Why do all the development work yourself? Quite often users are willing to help. If you ask them, that is. The state owned Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) did that today – and lots of good suggestions are coming in.
NRK used to have the same position in Norway as BBC had in Great Britain: It was the state monopoly for broadcasting. Not anymore, of course. But NRK is still funded by tax payers’ money.
Recently the former monopoly institution has had great success on the web, especially after launching the weather service yr.no. It now receives 1,5 million unique visitors to its web site each week, which is a lot in a country with only 4,5 million citizens.
Compared to many other media institutions in Norway, NRK has demonstrated a great degree of openness towards its users when developing new services. Especially this is exemplified by the blog NRKBeta, which essentially is a playground for new web ideas. Frequently the NRK bloggers will describe in detail new services that are planned and even beta test ideas live.
Today NRK announced its plans for a new national service together with the Norwegian Trekking Association. The web portal will specialize on trekking and outdoor life, displaying tracks, places, areas and ideas for people who enjoys hiking in the beautiful landscapes of our country.
How shall we make this new service?, the NRKBeta blog asks its readers (in Norwegian, I am afraid). The author goes on discussing the possibility of using Openstreetmap or other open source services.
Please help us, he invites.
And the ideas and suggestions pour in. Only a few hours after the posting there are 40 comments, most of them with very constructive views about how NRK can build the new service in the best way possible. Many readers show examples of successful similar sites abroad or suggest good technological solutions.
It would have taken the NRK developers days of work to come up with the same amount of information by themselves!
It is a great example of how a media company can work together with its users, and in the process achieve so much more. Of course I have no idea what the final web site might look like, but I am pretty sure it will end up much better because of reader suggestions. And in any case NRK will be able to start off the site with a lot of enthusiastic fans who will be promoting it among their friends.
Unfortunately most media companies choose a far less open approach when planning new sites. But it seems like this attitude is slowly changing, and that we will keep seeing examples of media companies looking for new approaches together with their readers.
Maybe you have some good examples yourself? Let us know.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=4f2d7405-7c6a-4ca4-96cc-c08cd2aff7d4)
