train

I’m currently travelling on the Writers Train. Or more specifically the Q150 Steam Train with authors Nick Earls and Kim Wilkins and the Arts Queensland Poet in Residence Hinemoana Baker. As I write this, I’m in the town of Roma in western Queensland. We have travelled approximately 500km (at about 30km an hour which is why it has taken us three days so far) and passed through dozens of towns, with people madly waving to us all the way down the line.

From my perspective this is pretty damn cool in and of itself (it’s a pristine 80-year old steam train, people!) But the reason I get to mention it here on a publishing futures blog is that we’ve got an interesting little side project going in partnership with Radio National’s Pool.

As we travel, we are uploading text, images, audio and video to Pool, all of it under Creative Commons licences, so you can not only read but participate as well. Kim Wilkins is travelling with her son Luka, 7, who is also blogging the trip on Pool so his classmates can tag along.

Pool makes use of a number of open source frameworks and Creative Commons licencing to provide a rich publishing platform that is capable of a thousand different uses, probably more.

As a publisher or author, how could you encourage engagement with your audiences by thinking about collaborating and sharing, instead of printing and selling?

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