I took a walk through the beautiful campus of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island recently, as I was in the city for the annual gathering of the various editions of The Conversation. This project follows a devolved model, providing local leadership and engagement with the higher education and research sectors that support it in different parts of the world. Alongside me on this sunny stroll through one of the world’s great educational neighbourhoods was Alfred Hermida, Professor at the University of British Columbia School of Journalism.
Alf and I don’t see a huge amount of each other, but when we do it tends to be pretty productive. We first met in July 2014 at an event at the University of Amsterdam, where I stood in for The Conversation founder Andrew Jaspan, and delivered a speech on the establishment of the project – then it only existed in Australia and the UK. Alf was pretty taken with the story, and the unique model.
Less than a week later he was in our newsroom at City, University of London, talking to our editors about his research into social media and news . But something else was going on in Alf’s head – something about discussions he’d had previously with his colleague Professor Mary Lynn Young that Canada could have its own edition of The Conversation . And for the next couple of years he and Mary-Lynn together built the case within the country’s higher education sector for a membership-supported Conversation Canada.
It launched in 2017 u.