Verde Smoke

Come see a bunch of planner and community organizers share how we’re using civic media tools in communities, at our barcamp session at the Knight Foundation and the Center for Future Civic Media’s The Future of News and Civic Media Conference @ MIT today (11am Stata rm 32-155)

Primary Question:
How can participatory media tools be used to build the capacity of community organizations to support member activism and collaboration?

An MIT Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning course (that I’m auditing), entitled Media Technology and Community Building, along with progressive community members, has been meeting twice weekly with a core group of Framingham youth and community activists since April 7th, 2009. The class has been helping the youth to analyze and activate their own social networks, both through classic mechanism and using new media technologies such as websites, cell phones, and user-created audio and video. Using these newly obtained skills the youth were challenged to activate their networks, to mobilize their peers, friends, and community to participate in a game on May 9th, 2009.

Check out this video of the final presentation to the Lawrence Community Works Union Crossing Committee, describing programs devised by the graduate and undergraduate students in the Spring 2009 Lawrence practicum course in the Dept of Urban Studies and Planning (11.423 LAWRENCE PRACTICUM: Info, Assets, and the Immigrant City) where I’m the teaching assistant.

Primary Question:
How can participatory media tools be used to build the capacity of organizations to support member activism, collaboration, and leadership?

Analysis:

How can participatory media tools be adapted for grassroots strategies to seed more forward-focused institutional memory practices? Can we use these tools, supported by strategies such as reflective practice, participatory action research, and participatory development communication, work in real-time in both the university and community?

I create media because not only to express my voice, but also to join communities. The participatory media tools I use, such as online social networks and make-your-own video games, are fueled by the principles of collaboration, personal creation, iteration, accessibility, and sustainability.

Presentation of my thesis problem statement as a set of visual diagrams, in writing seminar last week.

[Please send comments!]

Values identify those objects, conditions or characteristics that an organization considers important and uses as guide for action. On the surface, the values that fuel the design and use of participatory media tools are the same as the values stated in most youth development organization’s vision statements. Specifically, these values include collaboration, personal creation, iteration, accessibility, and sustainability.

I like to describe myself as a storyteller in search of community. But I’m not always the most well spoken person in the room. Sometimes I look up and find myself up to my neck in community. Upon reflection, perhaps the biggest gap is between the way I see myself and the reality of the places I end up.