The Boston Globe in the Digital Age

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 20:30:45 GMT

Civic Media Lunch: "ZUMIX"

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 14:30:10 GMT

ZUMIX is an East Boston-based nonprofit organization dedicated to building our community through music and the arts. A core belief is that music is the most powerful means of developing adolescent self-identity. Our award-winning music and creative technology programming is designed to equip youth with the tools necessary to reach their full potential, while creating a safe space for youth to explore who they are and who they want to be. Through community events, ZUMIX provides access to top-quality arts experiences for a low-income, under-served neighborhood.

Madeleine Steczynski, Co-Founder and Executive Director, is an East Boston resident. She founded ZUMIX in 1991 in response to the worst year of violence in the City of Boston's history. Together with ZUMIX's Board of Directors and Youth Advisory Board, she has grown ZUMIX from a kitchen table project into a vital East Boston community institution. As an advocate for the arts, Madeleine has served on the Executive Committee for East Boston Healthy Boston Coalition; was one of the founding members of Cultural Connections, a three-year effort to integrate arts as part of a Sustainable Community initiative funded by The PEW Charitable Trust; and served as an Artistic Fellow for The Boston Foundation’s Arts and Audiences Initiative. n 2009 she successfully completed a $4.6 million dollar capital campaign and moved ZUMIX into its new home. In 2011 Madeleine started a 3-year learning journey as a prestigious Barr Fellow. Madeleine attended Boston College, the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts – Boston, and the Executive Leadership Program at Harvard University.

Elena Botkin-Levy, ZUMIX Radio Coordinator, is a radio producer, educator and enthusiast. She started producing radio as a teenager, co-founding RadioActive Youth — a youth-run radio program in Western Massachusetts. Since then she has continued to deepen her love of radio. At WMUA 91.1FM in Amherst, she facilitated and engineered a local community radio-programming block. As a coordinator with the Prometheus Radio Project, Elena organized with community radio stations across the country and she traveled to Kenya to partner with international community radio organizers. She has produced radio documentaries and news for national broadcast. Her radio work has aired on Making Contact, Free Speech Radio News, and Crosscurrents. In Oakland, California, Elena coordinated and produced radio programs with the National Radio Project. She also taught radio production to youth at outLoud Radio in San Francisco.

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: Turning Data into Narrative

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 07:04:19 GMT

As media makers and members of the public, we increasingly have access to rich data sets that contain information about our communities, our politics and our government. Our panelists explore their strategies for finding and sharing stories embedded within sets of data.

Panel:

Emily Bell-Tow Center, Columbia University, Moderator
Dan O'Neil-Smart Chicago Collaborative
Kara Oehler-Zeega
Jonathan Stray-Associated Press
Laura Kurgen-Columbia University

Read more about the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: http://civic.mit.edu/conference2012

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: And Now for Something Completely Different

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 17:30:12 GMT

And Now for Something Completely Different

A showcase of some of the more unexpected and provocative directions news and civic media may be taking in the future.

Panel:

Lorrie LeJeune- MIT, Moderator
Larry Birnbaum-Northwestern University/Knight News Innovation Lab
Kate Darling- MIT Media Lab
Gregg Marra-Google; Ben Moskowitz-Mozilla
Dan Schultz-MIT/Knight-Mozilla Fellow

Read more about the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: http://civic.mit.edu/conference2012

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: Civic Action On and Offline: IRL + RT FTW!

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 17:30:12 GMT

Civic Action On and Offline: IRL + RT FTW!

Activists, theorists, media makers and researchers are all struggling to understand the relationship between the recent global cycle of protests and the new media ecology. This panel takes a look at how civic action moves between online and offline spaces, with attention to the SOPA/PIPA battles, Anonymous and Occupy, Justice for Trayvon Martin, and DREAM Activists.

Panel:

Sasha Costanza-Chock(Moderator
Jamilah King-Colorlines
Hal Roberts-Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University
Holmes Wilson-Fight for the Future

Read more about the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: http://civic.mit.edu/conference2012

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: Internet Native News Networks

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 17:30:12 GMT

Internet Native News Networks

If we were to start CNN today, it might look more like one of the networks featured in this panel. We take a whirlwind tour of new news networks and new models for reporting and sharing information in our connected age.

Panel:

Christina Xu-Awesome Foundation, Moderator
Ivan Sigal-Global Voices
Charlie Sennott-GlobalPost
David Wertime-Tea Leaf Nation

Read more about the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: http://civic.mit.edu/conference2012

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: Moments of Profundity, with Michael Maness

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 17:30:12 GMT

Moments of Profundity, with Michael Maness

Read more about the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: http://civic.mit.edu/conference2012

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: Open Gov_What's Gone Wrong, What's Gone Right

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 17:30:12 GMT

Open Gov_What's Gone Wrong, What's Gone Right?

What's gone wrong and what's gone great? As we near the end of the (first term of) the Obama presidency, it's an appropriate time to review the successes, failures, and lessons learned in local, state and national efforts at transparency and e-government.

Panel:

Susan Crawford-Harvard Law School and Kennedy School, Moderator
Mike Norman-Wefunder.com; Mark Headd-Code for America
Chris Vein- Deputy United States Chief Technology Officer for Government Innovation

Read more about the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: http://civic.mit.edu/conference2012

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: Welcome and Introduction

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 19:16:32 GMT

Welcome and Introduction by Joi Ito, Ethan Zuckerman, and John Bracken

Read more about the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: http://civic.mit.edu/conference2012

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: MIT Civic Ignite- Becky Hurwitz

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 18:55:26 GMT

MIT Civic Ignite - A Way Fast MIT Project Show-And-Tell

Becky Hurwitz

Read more about the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: http://civic.mit.edu/conference2012

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: MIT Civic Ignite- Charlie DeTar

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 18:55:26 GMT

MIT Civic Ignite - A Way Fast MIT Project Show-And-Tell

Charlie DeTar

Read more about the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: http://civic.mit.edu/conference2012

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: MIT Civic Ignite- Dan Schultz

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 18:55:26 GMT

MIT Civic Ignite - A Way Fast MIT Project Show-And-Tell

Dan Schultz

Read more about the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: http://civic.mit.edu/conference2012

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: MIT Civic Ignite- Huan Sun

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 18:55:26 GMT

MIT Civic Ignite - A Way Fast MIT Project Show-And-Tell

Huan Sun

Read more about the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: http://civic.mit.edu/conference2012

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: MIT Civic Ignite- Leo Burd

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 18:55:26 GMT

MIT Civic Ignite - A Way Fast MIT Project Show-And-Tell

Leo Burd

Read more about the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: http://civic.mit.edu/conference2012

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: MIT Civic Ignite- Matt Stempeck and Nathan Matias

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 18:55:26 GMT

MIT Civic Ignite - A Way Fast MIT Project Show-And-Tell

Matt Stempeck and Nathan Matias

Read more about the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: http://civic.mit.edu/conference2012

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: MIT Civic Ignite- Nathan Matias

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 18:55:26 GMT

MIT Civic Ignite - A Way Fast MIT Project Show-And-Tell

MIT Civic Ignite- Nathan Matias

Read more about the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: http://civic.mit.edu/conference2012

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: MIT Civic Ignite- Pablo Rey

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 18:55:26 GMT

MIT Civic Ignite - A Way Fast MIT Project Show-And-Tell

MIT Civic Ignite- Pablo Rey

Read more about the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: http://civic.mit.edu/conference2012

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: MIT Civic Ignite- Paulo Rogerio

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 18:55:26 GMT

MIT Civic Ignite - A Way Fast MIT Project Show-And-Tell

Paulo Rogerio

Read more about the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: http://civic.mit.edu/conference2012

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: MIT Civic Ignite- Rahul Bhargava

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 18:55:26 GMT

MIT Civic Ignite - A Way Fast MIT Project Show-And-Tell

Rahul Bhargava

Read more about the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: http://civic.mit.edu/conference2012

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: MIT Civic Ignite- Rogelio Lopez

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 18:55:26 GMT

MIT Civic Ignite - A Way Fast MIT Project Show-And-Tell

Rogelio Lopez

Read more about the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: http://civic.mit.edu/conference2012

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: MIT Civic Ignite-Dan Sinker

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 18:55:26 GMT

MIT Civic Ignite - A Way Fast MIT Project Show-And-Tell

Dan Sinker

Read more about the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: http://civic.mit.edu/conference2012

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: Extreme Data_Extreme Story

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 18:55:25 GMT

Extreme Data/Extreme Story - June 18, 2012

Speakers:

Truly crazy story: Paul Salopek, the seven-year walk

Truly crazy data: Cesar Hidalgo, MIT Media Lab, and Nathan Kelso, Stamen Design

Read more about the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: http://civic.mit.edu/conference2012

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: MIT Civic Ignite- Chris Peterson

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 18:55:25 GMT

MIT Civic Ignite - A Way Fast MIT Project Show-And-Tell

MIT Civic Ignite- Chris Peterson

Read more about the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: http://civic.mit.edu/conference2012

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: MIT Civic Ignite- Matt Stempeck

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 18:55:25 GMT

MIT Civic Ignite - A Way Fast MIT Project Show-And-Tell

Matt Stempeck

Read more about the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: http://civic.mit.edu/conference2012

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: Stories and Fables

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 18:55:25 GMT

Stories and Fables - June 18, 2012

Panel:

Ethan Zuckerman-Moderator
Laura Amico-Homicide Watch DC
Michael Poffenberger-resolve.org
Keith Oatley-University of Toronto
Benjamen Walker-WFMU
Sam Gregory-Witness

Read more about the 2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: http://civic.mit.edu/conference2012

Civic Media Session: "Effective Citizenship in a Connected Society"

Fri, 18 May 2012 07:03:10 GMT

In this age of streaming data and 24/7 connectivity, the options for civic engagement are many. But what does it really mean to be an effective citizen? Is there an app?

Tom Steinberg is founder of mySociety.org, a UK-based consultancy that's become one of the innovators in helping individuals participate in civic life and demand accountability from their government.

He joined Center for Civic Media director Ethan Zuckerman for a conversation about tools and techniques to encourage civic engagement in a connected society.

Craig Watkins: "The Digital Edge: Exploring the Digital Practices of Black and Latino Youth"

Mon, 14 May 2012 14:30:09 GMT

A Civic Media Session and Comparative Media Studies Colloquium

"Adapting Journalism to the Web" with Jay Rosen and Ethan Zuckerman

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 07:02:41 GMT

How can professional reporters and editors help to assure that quality journalism will be recognized and valued in our brave new digital world?

Caroline Woolard, "SolidarityNYC, OurGoods.org, and Trade School"

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 07:02:48 GMT

April 5, 2012 - Civic Media Lunch
Caroline Woolard speaks about her work with SolidarityNYC, OurGoods and Trade School, two barter economies for cultural production. OurGoods.org connects artists, designers, and craftspeople to trade skills, spaces, and objects to get independent projects done. Trade School, a program of OurGoods.org, is model for barter-based education that has spread from NYC to London, Cologne, Guadalajara, Cardiff, Singapore, Leon, and Milan since it started in 2010.

Woolard is a Brooklyn-based, post-media artist exploring civic engagement and communitarianism. Her work is collaborative and often takes the form of sculptures, websites, and workshops. Woolard is a co-founder of OurGoods.org and Trade School, two barter economies for cultural producers, and a coordinating member of SolidarityNYC, an organization that promotes grassroots economic justice. These projects have been supported by a Rockefeller Cultural Innovation Fund, an Eyebeam Fellowship, EFA Project Space, the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Art and Design, the Queens Museum, Creative Time, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

Leo Bonanni, "Sourcemap and Supply Chain Transparency"

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 20:30:08 GMT

Supply chains are the backbone of globalization and understanding them is the key to social and environmental justice. Leonardo Bonanni will talk about Sourcemap -- the first platform for supply chain transparency -- which started as his Ph.D. thesis project at the Media Lab and is now a company dedicated to helping individuals and organizations find out where things come from, what they’re made of, and how they impact people and the environment. Companies use Sourcemap to communicate transparently with their customers and tell the story of how products are made. Thousands of maps have already been created for food, furniture, clothing, electronics and more.

Sourcemap has been featured by the BBC, NPR, the Globe and Mail, the Boston Globe and received awards from Scientific American, Ars Electronica, and ID magazine among others.

Leonardo Bonanni is the Founder and CEO of Sourcemap.com. He was recently named one of 2011’s “100 Most Influential People in Business Ethics” by the Ethisphere Institute. He has a Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab’s Tangible Media Group, an MS and a Master of Architecture from MIT, a BA from Columbia, and he teaches sustainable product design at Parsons and MIT.

Question Bridge: Black Males

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 20:30:08 GMT

Question Bridge: Black Males opens a window onto the complex and often unspoken dialogue among black men, creating an intimate and essentially genuine experience for viewers and subjects, while providing new opportunities for understanding and healing. This project brings the full spectrum of what it means to be “black” and “male” in America to the forefront. “Blackness” ceases to be a simple, monochromatic concept.

Bayeté Ross Smith is an artist, photographer, and educator living in New York City. He is represented by beta pictoris gallery/Maus Contemporary.

He began his career as a photojournalist with the Knight Ridder Newspaper Corporation. Bayeté has exhibited with organizations and venues such as the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Oakland Museum of California, MoMA P.S.1, the New Museum, Duetsche Bank, Rush Arts Gallery, the Leica Gallery, the Patricia Sweetow Gallery, the Goethe Institute (Ghana), and Zacheta National Gallery of Art (Poland). His collaborative projects Along The Way and Question Bridge: Black Males have shown at the 2008 and 2012 Sundance Film Festival, respectively. He has also been involved in a variety of community and public art projects with organizations. His images have been published in numerous books and magazines, including Dis:Integration: The Splintering of Black America (2010), Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (2009), Black: A Celebration of A Culture (2005), The Spirit Of Family (2002); SPE Exposure: The Society of Photographic Education Journal, Black Enterprise Magazine, Working Mother Magazine, and the various publications of Village Voice Media.

Chris Johnson is a photographic and video artist, writer, curator and arts administrator. He has also produced highly regarded performance works in collaboration with Suzanne Lacy. His artwork has been exhibited in two museum shows: "Being There: 45 Oakland Artists" at the Oakland Museum of California in 2002 and "Reflections in Black: A History Deconstructed" at the Mills College Museum in 2003. In 1994 he co-produced a large performance work in Oakland titled "The Roof is on Fire" bringing together inner-city high school students and adults. In 1996 he produced the original Question Bridge project that investigates class divisions within the black community.

He is currently a full Professor of Photography at the California College of the Arts and author of The Practical Zone System: for Film and Digital Photography, currently in its 5th edition. From 1997 to 2000 he was Director of the Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography.

VoIP Drupal webinar: Building sites that make and receive phone calls

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 07:03:18 GMT

As part of this webinar, you will learn about VoIP Drupal, a new open source framework that makes it easy to build websites that almost literally pick-up the phone.

Christina Xu and the Institute on Higher Awesome Studies

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 15:37:20 GMT

Christina Xu is the founding director of the Institute on Higher Awesome Studies, an organization dedicated to nurturing small awesome ideas around the world; she also serves as a trustee on the Boston chapter of the Awesome Foundation. By day, she is employee #1 at Breadpig, an uncorporation that publishes webcomics and funnels the goodwill of geeks worldwide towards worthy causes.

The Awesome Foundation movement was started in Boston in 2008, when a group of 10 acquaintances decided to give away $1000 of their own pooled money every month to awesome projects and individuals, no strings attached. They called it "the MacArthur for micro-flashes of brilliance". Spreading mostly by word of mouth, there are now 25 Awesome Foundation chapters on 4 continents with no formal centralized organization. The Institute on Higher Awesome Studies (IHAS) was founded to promote the Awesome Foundation model within a development and revitalization context. In June 2011, IHAS received a grant from the Knight Foundation to start Awesome Foundations focused on journalism and civic media; the pilot chapter is called Awesome News Taskforce: Detroit.

Civic Media Session: "Mapping Media Ecosystems"

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:27:53 GMT

Hal Roberts, Erhardt Graeff, Gilad Lotan

This session looks beyond platforms to explore the concept of media ecosystems. How do we understand, map, visualize, and ultimately shape the flow of texts across an increasingly diverse and complex media ecosystem? What are the relationships between professional and citizen, participatory and broadcast media? How do we understand what people are encountering, both in terms of supply (tools like Media Cloud that examine what's published) and demand (tracking/logging efforts that look at individual or group consumption?

Hal Roberts is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. He studies various issues around the flow and control of content online, including Internet filtering and circumvention, online surveillance, distributed denial of service attacks, and new media. Hal has worked on the technical side of many Berkman projects over the years, including H2O, Weblogs at Harvard Law, and Global Voices Online.

Erhardt Graeff is a founding member of the Web Ecology Project and a research assistant on the Good Participation and GoodPlay projects at Harvard Project Zero. His research focuses on questions of internet and society with a heavy emphasis on civic engagement, digital inequality, education, journalism/media, and social capital. Additionally, Erhardt is the co-founder of BetterGrads, an online college mentoring organization, and a founding trustee of The Awesome Foundation, which gives monthly grants to awesome projects. He has an M.Phil. in Modern Society and Global Transformations (i.e. sociology) from the University of Cambridge and bachelor's degrees in information technology and international studies from Rochester Institute of Technology. Erhardt's personal website is erhardtgraeff.com. On Twitter he's @erhardt.

Gilad Lotan is the VP of Research and Development for SocialFlow, where he utilizes data driven approaches to draw insight and understanding from social streams. Previously, Gilad served as a program manager at Microsoft's FUSE labs. Past work includes 'Retweet Revolution', visualizing the flow of information during the 2009 #IranElection riots, and a 2011 IJOC study investigating the relationship between mainstream media and social media channels during the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. Gilad's work has been presented at TED, IXDA, Summit Series, Berkeley BCNM, Boston Book Festival, and published at HICCS, CHI and Ubicomp.

Community Radio Programming for the Digital Age, with Benjamen Walker

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 12:30:53 GMT

Benjamen Walker is the host of the program "Too Much Information" a radio show (and podcast) about life in the information age. He reports on many of the issues and topics of the day (Wikileaks, Anonymous, online porn, surveillance, net neutrality) but he also throws in conspiracy theories, fiction and interviews with ordinary people trying to make sense of their digital selves.

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The Civic Media Thursday lunch series welcomes those working in the civic media field, who share food and company with staff, researchers, and visitors at the Center's headquarters in the MIT Media Lab.

Civic Media Session: "Civic Maps"

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 13:11:44 GMT

Laura Kurgan, Pablo Rey

Maps, Geographic Information Systems, and spatial analysis are powerful tools that recently have become increasingly accessible to non-specialists. Dynamic maps with user created content are becoming part of daily life in the 1/3 world (developed countries and elites in the global South). There is a long history of maps as tools for civic engagement, with public participatory GIS and community engaged mapping playing key roles in (for example) indigenous land rights struggles, mapping health disparities, and the environmental justice movement's demonstration of the unequal spatial distribution of pollution. Most recently, new tools and platforms like Open Street Maps and Grassroots Mapping are democratizing maps even further.

What challenges still constrain the effective creation and use of Civic Maps? What tools and platforms are most promising? What steps can developers, practitioners, and researchers take to help build the field of civic mapping?

Community Radio Programming for the Digital Age, with Benjamen Walker (FULL VERSION)

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 12:37:29 GMT

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Ramesh Srinivasan: "Empowering Culture and Context"

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 19:47:01 GMT

Featuring guest Ramesh Srinivasan, Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA.

The power of culture and context dramatically shape technology's influence on networks and power worldwide. Having just spent a month in the field in and around Egypt, and building on earlier work in Kyrgyzstan, I will describe how 'social media' shapes and impacts but one limited set of networks within the many that characterize everyday life. I will discuss in both cases how social movements are fueled by layers of networks, and that digital networks tend to directly speak to those of higher economic and educational class, indirectly influencing poorer masses though not unproblematically. From these critical perspectives, I will try to tell a story how technologies can be re-envisioned and sociotechnically deisgned to better empower diverse cultural ontologies and value systems by presenting fieldwork done in India and with a group of Native Americans.

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Networks Understanding Networks, Pt. 15: Ethan Zuckerman

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 14:58:47 GMT

Civic Media and Networks — Understanding Media as an Ecosystem: Ethan Zuckerman

Civic Media Session: "Amplified Streets, from Print to Tweets: Social Movement Media Across Platforms"

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 18:48:46 GMT

Jason Pramas, Steve Meacham, and Kyle de Beausset

Social movements have always been productive spaces for the creation and circulation of media texts, tools, and frames for understanding the world. In the past, movement narratives were often told by specialists: filmmakers, writers, radio producers.

These roles still exist, but more recently, the rapid spread of digital literacies allows increased participation in movement media making by everyday participants.

This session brings together social movement media makers and scholars in a conversation about what the transformation of the media ecology means for movements. Under what conditions does media making by a movement's base help strengthen the movement and advance its goals, and when does it produce confusion and a lack of narrative power? How can filmmakers rooted in movements open up their processes to increased participation? What movements today are engaged in innovative cross platform practices?

Jason Pramas is editor/publisher of Open Media Boston - an online metro news weekly with a progressive editorial stance covering the labor and community beats since 2008. A photojournalist by trade, he has been active in movements for democracy and social justice for over a quarter century. He is working on an MFA in Visual Arts at the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University, and teaches social media in various academic and professional settings.

Steve Meacham is organizing coordinator of City Life/Vida Urbana and has been an organizer for almost forty years, working in areas of housing, labor, community democracy, peace work, and economic conversion. He emphasizes a radical approach that links day-to-day issues to systemic change, that generates new leaders, and that can rapidly expand. His current position at City Life/Vida Urbana has allowed for the full development of this organizing model. It has combined an aggressive day-to-day response to housing displacement with a series of conferences and institutes called the Radical Organizing process.

Kyle de Beausset is the founder of Citizen Orange and a campaigner at Presente.org. He was born and raised in Guatemala of U.S. citizen parents and got connected to the pro-migrant movement after he retraced the route of a Guatemalan migrant into the U.S., almost lost his life to smuggler, and blogged about it. After being trained to organize by the undocumented youth movement, he learned to use his social media skills to help stop deportations, move the Presidents of Universities, and influence lawmakers. His writing and commentary have been featured in both local and national media outlets including the Associated Press, the Boston Herald, the Boston Globe, National Public Radio, Fox News, and MTV.

Civic Media Session: "Representing Islam"

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 14:14:48 GMT

Intisar Rabb, Amir Ahmad Nasr, and Nasser Weddady

Moderated by Ethan Zuckerman

Media dialogues in America have often centered on the role of Islam in US and global society. The representation of Islam in debates over the Park 51 Mosque in lower Manhattan, for example, offers the voices of many non-Muslims offering their interpretations of Islam, not all of which are well-informed. The panelists we've invited have taken on the challenge of representing Islam to American and global audiences, in different contexts - they offer scholarly research on what Islamic scholars believe and argue, to challenge discourse about "Sharia law"; they feature a multiplicity of voices offering different visions of what it is to be Muslim.

What does it mean to represent roughly one-fifth of humankind? How does participatory media change the dynamics of representing Islam...or representing any other faith, belief or conviction?

Intisar A. Rabb is an assistant professor of law at Boston College Law School, a faculty research affiliate at Harvard Law School in the Islamic Legal Studies Program, and a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society (for the project islawmix.org - an online resource for issues related to Islamic law). She is also a 2010 Carnegie Scholars for research on contemporary Islam. Her research centers on comparative Islamic law and legal history, advanced constitutional law, and criminal law. Rabb received a BA from Georgetown University, a JD from Yale Law School, an MA and a PhD from Princeton University, where her thesis on Islamic law won a prize for best PhD dissertation. She has traveled for research to Egypt, Iran, Syria, and elsewhere.

Amir Ahmad Nasr is a digital media and marketing consultant and leading Sudanese blogger. He's been featured on USA Today, BBC, Reuters, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Al Jazeera's English TV channel, German magazines and many more media outlets. He is the host and curator of The Future of Islam In the Age of New Media, an audio seminar that convened 60 speakers in 60 seconds each for a total of 60 insightful minutes. He is also the author of the upcoming book, Islam: A Love Story - How Fundamentalism Stole My Mind, Broke My Heart, and Blogging Freed My Mystic Soul.

A native of Mauritania, Nasser Weddady is the civil rights outreach director of the American Islamic Congress. He grew up in Libya and Syria, traveling extensively through the Middle East, before coming to the US seeking asylum in 2000. A few days after the September 11 attacks, Nasser was falsely detained by the FBI because of his ethnic appearance. A long-time activist in the struggle to end slavery in his homeland, Nasser has organized conferences for young activists across the Middle East; published in the International Herald Tribune, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and Baltimore Sun; appeared on Fox's Hannity & Colmes, BBC World Service, Al Jazeera, and Radio Liberty; and testified to Congress' Human Rights Caucus. Fluent in five languages, Nasser has lectured at the US Institute of Peace, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and diverse interfaith settings.

Crowdsourcing Crisis: How Civic Media Informs Breaking News

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 12:57:46 GMT

The first half of 2011 has seen dramatic events -- some tragic, others encouraging -- take place across the globe. From revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia to an earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis in Japan, breaking news has been reported by individual citizens as well as professional journalists. And explaining the complex nuances of unfolding events has shown the power of civic media in informing local communities and the wider world.

In this session, we talked with two individuals who've been part of efforts to share perspectives from civic media with a global audience.

Mohamed Nanabhay, Head of New Media at the AlJazeera Network, helped unpack the North African revolutions using video from Facebook and other online sources.

Joi Ito, the new head of MIT's Media Lab, has worked with a group of civic reporters and citizen scientists in Japan to document the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima nuclear plant. The two will discuss the emerging media environment, where professional and civic media interact to produce a richer and more inclusive picture of global events.

Summary and Collaboration Contest results

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 14:10:12 GMT

Knight Foundation's Michael Maness emcees an audience discussion about the 2011 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference, and we announce the winners of the conference's collaboration contest, where attendees can work together to win small pots of funding for civic media projects pitched at the conference. This year's collaboration contest-winning projects include:

Visual Voice: Bringing visual storytelling to radio
Streaming Screaming: Balloon-mapping at protests
Mobile Living Unit/"Vehicle of Many Uses": Recording, exhibition, and storytelling on the fly

Mobile Storytelling in Real Time

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 17:01:55 GMT

Andy Carvin, National Public Radio
Liz Henry, BlogHer
Dan Sinker, Columbia College Chicago, @mayoremanuel

Plenary: "Civic Media Mobilization"

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 12:33:17 GMT

Successful civic media tools - especially ones designed by this conference's attendees - reengineer how mass-mobilization happens. But does that mean we should turn the page on old lessons?

Originally envisioned as a way to connect the like-minded across borders, civic media is proving just as powerful at mobilizing neighbors, in their towns, where they vote. So even for national issues, is all civic media really local? From the Wisconsin protests to Presidential campaigns, civic media is playing a larger role in organizing communities and defining political arenas. In this conversation between an organizer and activist, we'll explore how online activism differs from face-to-face.

Chris Faulkner, a member of the Tea Party, spends much of his time organizing online.

Yesenia Sanchez, from P.A.S.O.-West Suburban Action Project 52, works at street-level to drive community participation.

Together with moderator Damian Thorman, the two will discuss ways organizers can use online and offline strategies to their advantage and debate situations in which one is more effective than the other.

The Future of Civic Media

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 19:02:23 GMT

A plenary from the 2011 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference, featuring:

Sasha Costanza-Chock, MIT Comparative Media Studies
Chris Csikszentmihályi, MIT Center for Civic Media
Ethan Zuckerman, Berkman Center/MIT Center for Civic Media

Lightning Talks by News Challenge winners

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:54:27 GMT

Announcement of 2011 Knight News Challenge winners

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 19:31:08 GMT

Civic Media Session: "Civic Disobedience"

Tue, 17 May 2011 20:31:53 GMT

2011 has seen a wave of popular protests threaten authoritarian regimes around the world. Protests in Tunisia removed a much-loathed dictatorship, and the occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo promises to reshape the government of Egypt. Even in countries where protests are unlikely to unseat entrenched leaders, the prospect of unrest has led leaders to make major political concessions.

Is this wave of civic disobedience best explained as a reaction to economic and political conditions in each country? The viral spread of Tunisian unrest infecting other vulnerable nations? Or are changes in the media and communications environment -- near-universal mobile phone use, social media, the internet, satellite television -- enabling popular protest in a way we've not seen before? Is civic disobedience easier, or perhaps more effective, in a connected age?

To explore this question, we've invited a team of experts to closely examine the public protests we've witnessed this year and consider questions about media and civic disobedience. Our discussion includes:

Ethan Zuckerman (Moderator)
Co-founder of Global Voices Online; Senior Researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and Visiting Scientist at the Center for Future Civic Media

Clay Shirky
Writer, consultant, and Associate Professor at NYU in the Interactive Telecommunications Program

Zeynep Tufekci
Writer, journalist, and Assistant Professor at University of Maryland Baltimore County exploring how technology and society co-evolve

Sami ben Gharbia
Tunisian human rights activist and director of Global Voices Advocacy

Civic Media Session: "Design for Vulnerable Populations"

Wed, 04 May 2011 14:00:46 GMT

Designers often want to help people that they perceive as being in need -- whether those affected by natural or human-caused disasters, the economically or physically disadvantaged, or those who are on the losing end of a cultural power dynamic. However, naive attempts to "help" through simplistic techno-centric design can be at best ineffective, and at worst counter-productive.

What can designers do to better connect with the communities and individuals they wish to serve? How can design projects avoid patronizing attitudes and economic colonialization? How can a designer be effective in promoting social change while following their conscience?

This panel brings together designers who have worked in the mental health industry, international development, the prison system, and community environmental action to discuss what has worked and what hasn't, and what approaches designers can take to increase their chances of success.

Charlie DeTar (Moderator) Co-founder of Between the Bars, a blogging platform for prisoners. Fellow at the Center for Future Civic Media, and PhD student at the MIT Media Lab.
Patricia Deegan Creator of the CommonGround web application which supports shared decision making in psychopharmacology consultation. Adjunct Professor at the Dartmouth College School of Medicine and at Boston University, Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences.
Liz Barry Director of Urban Environment at Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, a collaborative developing inexpensive and community-led means to explore environmental and social issues; Co-founder of TreeKIT, an initiative to collaboratively measure, map, and manage urban forests.
Nathan Cooke Born and raised in California, USA, Cooke works at MIT's D-Lab documenting technologies and working with students on design projects. He has previous experience working for Frog Design in San Francisco and at Autodesk as part of their Sustainability division.

Steve Kurtz: Cultural Resistance

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 13:23:10 GMT

A Civic Media Session about models and techniques for public interventions and soft subversions aimed at undermining authoritarian tendencies in a time of neo-liberal domination.

Known for his work in Electronic Civil Disobedience and BioArt, Steve Kurtz is a founding member of the Critical Art Ensemble, a collective of five tactical media practitioners of various specializations including computer graphics and web design, film/video, photography, text art, book art, and performance.

Formed in 1987, Critical Art Ensemble's focus has been on the exploration of the intersections between art, critical theory, technology, and political activism.

Tool for Consensus Building

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 15:04:05 GMT

Charlie DeTar walks us through prototype software to aid medium-to-large groups in consensus-based decision making.

Sourcemap

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 15:02:39 GMT

Leo Bonnani updates the civic media community on Sourcemap, a Center-sponsored project to help citizens map where things come from...from laptop parts and IKEA beds, to campaign contributions.

Lost in Boston: Realtime

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 15:00:32 GMT

Rick Borovoy explains the benefits of displaying relevant community information -- such as realtime bus location data -- using inexpensive displays in public-private spaces like coffeeshops.

Junkyard Jumotron

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:58:06 GMT

Rick Borovoy demos the Junkyard Jumbotron, an easy method for linking together multiple cheap displays to create a single large image.

Hero Reports / Cronicas de Heroes

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:56:24 GMT

Lorrie LeJeune describes Hero Reports/Cronicas de Heroes, a project currently deployed in Juarez, Mexico, to help residents report and map incidents of heroism, large and small.

Grassroots Mapping

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:53:02 GMT

Jeffrey Warren presents his work in grassroots mapping -- helping citizens make their own free, open, high-resolution maps with common resources like kites, balloons, and inexpensive cameras.

Between the Bars

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:50:11 GMT

Charlie DeTar presents his blogging platform for prisoners.

Cities, Code, and Civics: "Customizing tools from city to city?"

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 22:11:52 GMT

Nick Grossman of OpenPlans, Nigel Jacob of the City of Boston Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics, and Max Ogden of Code for America respond to questions about how civic tools do (or need to) vary from city to city.

Cities, Code, and Civics: "Enhanced serendipity"

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 21:45:05 GMT

Max Ogden of Code for America discusses taking "treasure troves" of government datasets to bring citizens and friends together.

Civic Media Session: "Bustling with Information: Cities, Code, and Civics"

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 20:48:33 GMT

Nick Grossman, Nigel Jacob, and Max Ogden

Moderator: Center director Chris Csikszentmihályi

Cities are vibrant, complicated organisms. A still-working 200 year old water pipe might rest underground next to a brand new fiber optic cable, and citizens blithely ignore both if they are working well. Cities are constantly rewriting themselves, redeveloping neighborhoods and replacing infrastructure, but deliberative structures like school boards and city council meetings continue to run much the way they have for generations. In what ways can information systems rewrite our understanding of civics, governance, and communication, to solve old problems and create new opportunities in our communities?

Nick Grossman is Director of Civic Works at OpenPlans. He oversees development of new products around smart transportation, open municipal IT infrastructure, participatory planning, and local civic engagement.

Nigel Jacob serves as the Co-Chair of the Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics, a group within City Hall focused on delivering transformative services to Boston's residents. Nigel also serves as Mayor Menino's advisor on emerging technologies. In both of these roles Nigel works to develop new models of innovation for cities in the 21st century.

Max Ogden is a fellow at Code for America and develops mapping tools and social software aimed at improving civic participation and communication. This year Max is working with Nigel and the Office of New Urban Mechanics to create technologies that better enable education in Boston's Public Schools.

Civic Media Sessions Hosted by the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, these open sessions highlight cutting-edge media research and tools for community and political engagement.

An Activity Theory approach to educational software development

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 22:15:07 GMT

Speaker: Leo Burd

Communications Forum: Civic Media and the Law

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 17:22:05 GMT

David Ardia, Daniel Schuman, and Micah Sifry

What do citizens need to know when they publicly address legally challenging or dangerous topics? Journalists have always had the privilege, protected by statute, of not having to reveal their sources. But as more investigative journalism is conducted by so-called amateurs and posted on blogs or websites such as Wikileaks, what are the legal dangers for publishing secrets in the crowdsourced era? We convene an engaging group law scholars to help outline the legal challenges ahead, suggest policies that might help to protect citizens, and describe what steps every civic media practitioner should take to protect themselves and their users.

David Ardia runs the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Micah Sifry is a co-founder and editor of the Personal Democracy Forum.

Daniel Schuman is the policy counsel at the Sunlight Foundation, where he helps develop policies that further Sunlight's mission of catalyzing greater government openness and transparency.

Communications Forum: Civics in Difficult Places

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 20:12:45 GMT

In a live demonstration of globe-straddling communication technologies like Skype, this forum connects to citizen journalists and activists around the world, some of whom frequently test the limits of governmental authority. Moderator Ethan Zuckerman wonders if these new digital forms are fundamentally liberating, providing users access to public spaces they might otherwise be denied. He pursues this line of inquiry in a series of internet conversations with correspondents covering some of the world's most ravaged or oppressed regions.

Featuring:

Cameran Ashraf, Iran
Mehdi Yahyanejad, Iran
Georgia Popplewell, Haiti
Huma Yusuf, Pakistan
Ruthie Ackerman, Liberia
Brenda Burrell and Bev Clark, Zimbabwe
Lova Rakotomalala, Madagascar

Project demos by Center for Future Civic Media researchers

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 16:27:13 GMT

Josh Levinger - Boycott Toolkit
Audubon Dougherty - Rural Peru's Transition to the Internet
Ryan O'Toole - Red Ink
Danielle Martin and Leo Burd - Department of Play

Learn more about our projects at http://civic.mit.edu/projects/c4fcm

Plenary: Data into Action

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 17:26:32 GMT

Our lives are increasingly mediated by computers and data - a shift that is becoming more and more natural to us. From Data.gov to real-time municipal bus information, data in many forms from many sources is being made available and recombined in ways we could not have anticipated just ten years ago, when everyone used the phone book, and when restaurant and movie reviewers numbered in the tens not the tens of thousands.

The value of data is in its ability to inform or to enable decision and action. Yet data can be generated, stored, and used in ways that do this well or poorly. While data visualization becomes more popular as a field, it is still an essentially rhetorical practice, able to influence people or engender action, but only to the degree that it is leveraged in a larger sociopolitical framework. In other words, does the data come from a trusted source? Is it collected in a sound manner? Is its release timely and influential? Is it embedded in a good story?

For this panel we bring together three expert data wranglers to discuss the question: How do we design data to help communities pursue their interests?

Speakers:

Nick Grossman (bio) is Director of Civic Works at OpenPlans. He oversees development of new products around smart transportation, open municipal IT infrastructure, participatory planning, and local civic engagement.
Ellen Miller (bio) is the co-founder and executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based, non-partisan non-profit dedicated to using the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency. She is the founder of two other prominent Washington-based organizations in the field of money and politics - the Center for Responsive Politics and Public Campaign - and a nationally recognized expert on transparency and the influence of money in politics.
Laurel Ruma (bio) is an editor at O'Reilly Media covering the Microsoft and Gov 2.0 topic areas. She is the co-chair for the Gov 2.0 Expo.

Plenary: Crowd Building

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 14:01:21 GMT

For years, news organizations have been ambivalently confronting the idea of crowdsourcing. In contrast to other forms of "user innovation" that feature collaborations by highly skilled professionals, crowdsourcing exploits a largely untrained group of contributors. Is crowdsourcing a solution to declining revenue or a symbol of the decline of western civilization? Either way, it is just one of the many new styles of collaboration and coproduction that the lowered costs of electronically mediated communication have fostered - and that many organizations have embraced.

But how might news organizations have responded over the last five years if, instead of crowdsourcing, they had taken their cue from the free software community and engaged in other forms of skilled collaborative coproduction? What challenges will new innovators and entrepreneurs face as they try to create new enterprises that help to sustain increasingly informed and engaged communities? Can crowdsourced information satisfy these engaged communities?

This panel brings together Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist who studied the Debian Linux community (which has built one of the largest and most influential operating systems) and Karim Lakhani, a business professor who studies collaborative user innovation to explore the question: How can we move from crowdsourcing to crowdbuilding?

Speakers:

Gabriella Coleman (bio), New York University, is an anthropologist who examines the ethics of online collaboration/institutions as well as the role of the law and digital media in sustaining various forms of political activism. She is completing a book manuscript Coding Freedom: Hacker Pleasure and the Ethics of Free and Open Source Software and is starting a new project on peer to peer patient activism on the Internet.
Karim Lakhani (bio) is an assistant professor in the Technology and Operations Management Unit at the Harvard Business School. His research is on distributed innovation systems and the movement of innovative activity to the edges of organizations and into communities. He is co-editor of Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software (MIT Press, 2005) and co-founder of the MIT-based Open Source research community and web portal.

Announcement of 2010 Knight News Challenge Winners

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 12:43:20 GMT

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation--sponsor of the MIT Center for Future Civic Media--in June 2010 announced their 2010 Knight News Challenge winners. Together, these winners form another ground-breaking, visionary class of civic media developers, inventors, and entrepreneurs.

This is video of the announcement by Knight Foundation president Alberto Ibargüen, as introduced by the Center's director Chris Csikszentmihályi. Please join us in congratulating the winners:.

CityTracking, by Eric Rodenbeck, Stamen Design
$400,000
To make municipal data easy to understand, CityTracking will allow users to create embeddable data visualizations that are appealing enough to spread virally and that are as easy to share as photos and videos.

The Cartoonist, by Ian Bogost and Michael Mateas, Georgia Tech
$378,000
To engage readers in the news, this project will create a free tool that produces cartoon-like current event games -- the game equivalent of editorial cartoons.

Local Wiki, by Philip Newstrom and Mike Ivanov
$350,000
Based on the successful DavisWiki.org in Davis, Calif., this project will create enhanced tools for local wikis, a new form of media that makes it easy for people to learn and share their own unique community knowledge.

WindyCitizen's Real Time Ads, by Brad Flora, WindyCitizen.com
$250,000
As a way to help online startups become sustainable, this project will develop an improved software interface to help sites create and sell what are known as real-time ads.

GoMap Riga, by Marcis Rubenis and Kristofs Blaus, GoMap Riga
$250,000
To inspire people to get involved in their community, this project will create a live, online map with local news and activities.

Order in the Court 2.0, by John Davidow, WBUR
$250,000
To foster greater access to the judicial process, this project will create a laboratory in a Boston courtroom to help establish best practices for digital coverage that can be replicated and adopted throughout the nation.

Front Porch Forum, by Michael Wood-Lewis, Front Porch Forum
$220,000
To help residents connect with others and their community, this grant will help rebuild and enhance a successful community news site, expand it to more towns and release the software so other organizations, anywhere can use it.

One-Eight, by Teru Kuwayama
$202,000
Broadening the perspectives that surround U.S . military operations in Afghanistan, this project will chronicle a battalion by combining reporting from embedded journalists with user-generated content from the Marines themselves.

Stroome, by Nonny de la Peña and Tom Grasty, Stroome
$200,000
To simplify the production of news video, Stroome will create a virtual video-editing studio.

CitySeed, by Retha Hill and Cody Shotwell, Arizona State University
$90,000
To inform and engage communities, CitySeed will be a mobile application that allows users to plant the "seed" of an idea and share it with others.

PRX StoryMarket, by Jake Shapiro, PRX
$75,000
Building on the software created by 2008 challenge winner Spot.us, this project will allow anyone to pitch and help pay to produce a story for a local public radio station.

Tilemapping, by Eric Gundersen, Development Seed
$74,000
To inspire residents to learn about local issues, Tilemapping will help local media create hyper-local, data-filled maps for their websites and blogs.

From the Net to Your Neighborhood: Using the Web to Connect Your Community and Encourage Civic Engagement

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 16:00:18 GMT

Recorded by Cambridge Community Television...

NeighborMedia Presents: From the Net to Your Neighborhood Panel Discussion

Whether you want to raise awareness about an important local issue or gather people for a community event, you can make use of web tools that are inexpensive and often easy to use, to organize those in your community. We'll cover strategic uses of blogging, web video, social networking, web sites, and more. Come learn how six Cambridge individuals have used these tools for positive change in their communities and organizations, and how you can too!

Panelists Include:

Moderator: Chris Csikszentmihályi, Director of MIT's Center for Future Civic Media
Garrett Anderson, Cambridge Energy Alliance, Director of Efficiency Projects & Energy Advisor, on CEA's use of Twitter and other social networking tools
Toni Bee, Area 4 correspondent for NeighborMedia, presents "Digital without a Dime," discussing options for inexpensive web tools
D.C. Denison, Boston Globe technology writer and Porter Square Neighborhood Association webmaster, on creating an effective community/neighborhood website
Anita Harris, Author of the New Cambridge Observer blog, President of the Harris Communications Group, and former PBS journalist on how to write a successful blog and encourage people to engage with it
Mark Jaquith, East Cambridge correspondent for NeighborMedia, on how NeighborMedia has helped him further the mission of Cambridge causes, organizations, and projects
Karin Koch, NeighborMedia correspondent and host of Vida Latina, on her integration of blogging, video, and social networking for the Latino community in Cambridge

MIT Communications Forum: Civics in Difficult Places

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 04:00:00 GMT

Government Transparency and Collaborative Journalism

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 14:06:47 GMT

Linda Fantin and Ellen Miller, with moderator Chris Csikszentmihalyi

In December, the Obama administration directed federal agencies and departments to implement "principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration," including deadlines for providing government information online. At the same time, citizens and journalists are developing new technologies to manage and analyze the exponential increase in data about our civic lives available from governmental and other sources. What new ways of gathering and presenting information are evolving from this nexus of government openness and digital connectedness?

Our speakers Linda Fantin, director of public insight journalism at Minnesota Public Radio and Ellen Miller, executive director of the Washington-based Sunlight Foundation, will explore this and related questions. Chris Csikszentmihalyi, director of MIT's Center for Future Civic Media, moderates the discussion.

Download high-res poster.

Damian Thorman, Closing Remarks

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:52:51 GMT

From The Future of Civic Engagement in a Broadband-Enabled World, a symposium hosted by the MIT Center for Future Civic Media in cooperation with the Federal Communications Commission's Broadband Initiative (broadband.gov).

Includes introduction by Center Director Chris Csikszentmihályi.

The Future of Government/Citizen Engagement

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:38:39 GMT

From the Mayor of Newark's tweets to the President's online town halls, technology has already changed how the public engages with their government. In a world of ubiquitous broadband, this interaction can radically change how government operates and develops policy. This panel will explore how broadband can transform government/citizen engagement.

Moderator: Jerry Mechling, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Speakers:

Christopher Csikszentmihalyi, MIT Center for Future Civic Media
Nick Grossman, The Open Planning Project
Laurel Ruma, O'Reilly Media
John Wonderlich, The Sunlight Foundation

The Future of Digital Public Media

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:43:52 GMT

Public media has always played a critical role in our democracy, informing citizens, leading our public conversation, and fostering civic engagement. However, broadband presents an historic opportunity for public media to reach even greater heights. This panel will explore the challenges and opportunities for the 21st century digital public media ecosystem.

Moderator: Jake Shapiro, Public Radio Exchange

Panelists:

Robert Bole, Corporation for Public Broadcasting
Sue Schardt, The Association of Independents in Radio (AIR)
Marita Rivero, WGBH-Boston
Kinsey Wilson, National Public Radio

Civic Engagement in the 21st Century: Data Transparency, Social Media, Public Media, Innovation in Government, and Digital Democracy

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:53:34 GMT

From The Future of Civic Engagement in a Broadband-Enabled World, a symposium hosted by the MIT Center for Future Civic Media in cooperation with the Federal Communications Commission's Broadband Initiative (broadband.gov).

This is the keynote address by Eugene Huang, Director of Government Performance and Civic Engagement for the FCC's National Broadband Plan.

Andrew 3 & 4

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 17:25:57 GMT

Andrew 5 6 7

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:20:04 GMT

Andrew 1 & 2

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 18:42:22 GMT

MIT Communications Forum: What's New at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media?

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Based on this roster of speakers, the MIT Center for Future Civic Media exists in a constant state of productive ferment, if not adrenaline rush.

Rick Borovoy unveils first LostInBoston.org sign, outside MassArt

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:20:35 GMT

Rick Borovoy, Visiting Scientist at the MIT Media Lab and the Center for Future Civic Media, proudly unveils the first Lost in Boston sign.

LostInBoston.org is a general-purpose web tool that cities can use to get citizens involved in civic improvement projects.

It's about helping Bostonians work together to make their neighborhoods more visitor-friendly. Community groups are partnering with local businesses and institutions to design signs that call out the key spots in their area. Signs are placed on private land. LostInBoston.org is a collaboration between the Urban Arts Institute at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT. To get involved, contact info[at]lostinboston.org.

The Future of News

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 03:29:54 GMT

In June of 2009, the Center for Future Civic Medias Future of News and Civic Media conference showcased some of the work done as a part of the Knight News Challenge, focusing on creative ways to provide people with the news and information needed to engage their communities effectively.

Collaboration contest, at the Future of News and Civic Media conference

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:01:28 GMT

From the Future of News and Civic Media Conference, June 17-19 2009, co-hosted by MIT's Center for Future Civic Media and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

One of the little gems that the Knight Foundation introduced at the Future of News and Civic Media conference last week was to award five grand to the best collaborative projects created at the conference. We thought it might be a tall order, what with everything else the attendees were doing, but boy did they ever respond.

Attendees pitched 19 brand-new projects, and three of them--TweetBill, Hacks and Hackers, and the WordPress Distributed Translation Plugin--won cold hard cash to develop the ideas further. And the creators can thank their fellow attendees, because everyone used Mako Hill's preferential voting tool Selectricity to vote on the spot.

About the winning projects...

TweetBill

TweetBill sends you notification via Twitter when a bill reaches the stage in the US Congress where it's useful for you to call your Congresscritter! Sign up, tell us where you live, choose your issues, and you will get a tweet when your representative is slated to vote on a bill, along with the rep's phone number.

See the prototype http://www.tweetbill.com

Team Members: Nick Allen, Pete Karl, Ryan Mark, Persephone Miel, Aron Pilhofer, Ryan Sholin, Lisa Williams

Hacks and Hackers

The problem: Scattered through the worlds of journalism and technology live a growing number of professionals interested in developing technology applications that serve the mission of journalism. Technologists are doing more and more things that are journalistic; journalists are doing things that are more and more technological. These people don't have a platform or network through which they can share information, learn from one another or solve each other's problems. These people are scattered in organizations such as IRE, ONA, SND - and are in both academia and industry.

Proposal: Establish "Hacks and Hackers," a network of people interested in Web/digital application development and technology innovation supporting the mission and goals of journalism. This is NOT a new journalism organization (SPJ, ONA, IRE, ASNE, etc.) . In fact we would call it a "DIS-organization." The goals of this network are: (a) Create a community of people in different disciplines who are interested in these topics; (b) Share useful information (e.g., a tutorial on how to install Drupal); (c) Networking; (d) Jobs; (e) Professional development; (f) Etc.

How this network will work: (a) We will establish an online network that will aggregate and link out to relevant information provided by members; (b) Membership costs $0.00; (c) We will establish a system through which contributions to the network are rewarded - for instance, via some kind of points system that rewards members for, for instance, solving one another's technical problem or creating a great tutorial; (d) We will seek to build bridges between journalism and academia, generating interest among computer scientists in the problems of journalism and media and among journalists in the opportunities presented by technology.

Team Members: Aron Pilhofer, Rich Gordon

WordPress Distributed Translation Plugin

Description: A WordPress plugin which extracts and divides text and meta-text from blog posts into segments that are delivered to The Extraordinaries smart phone application so that bi-lingual users can volunteer five minutes while waiting in line at the supermarket to help translate news articles and blog posts. The plugin would also reassemble the translated segments into a single blog post and, optionally, give credit to all involved translators.

Background: Global Voices is the largest volunteer translation community in the world, both in terms of volunteers and the number of working languages. (New York Times article here.) On a daily basis the community translates independent media between Indonesia, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Malagasy, Dutch, Portuguese, Swahili, Serbian, Macedonian, Arabic, Farsi, Bangla, Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew, Russian, Albanian, and more. Developing a mobile interface to social translation would allow Global Voices and other organizations to recruit volunteer translators who don't have regular access to a desktop internet connection.

Background -- The Extraordinaries (http://www.BeExtra.org):

The Extraordinaries delivers micro-volunteer opportunities to mobile phones and web browsers that can be done on-demand and on-the-spot. Currently available as an iPhone® application through Apple's iTunes® store, The Extraordinaries enables organizations to connect with their supporters through these micro-volunteer opportunities, strengthening relationships while leveraging their "crowds" to complete real work such as image tagging, translation and research.

Team Members: David Sasaki, Jacob Colker

Announcement of 2009 Knight News Challenge Winners

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:00:48 GMT

The 2009 Knight News Challenge Winners, as introduced by John S. and James K. Knight Foundation President and CEO Alberto Ibargüen. Held as part of the Future of News and Civic Media conference MIT, hosted by MIT's Center for Future Civic Media. The 2009 winners represent a remarkable diversity in ideas for developing new tools for news and engagement.

After opening remarks by Ibargüen, the introduction of the winners starts around the 15:30 mark.

Plenary: "News, Nerds and Nabes": How Will Future Americans Learn About the Local?

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:49:39 GMT

Alberto Ibarguen, Eric Klinenberg, and Henry Jenkins

Plenary: "Flesh and Bits: Information, Representation, Action"

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:01:00 GMT

With Chris Csikszentmihályi, Ben Fry, Matt Carroll, and Martin Wattenberg

What we know, how we know it, and what we do with it are all tightly coupled, and the relationships between them change as do our systems for producing, representing, and communicating knowledge. Moveable type and universal literacy ushered a dramatic reformulation of society: many historians believe it made contemporary democracy possible. Today, information and communication technologies are having similarly sweeping effects, and the need for technical understanding and data literacy -- and laws to ensure free data -- may be just as great. The possibilities opened (and closed) by information technologies are profound enough that entire industries and institutions have had to radically alter their structures and practices to adapt, but in many cases they cannot and do not. How can one understand the major structural changes these technologies can afford? And how can we advocate for technologies that will help to co-create the society we want?

Christopher Csikszentmihályi directs the MIT Center for Future Civic Media. Drawing on work from the Center, he will offer 33 Variables of Community and Information in 33 Minutes, looking at how the history of media and technology help us to understand these transformations.

Ben Fry directs the Seed Media Group's visualization strategy and research labs, and co-directs the Processing project, a programming language for visualization. He will talk about data literacy and his work to increase it.

Discussants:

Matt Carroll is a reporter at the Boston Globe who specializes in computer-assisted reporting and handles the paper's growing library of databases. In 1994 he started the Globe's first internal website; he will speak about data journalism and the city paper.

Martin Wattenberg is a computer scientist and artist. He is the founding manager of IBM's Visual Communication Lab, and will update us with the view from his project Many Eyes.

Recent Videos posted to Center for Civic Media on MIT Video

The Boston Globe in the Digital Age

Civic Media Lunch: "ZUMIX"

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: Turning Data into Narrative

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: And Now for Something Completely Different

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: Civic Action On and Offline: IRL + RT FTW!

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: Internet Native News Networks

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: Moments of Profundity, with Michael Maness

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: Open Gov_What's Gone Wrong, What's Gone Right

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: Welcome and Introduction

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: MIT Civic Ignite- Becky Hurwitz

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: MIT Civic Ignite- Charlie DeTar

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: MIT Civic Ignite- Dan Schultz

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: MIT Civic Ignite- Huan Sun

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: MIT Civic Ignite- Leo Burd

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: MIT Civic Ignite- Matt Stempeck and Nathan Matias

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: MIT Civic Ignite- Nathan Matias

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: MIT Civic Ignite- Pablo Rey

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: MIT Civic Ignite- Paulo Rogerio

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: MIT Civic Ignite- Rahul Bhargava

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: MIT Civic Ignite- Rogelio Lopez

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: MIT Civic Ignite-Dan Sinker

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: Extreme Data_Extreme Story

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: MIT Civic Ignite- Chris Peterson

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: MIT Civic Ignite- Matt Stempeck

2012 MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference: Stories and Fables

Civic Media Session: "Effective Citizenship in a Connected Society"

Craig Watkins: "The Digital Edge: Exploring the Digital Practices of Black and Latino Youth"

"Adapting Journalism to the Web" with Jay Rosen and Ethan Zuckerman

Caroline Woolard, "SolidarityNYC, OurGoods.org, and Trade School"

Leo Bonanni, "Sourcemap and Supply Chain Transparency"

Question Bridge: Black Males

VoIP Drupal webinar: Building sites that make and receive phone calls

Christina Xu and the Institute on Higher Awesome Studies

Civic Media Session: "Mapping Media Ecosystems"

Community Radio Programming for the Digital Age, with Benjamen Walker

Civic Media Session: "Civic Maps"

Community Radio Programming for the Digital Age, with Benjamen Walker (FULL VERSION)

Ramesh Srinivasan: "Empowering Culture and Context"

Networks Understanding Networks, Pt. 15: Ethan Zuckerman

Civic Media Session: "Amplified Streets, from Print to Tweets: Social Movement Media Across Platforms"

Civic Media Session: "Representing Islam"

Crowdsourcing Crisis: How Civic Media Informs Breaking News

Summary and Collaboration Contest results

Mobile Storytelling in Real Time

Plenary: "Civic Media Mobilization"

The Future of Civic Media

Lightning Talks by News Challenge winners

Announcement of 2011 Knight News Challenge winners

Civic Media Session: "Civic Disobedience"

Civic Media Session: "Design for Vulnerable Populations"

Steve Kurtz: Cultural Resistance

Tool for Consensus Building

Sourcemap

Lost in Boston: Realtime

Junkyard Jumotron

Hero Reports / Cronicas de Heroes

Grassroots Mapping

Between the Bars

Cities, Code, and Civics: "Customizing tools from city to city?"

Cities, Code, and Civics: "Enhanced serendipity"

Civic Media Session: "Bustling with Information: Cities, Code, and Civics"

An Activity Theory approach to educational software development

Communications Forum: Civic Media and the Law

Communications Forum: Civics in Difficult Places

Project demos by Center for Future Civic Media researchers

Plenary: Data into Action

Plenary: Crowd Building

Announcement of 2010 Knight News Challenge Winners

From the Net to Your Neighborhood: Using the Web to Connect Your Community and Encourage Civic Engagement

MIT Communications Forum: Civics in Difficult Places

Government Transparency and Collaborative Journalism

Damian Thorman, Closing Remarks

The Future of Government/Citizen Engagement

The Future of Digital Public Media

Civic Engagement in the 21st Century: Data Transparency, Social Media, Public Media, Innovation in Government, and Digital Democracy

Andrew 3 & 4

Andrew 5 6 7

Andrew 1 & 2

MIT Communications Forum: What's New at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media?