioned some pre-Olympic and Olympic Games related activities coming up in passing. Now, as topics are piling up and the Beijing Summer Games are nearing (complete with controversy), henceforth begins a blog mini-series called, “China, The Olympics, Social Media, Symposiums, etc.” – I think I’ll need a better name for the series though. Suggestions are welcome.

Background

As you likely know, Raincity Studios actively conducts business in China with an office in
Shanghai and the Raincity Studios site is published in English and Mandarin (French underway) and we collaborate with Chinese colleagues and some of us (not me) study Mandarin language and foodery. Just so ya know where we’re coming from.

Social Media at Olympics

As for the Olympic games, RCS crew were at Torino 2006 – documenting the Olympic events as social media journalists using the Torino Piemonte Media Center and creating heaps for grassroots coverage (see Torino Flickr pool, DailyVancouver Torino, coverage) as well as participating in BC House activities on a professional basis.

Along with Scales, BMann and KK in Turin, Roland, Will Pate and I linked up for a cross-ocean symposium “Web 2.0 and the Future of Sport” about tech and athletics featuring gold medalist Ross Rebagliati (Flickr coffeewithross).

Among other topics, we discussed the restrictions (or lack thereof) put on self-expression by athletes as well as ways the participants can use technology to better communicate with friends and family back home. Really so many athletes will never make it to TV and their families seek the micro-coverage possible only by crowd sourcing e.g. the first ever Nepali winter Olympian (SLC 2002 Olympics collection).

Olympian Politics

With the 2010 Winter Games coming to our HQ city of Vancouver, and the resultant controversies (mostly concerning tax money spent on events rather than poverty and homelessness), we, like much of the world, are watching as the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing is becoming increasingly politicized and watching the reaction of the government and the citizens of the world.

The most visible conundrum is the torch relay which was used as a rallying point for anti-China protesters and widely reported about on Now Public among other citizen journalism and mainstream media sites.

Certainly political gamesmanship is a staple in the modern Olympic games and the heavy handed security surrounding the torch parade is only the beginning of a conversation about the perceived emphasis on tight security and enforcing the stringent policies of the Chinese government rather than using this global event as a springboard to openness.

Having met several Olympic athletes who are eager to chronicle their experience freely, I am curious if athletes will be allowed and encouraged to speak openly while at the Games? (Blogging, Athletes and web sites – …). Can they report on their experiences in candid fashion? Can they explore the region and travel the country without hindrance? or will the world see just the parts of China which look good on TV?

Make Your Own Media

Beyond the political conversations, as social media content creators and advocates of journalistic access for indie producers, we are also watching carefully as the policies about social media coverage are created (by who?).

So far there are mixed signals about athletes not/allowed to blog, and how amateur created content can be used (is posting your personal Olympic photos Flickr OK?) How about creating podcast coverage of the games with reaction to in-person and/or televised coverage?

International Symposium

Well, we’re not the only ones with these questions. Olympic scholar Dr. Andy Miah is organizing a panel at the 9th International Symposium on Olympic Studies, in Beijing, August 5-7, 2008.

Before we get too far along, what is the ICOS?

The International Centre for Olympic Studies, established at The University of Western Ontario in 1989, was the first of its kind in the world. It remains the only such Centre in the Americas. It has as its primary mission the generation and dissemination of academic
scholarship focused specifically upon the socio-cultural study of the Olympic Games and the Olympic Movement.

And the event blurb:

The Symposium’s theme, “Deconstruction and Discourse: Odysseys in Olympic Socio-Cultural Matters,” focuses on research studies dealing with the history, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy of the modern Olympic Movement.

Emerging Journalism Panel

Dr. Miah (who is a Reader in New Media & Bioethics, School of Media, Language & Music, University of the West of Scotland)’s topic is “Emergent Journalistic Practice at the Olympics” will feature a panel of Ana Adi, Beatriz Garcia, Raincity Studios President Kris Krug, Raincity Studios CEO Robert Scales,Garry Whannel, and Tina Zhihui.

Here’s the panel description from the abstract:

{Ed note: Paragraph breaks mine to make easier reading}

Research into the role of the media within the Olympic Movement has focused predominantly on representational questions. Far less research has investigated the journalistic culture of an Olympic Games or the Movement more generally, besides analyses of its contribution to sustaining the Olympic Movement.

Moreover, nearly no research has examined the work of those journalists who are peripheral to the organizational staging of the Games.

This category includes journalists who are associated with accredited media institutions, but whom might not have formal accreditation due to restrictions on numbers of passes. It also includes journalists who are from major media organizations, but whom have no intention of working from Olympic facilities. However, it also includes non-accredited journalists, which encompasses professional journalists from a range of organizations, along with freelance or citizen journalists, whose work is utilized by the mass media and is duplicated in independent domains.

This panel engages some of these issues in the form of a round table debate about the future of journalism at the Olympic Games. It reviews some of the implications of emerging new media platforms, arguing that the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games can be characterized as the first Web 2.0 Summer Games. While some principles of Web 2.0 have been visible since the Internet’s inception, critical aspects of its current architecture began to flourish around 2005. Applications from this era, such as YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, more adequately enable users to report the Olympics as citizen journalists.

The implications of this within China and for the Olympics more broadly are considerable. As mass media organizations begin to strike partnerships with new media institutions – for instance, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) purchased a YouTube channel in March 2007 – questions remain over how the Olympic Movement will protect its intellectual property, as the base broadens over ownership claims and via distributed publishing syndication.

Next up, More Questions

Now that you are briefed with sufficient background, the next post will pose a variety of questions which the panel will discuss so you can share your opinions about “China, The Olympics, Social Media, Symposiums, etc.”

Robert Scales from Raincity Studios and Kris Krug from Bryght are featured in today’s Vancouver Sun article, “Canadians Trying To Land Beijing Contracts”. Vancouver Sun reporter Wency Leung came into our offices a few days ago to interview Robert and Kris and spoke with them about their upcoming trip to China, getting a scope and understanding on how Raincity and Bryght is looking to effect and learn from the tech and new media industry in Beijing, in conjunction with preparing for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.

Vancouver Sun Article Excerpt:

Vancouver-based new media partners Bryght and Raincity Studios, which are working with China Access 2008, also see opportunities at the Beijing Olympics for B.C.’s technology companies.
“We think there’s a huge market opportunity for us to do work with Chinese Internet service providers, and Chinese hosts and Chinese web development shops,” said Kris Krug of Bryght.
He added that a presence at the Beijing Games will also help Bryght and Raincity Studios prepare for the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver and Whistler.
“We have an interest in learning as much as we can [at the Beijing Games] so that we can find out what companies and teams and countries are looking to do online around the 2010 Olympics,” Krug said.

Kris and Rob head over to China on Thursday for 2 weeks, getting on the ground and exploring first-hand the opportunities that potentially lie ahead.

Tomorrow they will be attending the China Access Forum, meeting people from other local BC companies who have already successfully initiated business in China.

You can register for the event on the China Access website and mark it on your upcoming.org account as well.

Listen Live to a reading of the article.

Wency Leung will be tracking Rob and Kris in China and will be following up with their progress upon their return.

An enhanced Olympic Outsider podcast with host Dave Thorvald visiting 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics Gold Medalist and Snowboard legend Ross Rebagliati. At a symposium in a noisy Take 5 coffeeshop, Dave asks Ross about the drug-testing incident in great detail plus discusses Ross’s aspirations for 2010 and beyond, recreational hobbies, real-estate dealings plus Dave relates anecdotes and gives thanks to Ross for inspiring the people.

Thanks to Bread for pics, Mudhoney for tunes, Bryght and Raincity Studios, and props to Roots for supporting Ross.

Download: Coffee Talk with Gold Medalist Ross Rebagliati
Olympics Outsider # 3 (.mp3, 18:45, 18MB)

Photo by Rachel Ashe via Roland Tanglao on Flickr

Coffee with Ross photoset

Coffeewithross phototag

Alt version: Coffee Talk with Gold Medalist Ross Rebagliati – enhanced with chapters and photomedia