Verde Smoke

As I sat in a meeting today at the Community Innovators Lab, where I volunteered to help with brainstorm low-cost ways to create interesting content for their Co-Lab Radio blog, I realized I’ve been a bad participatory media advocate.  Because I haven’t blogged myself forever.  I blame Twitter and Facebook, where I spew updates to a very select audience of friends who I assume want to hear 140 characters of what I’m thinking.

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)

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.

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.

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.

More info at http://architecture.mit.edu/class/cityscope/

I’m the writing TA for this semester’s CityScope class and we’ve just returned from a trip to Peru during spring break. Here’s the blurb on the class from the syllabus:

“CityScope is a combination undergraduate course and Masters in City Planning graduate practicum that focuses on a series of topics, using social and political science, engineering and technical tools, architectural design and other fields and methods. We focused on one city in particular, the coastal town of Tambo de Mora (TdM). Today, TdM is host to a toxic mix of some of the worst problems of a post-disaster urban zone. Suffering from a natural, human, political and social tragedy, the city’s future continues to be haunted by the tremendous earthquake damage of August 2007.

I’ve been accepted into the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives internship program in India for this summer! I’ll be working with my former instructor (from the MIT Media Lab IDEAS Institute) Geetha Narayanan with the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology on community radio projects. Below is the slide I just submitted as a profile.