Meetings to talk about the election are a dime a dozen these days. Everyone has been in planning mode for some time, and the early start of the campaign season means that much of the work is already underway. What makes this meeting different (or more different) was our effort to find new ways to collaborate together on initiatives that we hope will improve the way public media covers the candidates and the issues over the next several months.

To be frank, we’ve tried to work together before – most recently during the 2006 elections – and the results weren’t stellar. We have competing media organizations with their own priorities, goals and agendas. There’s a lot on our plates and, most of the time, collaboration becomes another to-do item that just never really gets off the ground. We won’t pretend it’s easy.

So why do we keep trying? For a couple reasons: technologies like RSS are making it easier than ever for us to share a wealth of reporting and data – creating a much richer experience for our listeners and viewers, and everyone who visits our web sites. We also share a growing feeling that public media needs to be at the forefront of reaching out to voters and providing platforms for participatory democracy. I don’t think I’m overstating that, although I’m aware that we’ll be crawling before we walk… and before we run.

There was a good mix of people in the room – NPR of course, execs from PRI and APM, as well as “The NewsHour,” PBS, PRX, and station folks from New Hampshire, KQED and WNYC, among others.

We talked about a number of ideas that have already arisen in other discussions – at IMA, at Beyond Broadcast, and at the NPR System Meeting in late April. They include introducing a single brand concept for public media’s campaign and election coverage – as a way of aggregating all of the audio and video coverage nationally and locally. From a PR standpoint, a single brand can be a nice way to emphasize the vast amount of content that we’ll be producing in newsrooms big and small around the country – a pool of a thousand reporters covering the candidates and the stories. This single brand concept (say, “Vote 2008″ or whatever) seems to resonate with many; at the System Meeting, I thought there was broad support, but this concept, which first emerged in discussions between NPR and The NewsHour, needs more work, and it needs a name – no one has a good one yet.

The other compelling idea seems to have emerged from another NPR/NewsHour discussion about sharing some online resources, including a single map of results on web sites on election night. This has grown to what Andy Carvin and others are calling a “Knowledge Network” – an entity that would have both a private face and a public face. The private part would facilitate the sharing of ideas and tools among networks, radio and TV stations, and it would also be a central location for aggregating feeds from news stations and networks. The public face would be the appearance of that information, in a number of varied forms, on existing station and network web sites. At it’s best, election reporting produced anywhere would be aggregated and, thus, available to people visiting any participating web site.

Remind you of the Digital Distribution Consortium? It should. The concept is similar to the project a small number of us worked on last summer; in fact, last year, we proposed the elections as an early test bed for the concept of the DDC. (The DDC hasn’t died, although we do have a special way of talking things to death in this industry. So far, though, the talk seems to be moving in a good direction.)

Remember one of the core problems that drove the idea of the DDC – that the seamless weaving of NPR, APM, PRI and local content on our broadcast stations was non-existent online. Web site visitors are lost in our online spaces – content lives in proprietary boxes, making it difficult to find; even worse, it robs the content of much of its value. Remember, our content has no real value without consumption, context and community.

Apply that problem and it’s obvious solution to the vast amount of election reporting – text, audio and video – we’ll be producing between now and November, 2008, and you see the kind of value you can create for our audience when there are tools that seamlessly aggregate that content and make it available on all of our web sites without a lot of wasted effort. Add to that another layer of tools like that election map, and other applications created and shared, available to all stations and networks for their sites. Those are the kinds of applications the networks and some stations can afford to build; sharing them means all can benefit.

There’s another layer to all of this, championed by Andy Carvin and others – and that’s a new focus on social media  for this election. How do we find meaningful ways to welcome, curate and offer interesting content created by our listeners and viewers? Many of these folks are already creating or consuming this content on YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and other social sites; is there a way to welcome them into a deeper conversation about the news and issues? Would they want to engage with this? There’s no question many of them do – they’re sending us emails, calling the talk shows, and posting everything from comments to thoughtful essays on our web sites and gather.com. So, we need to develop some thoughtful ways to engage them. Carvin came with a few thoughts and this, and I hope we’ll develop more.

Where is all of this going? The Corporation for Public Broadcasting would like to fund some election-related projects that leverage public media’s assets in new ways that have the potential to benefit all. Over the next couple weeks, we’ll try to stitch a proposal together that highlights some of the best of these thoughts. And then the real work begins. With or without support from CPB, there are a number of things we can do and this stuff ranges from small to big, from collaborations between two stations to major initiatives, like the single brand concept.

We’ve borrowed another concept from the DDC: we won’t try to reinvent the wheel. We’ve invested millions of dollars in infrastructure already – PRX and Public Interactive are the two best examples – and much of what we need to get off the ground exists already.

I find all of this exciting – first of all, it involves stations and networks working together; anytime that happens, it’s not easy, but it’s always worthwhile. And the biggest beneficiary is our audience, which is the way it should be,