Recent news from the Center for Civic Media

Design, Hack, Ship: How Facebook Designs Products

Submitted by natematias on February 10, 2012 - 1:39pm

Today, Tom Stocky visited the Media Lab to talk about how Facebook designs and builds products. He's a Media Lab graduate and the director of product management at Facebook. He shared five principles for great design: start with people; hack and share; solve the root cause; keep it simple; and be bold.

Tom started out by encouraging us to start with people, to build social systems with people at the center. He showed us a network diagram by the Dachis Group's social business design team. He wanted to differentiate what Facebook does from that model. Instead of thinking about systems, he encouraged us to start with people's experience in the real world and then design a product around that, with people at the center.

Will Technology Disrupt Democratic Institutions to the Extent it has Disrupted Political Campaigns?

Submitted by mstem on February 9, 2012 - 4:05pm

This is a writeup of today's Center for Civic Media lunch event. If you're in the Cambridge area, come join us!

Otto Santa Ana: TV News is "a One-A-Day Hegemonic Vitamin" that naturalizes myths

Submitted by schock on February 8, 2012 - 11:06pm

Live notes from Otto Santa Ana's talk "Contemporary Network Television News Reporting About Latinos: Successes, Failures, and a Range of Proposals to Correct Its Limitations." All errors by natematias and schock.

Event link: http://cms.mit.edu/events/talks.php#020812
Live notes link: http://brownbag.me:9001/p/otto

Civic media courses for Spring 2012!

Submitted by Andrew on February 7, 2012 - 11:00am

One feature of the Center that we love to, well, feature is our completely unique set of courses. This semester we have three of them -- two taught by professor and Center co-principal investigator Sasha Costanza-Chock and the other, in his MIT class debut, by our director Ethan Zuckerman. Registration is still open:

CMS.362 Civic Media Collaborative Design Studio
S. Costanza-Chock
Project-based studio focusing on collaborative design of civic media provides a service-learning opportunity for students interested in working with community organizations. Multidisciplinary teams create civic media projects based on real-world community needs. Covers co-design methods and best practices to include the user community in iterative stages of project ideation, design, implementation, testing, and evaluation. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments. Limited to 16.

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom

Submitted by natematias on February 2, 2012 - 8:11pm

Do we need a Magna Carta for the Internet? Who should create it, and what might it contain?

Rebecca McKinnon spoke at the Center for Civic Media today about her new book, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom (TED Talk). For many years, Rebecca was the face of CNN in Beijing and Tokyo. Then she co-founded Global Voices with our director Ethan Zuckerman. More recently, she has been thinking about what it means to be a netizen, and what might be our responsibilities and rights.

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