Rising Tides 7/21/09

Rising Tide IV is scheduled for Saturday, August 22nd, once again at the Zeitgeist Multi-Disciplinary Arts Center. There will again be a meet and greet Friday night social gathering for food and drink and lively interaction. There are exciting new panel discussions planned and details will be emerging soon. Follow @risingtide on Twitter and check the Rising Tide blog for exciting details to come. Who's the keynote? The MC? What are the panel discussions? Where is the Friday night party? Tell me about the food! I can't wait.

I remember my first Rising Tide conference, the first Rising Tide conference. We gathered at a patched together New Orleans Yacht Club (not what it sounds like) and our view of the docks and Lake Pontchartrain beyond was a surreal depiction of why we had gathered. Where all the beautiful sailboats should have been, there were a few coming and going, but many more just masts, sticking up out of the water, sunk where Katrina's surge had left them. I remember driving straight from Atlanta, through a largely deserted Lakeview neighborhood and spending the first of many nights at Dangerblond's.

The keynote speakers at the first Rising Tide Conference were Robert Block and Chris Cooper, Wall Street Journal staff reporters who'd covered the hurricane and the flood that followed it in New Orleans and had just released their book Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security. One of the things I remember Cooper saying when he sat in on the journalism panel in the afternoon, respectful of there being a place for citizen journalism, was his emphatic advice that we write about what we know. Quoting loosely, "If you're not an expert on Iraq and Iran, you shouldn't be writing about Iraq and Iran." It stuck with me, and I've tried to follow his advice.

Now, I don't know much about Iran and have no business writing about it. Seeing Twitter profile pictures turn to green to show solidarity with the protesters is moving, and so is seeing everyone's Twitter location turn to Tehran, Iran in hopes that it might make those actually tweeting from Iran harder for their government's censors to find. I've thought a lot about the NOLA Bloggers as I've watched the remarkable events in Iran unfold, brought to us by citizen journalists, via Facebook and YouTube, blogs and Twitter. When social structures break down as they did in the case of the flood in New Orleans and have again during the civil unrest in Iran, conventional paths of information flow disintegrate. As we watch the continuing evolution of Crisis Citizen Journalism allow information to flow out of Iran, I look forward to Rising Tide IV and again meeting with and listening to the New Orleans Bloggers who pioneered the art.