Users as Editors: What's the Key to Quality Social Media Content?

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Panelist Questions:

Opening question, for each panelist: Tell us about your publishing platform from your own perspective: what does it do, how to editors use it, who's using it?

What to you is the most clear benefit of having users being able to create their own editorial content via social media technologies?  What's the real-world plus for people consuming content created by a social media community?

What are your real success stories for users as editors? What can we point to and say, "Yeah, that really does work, doesn't it?

What features and community management techniques are most important in ensuring that there is quality content in a social media community? 

How important is the scale of a social media community to the development of quality content? Does the addition of more people as editors create more opportunities for quality content or just more weak content?  

What is truth when social media communities enable a wide variety of people to try to create the truth in their own image? When we have governmental, corporate and political organizations trying to spin the truth via social media ("astroturfing"), do we wind up with journalism and reference materials that we can trust or something less?

What is very apparent in any publishing environment is that not all editors are created equal - some are better than others. How does your own service - or another service that you admire - do a great job of helping the best editors develop the most influence over the content of a social media product?

What will it take for social media to rise to a level of quality that it will rival mainstream publications - or has it already done so? What inherent advantages does social media have in editing content that mainstream publications just can't match?

What to you is the next logical step in developing quality social media? What tools, techniques or services are likely to shift social media up to an even higher level of respected, "go to" quality? 

Where do you think social media will be in two years' time as a source of quality content? Will the bloom be off the rose or will it have transformed publishing as we know it?