C4FCM Researchers—

The project will continue weekly throughout the summer, after a hiatus May 21 and 28 to allow everyone to wrap up the semester. Our next meeting will be June 4, to talk about the conference and prepare our demos. The following week, June 11, will be the launch of the conference so we will not have a meeting. On June 19 we will have a debrief of the conference and planning session for the rest of the summer.

The summer offers everyone a chance to step up and organize a C4FCM meeting. We encourage you to sign up for organizing a specific Wednesday meeting, which can be experimental. They might be informal discussions that you lead, with a theme and perhaps resources for us to look at in advance. It can be a film you wish to show, or a guest speaker. It can be just for the MIT research group or you can invite a larger community.

The summer period for C4FCM should be time for research and reflection. Many of you will be here working on your projects. If CMS students need working space, please let me know ASAP.

I will be working with Colleen and Huma over the summer on a white paper about Civic Media. It will include descriptions and definitions to describe the field. A typology of civic media. Hallmarks of best practice. Part of this process will be open to the group, for your contributions.

Here are some proposed summer sessions that I am happy to organize for us, depending on your interest.

• Brainstorm sessions for Civic Media white paper. What are the definitions, types and hallmarks of civic media? What research is already underway? Who are the key people in the field?

• Brainstorm session about the C4FCM website and public role: what content? What links and functions? What audiences? How should we structure our meetings in the fall?

• Chat with guest Walter Bender, former Director of the Media Lab and director of the Electronic Publishing group and the News in the Future Consortium, and former President of Software for the OLPC Foundation, and currently heading up a new foundation to develop Sugar (the XO laptop user interface) as an Open Source education platform.

• Field Trip to Spare Change: see what their news operation is like, their distribution and engagement of homeless people by giving them jobs.

• Conversation with Mike Sances of SCI: Mike will start in the MIT PhD program in Political Science this fall. www.socialcapitalinc.org

• Jon Greenberg, New Hampshire Public Radio, Tracking Year One project. a project to use citizen media to help traditional newsrooms do a better job of covering the first year of the next presidency. The basic idea is to use about eight communities around the U-S and internationally to track public thinking about the next president, and by extension America itself, from 1/20/09 to 1/20/10. Residents in these communities would be given the task to describe the conversations they hear in the course of daily life. Each community would have a strong partnership with at least one mainstream media operation that would watch the flow of content and look for story opportunities. Each community would have its own web site and all content would by synthesized on a common site with full translation of postings from non-English speaking participants being shared on all sites. Year One is modeled on the small but successful project Primary Place Online. I would never argue that PPO changed the world or that it generated stories that never would have otherwise seen the light of day. But it was hugely valuable to me in the stories I produced for NPR and NHPR and it was a transformative experience for the citizen participants. PPO pointed the way toward a relationship between citizen media and traditional newsrooms that is quite beneficial to both.

• Investigative Reporting Workshop. Bring in journalists to show us how they do their investigative reporting.

• Helping the Gulf Coast: Dayna Cunningham. Their work with the post-Katrina recovery offers rich opportunities for our civic media innovations.

• More work with Thought and Memory, Clay and Shaunalynn

• Street Media, Rekha Murthy. She will open our eyes to new media spaces and opportunities

• Not in Our Town.org Patrice ONeill fights hate crimes around the world, by connecting people in local communities who are sharing the same challenges

• Suburb in search of an identity: Lance Bennett wants to help a California nondescript suburb find its sense of community and identity. Does anyone want to use this as a testbed opportunity?

(see also www.redwired.org/PresslDaniel and www.redwired.org)

Overview

Since 2006 I have been building a social networking site for Austria, slowly connecting my friends and business partners and now reaching out further, as the network keeps growing.

Constraints

Lack of funding for appropriate publicity. Strong competition from other websites.

What’s New About This Project?

The combination of the possibilities to sell products, organize events, report through blogging and brainstorm for new ideas for the region.

The very simple blogging interface, simpler than existing software.
Also, every user gets a URL, so the hassle of creating usual webspace is not necessary. Furthermore, I think www.redwired.org/username (red-white-red, the colors of the Austrian flag is something Austrians can easily connect with).

What Testbed Are You Intending?

As next steps I would like to spread the word and re-invent the site contacting technical universities in Austria, which will perfect the interface and the look, feel and handling of the site.

Students, Universities, little towns,…

How Does This Project Fall under The Concept Of Civic Media?

After listening, to the Silver Stringer project, in mas.712 I have now enforced a blogging project on my site and was able to find about 14 bloggers, from all over Austria, who continuously post articles about their surroundings and interests (2 articles per day). I would like to create a blogger/journalism team for Austria that writes about the writers’ Austria and the articles could be published, as well, in collaboration with local news-papers,…

The project Redwired Ideas shall make it possible for any group of people to create and grow their ideas. These ideas can then turn into projects, which can be micro-financed. The credo should be anything is possible, as long as there is more than one: “One for all, and all for one!”

Future Steps

Redwired Ideas:

I am in touch with the region, where I would like to start the project, as well as an Austrian bank. Over the course of 2008, I will be reaching about 2500 students. Furthermore, I will also teach a class in the Fall of 2008, in Austria, based on Redwired Ideas. There, representatives from all years and schools will come to the class, bring the ideas from their classes to the class, brainstorm and develop strategies, how to turn the ideas into projects.

You

I would love to hear about your ideas and/or feedback and, please, if you have an idea/code that you would like to try out in a social network, like Alec’s MAKE project, let me know!

This week we heard from Alyssa Wright about the Hero Project and from guest speaker Adam Strom of Facing History and Ourselves, a school curriculum initiative.

A question to consider after hearing from Adam: What role can technology play in the education of students in order to prepare them to make a positive difference in their neighborhood, nation, and the world?

Our meeting this Wednesday will feature Lisa Williams, Emily Lin, and myself (for a brief update). See the syllabus page for a description.

Readings this week are on the Web:

• Articles from Lisa Williams and Tish Grier: Lisa says, “..a couple are ones we wrote, but basically, if we were a band, these would be our influences.”
  • Lisa’s influences:
    * Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. See “Universal Access to All Knowledge,” a talk by Brewster Kahle: http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail400.html
    * Paul Graham. “Hackers and Painters.” http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html
    * Joel Spolsky. “Painless Functional Specifications.” http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000036.html
    * Other influences: Debbie Galant, Adam Gaffin, Dave Winer, Susan Mernit, Jay Rosen.
  • Tish’s influences:
    Clay Shirky: “A Group is its own worst enemy,”
    http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html (persistent patterns in long-lived online groups–a real hoot)
    Another from Clay: Social Software and the Politics of groups
    http://shirky.com/writings/group_politics.html
    Also, The Cluetrain Manifesto, and people: Dave Weinberger and Doc Searles
  • Here’s something Tish wrote:
    “Can we all just learn to interact? a primer on newspapers and online interaction,” Tish Grier, OJR
    http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/060612grier/index.cfm

• Check out the possibilities for data visualization and prepare to
  comment on some that you think are relevant for C4FCM:
  http://www.many-eyes.com

Dear All,

First, thanks for listening so patiently to our presentations. To be honest, if any of you had told me a year ago that I’d be working on natural gas extraction in Colorado I’d have slapped you and called you a liar. By now, however, this odd cocktail of business, community, health, toxins, and government has become so intoxicating to me that I sometimes forget how far I’ve strayed. On the other extreme, Dan and Lisa have been interested in these topics for decades, and have devoted their lives to alleviating the hurts of extractive industries. But I think if you had told them that they’d be working with MIT researchers on developing information technologies, they would have assumed you were inhaling too many volatile organic compounds. I hope that we were able to transmit some of our interest in the problems.

Also, I want to thank you for accepting our conceit of not saying much about what we’re actually working to make. It wasn’t all conceit: truth be told, we’ve only recently started the project. Moreover, while we have some strong suspicions about our points of intervention, we’re also trying to develop a strong, holistic understanding of the situation; like good detectives we’re trying to avoid jumping to conclusions too quickly. It’s also a bit intimidating to conceive of a design that can accommodate the range of communities for whom this has become a central concern, and the range of interests within each of those communities. Farmers and ranchers, environmentalists and vacationers, migrant workers and purveyors of organic goat’s milk — they are all affected in different ways. It would only be a modest overstatement to say that the biggest commonality between these different people, with their different ways of life, is the fact that they’re all being effected by the extractive industries. I can almost hear the ad now: “BP. A uniter, not a divider.”

One of our big problems in designing for rural communities has to do as much with us as with those communities. Let’s face it: most information technology is designed for people who use information technologies. Not many too many people who use film cameras use flickr, and not too many people who don’t sms use twitter. Many of the communities we’re hoping to work with don’t use the web much, and that’s not necessarily something we want to “fix”. It’s easy, after spending time at MIT, to think that the web is something that’s indispensable, a clear benefit. The byproduct of concerns over the “digital divide” — concerns that are in many ways urgent and valid — is that such concerns repeat and reify the assumption that one side of the divide should be on the other side. A computer-less lifestyle is easily conflated with a lack. On the other hand, everyone I’ve met who watches shooting stars from their porch, births calves, or lives off their own garden plot thinks that those experiences are an indispensable part of life. And at MIT, we’ve all given up those things. We’re on the wrong side of the calf-birthing divide.

It’s not the goal of our project to turn everyone in rural Colorado into computer users. To the degree that we can develop information technologies that leverage forms of media (mail, phones, community meetings) that are already used by local activists, we should. The monthly newsletter is a central technique by which community groups inform and self-represent. We fully expect that it can be one medium that we use for output. Phone networks are the dominant electronic networks for activism in these areas. We’ll use them too. Maybe it’s a sign that I’ve been hanging out with Henry more because of the Center, but I’m looking to augmented reality games for a model of multi-media, multi-modal interactions. If a year ago you’d have told me that I would be looking at augmented reality games, I’d have slapped you and called you a liar.

Even if every rancher in Colorado won’t become a Debian committer, it’s clear that networking is important. Irresponsible extractive industries cause such serious impacts that they are uniters, and they’re able to effect communities and the environment so much because of their logistical, organizational, and communications technologies. We need to balance that power. For community members to act locally, they often have to out-think global entities that can leverage global resources. Right now, a community group’s only way to do that is to ally with national or global environmental groups, but those are usually top-down organizations, resembling media corporations like Newscorp or CNN. Knight Ridder was a news company with a bottom-up organization, pooling the resources of local papers to support national and international news coverage. Can we do the same, and help to network coalitions of local groups in a way that can multipy their reach, but won’t force them to centralize?

So, I think I’m supposed to ask you some questions at this point, or something. But I retain just enough grasp on reality to know that it would be unreasonable to expect you all to have something to say about tight-sands hydraulic fracturing in Garfield County, CO. Instead, let me just throw some tags at you, and if any of them spark any interest or associations, please add comments, links, or questions. Lisa, Sara, Dan and I thank you in advance! Best,

Chris.

rural IT — community collective action — extract — old media and new media — globalization — sustainability — adrenal cancer — pollution — GIS interfaces — Django — insurgency — tight-sands hydraulic fracturing in Garfield County, CO — cowboy individualism — dick cheney — asterisk and pbx — environmentalism — hungarian geniuses — technocracy and expert knowledge — space of flows — global resistance — issue-specific news — newsletters — erin brockovich — anti-corporate charter movement — technologist as colonist — tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving left-wing freak show

Colleen and Huma presented their project, an online tool to share, create, and aggregate community-generated audio pieces. A website doesn’t yet exist for the project but a more substantial description can be found under our names.

We appreciate any feedback in general but have a few questions of our own for the class:

* In what scenarios could you imagine having access to mobile user-generated ‘radio shows’ help build community or facilitate community organizing?

* Regarding labeling audio content, would you want to be able to categorize content as you wish (a la delicious) or would you be willing to use predetermined options, provided they were relatively broad?

* A later version of this audio tool imagines allowing users to access user-generated audio or ‘radio shows’ on mobile platforms like phones. How might this inform our current database design?

* As a user looking to access audio content online, what functions would be most useful to you (the ability to scrub, edit, mash-up content, etc.)? Would you want different functions if you were accessing audio content to listen online/as a podcast than if you were accessing audio from a mobile device?

* There were a few comments about adding GPS functionality to the project. Once we progress to that stage, any further thoughts on this would be appreciated.

* At a later stage (once the initial database is in order), on what sorts of mobile platforms might audio content generated by DIY Radio be delivered?

At our session on February 27, Nadav Aharony described how his Comm.unity platform can support decentralized communications and file-sharing among people who are in close proximity to one another.

Please use the class blog to discuss and brainstorm:

* How this technology could be used to foster civic engagement in communities that you participate in (or communities that you are interested in studying)

* How this technology might be used by participants at the Center for Future Civic Media conference this June (assuming that we can give an Comm.unity-supported mobile device to each participant)

Please share your thoughts and reflections on the meeting with the Silver Stringers. Here’s a question to get us started:

Since the Silver Stringers started a decade ago, there have been significant shifts in tools and approaches for web-based publishing and communication. If you were starting the Silver Stringers today what would be different about the tools and strategies?