The co-creation of cultural artefacts has been democratised given the recent technological affordances of information and communication technologies. Web 2.0 technologies have enabled greater possibilities of citizen inclusion within the media conversations of their nations. For example, the Australian audience has more opportunities to collaboratively produce and tell their story to a broader audience via the public service media (PSM) facilitated platforms of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). However, providing open collaborative production for the audience gives rise to the problem, how might the PSM manage the interests of all the stakeholders and align those interests with its legislated Charter? This paper considers this problem through the ABC’s user-created content participatory platform, ABC Pool and highlights the cultural intermediary as the role responsible for managing these tensions. This paper also suggests cultural intermediation is a useful framework for other media organisations engaging in co-creative activities with their audiences.

1. Communication models of
institutional online
communities: the role of the
ABC cultural intermediary
Jonathon Hutchinson
ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and
Innovation (CCi), Queensland University of Technology
jonathon.hutchinson@qut.edu.au
@dhutchman

2. The Problem…
How do online communities and public service
broadcasters collaborate on the production of
cultural artefacts?

3. Theoretical framework
• Peer production (Benkler 2006)
• Participatory Cultures (Jenkins 2006)
• Produsage (Bruns 2008)
• Meritocracy (Malaby 2009)
• Bureaucracy (Kreiss et al. 2011; Weber 1983)
• Distinctive innovation (Cunningham 2013)
• Cultural intermediation (Bourdieu 1984;
Negus 2010)

4. Theory to practice
• Decentralised activity through ICT
technology – UGC
• Participatory cultures within media
organisations
• UGC at the ABC – ABC Pool
• Editorial and regulatory issues
• Institutional online communities

5. Institutional online communities
“an online community operating within a public,
commercial or non-commercial institution and
not an open, independently facilitated online
community” (Hutchinson: 14, forthcoming)
How then to manage IOC within PSB?

6. Cultural Intermediation
• Human and non-human actors
• Coding, platforms, design etc.
• Enable/disable certain functionality
• Usually the work of community manager
• “The combination of all of these human and
non-human actors as they negotiate cultural
artefact production is described as cultural
intermediation” (Hutchinson: 5, forthcoming)

7. Methodology
• Ethnographic action reseach
• Participant observation
• Focus Groups
• Interviews

8. ABC Pool [abc.net.au/pool]

9. ABC Pool users

10. ABC Pool Community Manager

11. Cultural Intermediary

12. Institutional Online Community
Governance

13. Conclusions
• Institutional online communities
• Community Manager
• Cultural intermediation
• Multiple forms of cultural intermediation
• Institutional online community governance
models

14. Jonathon Hutchinson
jonathon.hutchinson@sydney.edu.au
@dhutchman