Andrew's blog

Our friends at Neighbors for Neighbors have officially teamed up with the Boston city government to launch a social networking website, allowing city personnel to better communicate with residents and hopefully address problems more quickly.

From the Neighbors for Neighbors press release:

“By providing these social networks, Neighbors for Neighbors is providing our residents yet another way to stay in touch with each other and their neighborhood officials,” said Mayor [Thomas] Menino. “We continue to use the latest technology to make government even more accessible and more responsive to our constituents. Just this week we launched the City’s first-ever iPhone application to send constituent requests to the Mayor’s 24-Hour Hotline and now we’re providing them another way to connect with city officials.”

On the networks, users create profiles and post information about themselves (and organizations they represent), and can find and communicate with neighbors. Users can also post blogs and events, participate in forums, add videos, photos, music, and create and join interest groups.

Coordinators from the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services as well as District Police Captains and Community Service Officers will all have a presence on the website to answer any questions users may have about their neighborhoods from broken street lights and trash pickup to various public safety issues.

Neighbors for Neighbors also held a kick-off this past week, announcing their partnership with the city:

With the exception of the beleaguered Atlanta Journal-Constitution, no major papers are covering the flooding currently ravaging Atlanta, Georgia. I only know about it because my mother and step-father live there---they're fine, but my mother nearly couldn't get home last night because of so many downed trees, washed-out roads, and police barricades. My step-father, being ex-Special Forces, was ridiculously well-prepared (hurricane lamps, a universal charger for multiple cell phones that hooks up to his car's cigarette lighter), but their neighbors aren't so lucky: good friends of theirs have seen their house so damaged that they expect to live in a hotel for months.

Can someone explain how this isn't a news story? Where's the coverage? Atlanta received 14 inches of rain in a few days, which all goes on hard-packed clay (it's a very dry part of the country) and thousands of miles of roadway. There's nowhere for the rain to go except into people's houses. Police are rescuing people by boat. The three interstates are shut. Every school in the city is closed. And the best the New York Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe can do is stick the same A.P. link at the bottom of their national news subsections: "Toddler Among 6 Killed as Storms Drench Southeast". And that story is 12 hours old.

I sincerely hope that it's my familial proximity to people at Atlanta that has me seeing this story all out of proportion. But if it's not, are we seeing the news industry's Katrina? Is this evidence that newspapers are unable or unwilling to expend the resources to help inform people during a natural disaster?

Something that characterizes everyone I've met in my year at the Center for Future Civic Media is a visceral frustration with tools and schemes that chip away at community ties or shut down communication between friends and neighbors---contrasted with an earnest desire to use technology to engender trust, heal rifts, and collectively build a better future. For every soul-crushing "See Something, Say Something" campaign, someone's working on a Hero Reports to counteract it.

On this, the eighth anniversary of 9/11, it's worth reflecting on this frustration and this desire to reestablish trust.

My in-laws are New Yorkers, and for many years my father-in-law worked in the World Trade Center. He was further uptown that morning, but, when the attacks happened, he made his way downtown to search for his nephew---who at that moment was escaping the WTC subway station through train tunnels. He was on the last train to leave before the towers fell. Together they walked up Manhattan island. They crossed a bridge into Brooklyn, turned back a moment, and recognized that their lives and their city were irreparably different.

So if anyone should want their government to guarantee safety at any cost, it's New Yorkers like them.

But as these eight years have gone by (admittedly perhaps because of a lack of new attacks), they have come to resent the breakdown in community particularly in contrast to the camaraderie felt in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, camaraderie despite fear of that next attack that we were all sure was coming. Sadly, it's human nature, and in the nature of government, to be influenced more by fear than by trust, and it's an old story. To act with perfect rationality in the wake of 9/11 would have been like Achilles not flipping out after Hector slays Patroclus. But Achilles, distraught, is who led us in our day to confused wars, sacrificed liberties, and, worst, a loss of trust in one another.

On this anniversary, I look with quite a bit of pride at our Center's long list of impressive projects in the context of reanimating that trust. It's the practice at MIT that we develop technologies to address really specific puzzles, but each of those technologies can be and are expanded to other contexts, ones that build up relationships between and within geographic communities:

• The aforementioned Hero Reports helps people praise acts of civic courage before they're forgotten.
• Extract organizes landowners---both urban and rural---so that they can represent their best interests to oil and gas companies.
• The technology behind VirtualGaza, though focused on Palestinians, can be adapted to help communities in the midst of crisis when mapping and storytelling is most critical.
• Newer projects, like Between the Bars, exemplify how a narrow cause---building a system that allows prisoners to blog---establishes a template for mutually beneficial relationships between groups that are usually adversarial.
• And even ostensibly geek-centric work, like GoodApp, a cloud-computing environment to collaboratively develop web applications, means that a tool now exists for anyone---citizen, company, government---to build and share code, easily and transparently.

None of those projects works without a high level of trust, even between complete strangers. It's not a naive trust. Not one, childishly, where you renounce responsibility. It's one where you respect your neighbor, acknowledge his or her worth and talents, and know that you're stronger together than apart.

It's the lesson we learned eight years ago, and it's one to which the Center stays true.

From our good friends and sponsors at the Knight Foundation, spreading the word on 2010 News Challenge. Use the code below to place a badge on your own website.

The 2010 News Challenge is accepting applications from now until October 15.

You can help us promote the 2010 News Challenge by putting a banner on your web site or blog. Click here for a page with images and html code which you can copy and paste.

URL: http://www.newschallenge.org/sites/default/files/knc-banner-for-icfj-280x140px.gif

Code for your web page:
<a href="http://www.newschallenge.org/?utm_source=c4fcm&utm_medium=banner&utm_term=banner&utm_campaign=public"><img src="/sites/default/files/knc-banner-for-icfj-280x140px.gif" width="280px" height="140px" border="0" alt="Click Now to Visit the Knight News Challenge" /></a>

URL: http://www.newschallenge.org/sites/default/files/knc-bannerknc-170px.gif

Code for your web page:
<a href="http://www.newschallenge.org/?utm_source=c4fcm&utm_medium=banner&utm_term=banner&utm_campaign=public"><img alt="Click Now to Visit the Knight News Challenge" src="http://www.newschallenge.org/sites/default/files/banner-knc-170px.gif" width="170px" border="0" height="100px" /></a>

German Language

banner_knc_german_468x60.gif (468px x 60px)

banner_knc_german_150x200.gif (150px x 200px)

banner_knc_german_120x90.gif (120px x 90px)

Spanish Language

banner_knc_spanish_468x60_v2.gif (468px x 60px)

banner_knc_spanish_150x200_v2.gif (150px x 200px)

banner_knc_spanish_120x90_v2.gif (120px x 90px)

Portuguese Language

banner_knc_portuguese_468x60.gif (468px x 60px)

banner_knc_portuguese_150x200.gif (150px x 200px)

banner_knc_portuguese_120x90.gif (120px x 90px)

Note: If you want us to know that you're sharing the love by sending traffic our way, change the value "&source=banner" to &source="your_name" and you'll know we can see which friends are linking to us.

Our director Chris Csikszentmihályi recently described for the Washington Post what he calls "click-through activism", the propensity of people online, especially youth, to feel they are contributing to a cause simply by writing a tweet or adding their name to a Facebook cause page.

In some ways, [Csikszentmihályi] says, the ease of the medium "reminds me of dispensations the Catholic Church used to give." Worst-case scenario: If people feel they are doing good just by joining something -- or clicking on one of those become a fan of Audi and the company will offset your carbon emissions campaigns, "to what extent are you removing just enough pressure that they're not going to carry on the spark" in real life?

I was curious how click-through activism affects a national group whose organizing is done almost entirely online. So I approached Matthew Zachary---founder and CEO of I'm Too Young for This!, an online community and non-profit for young adult cancer survivors---for his thoughts.

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...

We've had to remain largely mum on the Future of News and Civic Media Conference, just held this week here at MIT--such is the reality of a popular-but-invitation-only conference and one whose big news, the announcement of the 2009 Knight News Challenge winners, was embargoed until the last minute.

Via Mitch Resnick and others...

Scratch Day is a worldwide network of gatherings, where people will come together to meet other Scratchers, share projects and experiences, and learn more about Scratch.

"Now" meaning as of three minutes ago on Wednesday, May 13, 2009. This is pretty remarkable.

Our friend Thomas Lowenhaupt of Connecting.nyc Inc. writes:

With the arrival of the .nyc TLD (like .com and .org but just for New York City), we'll will soon have the capacity to create neighborhood media centers such as astoria.nyc, brooklyn-heights.nyc, clinton.nyc, greenwich-village, harlem.nyc, etc.