I posted the following to the Comparative Media Studies site; the reaction around the Center to Swartz's suicide is, we all would agree, still too raw for the Monday-after. A collection of articles, essays, testimonials, and other media is available too.

The CMS community -- in particular several of its colleagues at the Center for Civic Media who knew Aaron Swartz well -- is grappling with the reality that he is no longer with us.

EngageMedia is a citizen video sharing platform, as well as a training, network development, software and research project based in Southeast Asia and Australia.

We welcomed Andrew Lowenthal, co-founder and Executive Director, who outlined EngageMedia's work, focusing on the nature of scaling, in particular developing strategic networks and open source software, and their implications and limitations in creating civic media today.

Becky was able to liveblog our Q&A bit of Lowenthal's talk. He also visited the Introduction to Civic Media class (notes, thanks to Rogelio) and the Berkman Center (notes, thanks to Nathan and Sasha).

Cape Cod Bay Watch is dedicated to protecting the species, habitat and health of Cape Cod Bay. The most immediate goal is to educate the public about impacts of Entergy’s Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station—especially its "once-through cooling" system. This system uses over a half-billion gallons of water from the bay every day, killing marine life in the process and dumping the water, heated 32⁰F degrees warmer and polluted with toxic chemicals and radioactive materials, back into the bay. In our opinion, Pilgrim Station does not have a valid permit to operate in this manner and is violating numerous state and federal water quality standards. Despite this, the facility was recently re-licenced to operate for another 20 years.

If you've spent any time in the American south -- or at the food court in Burlington Mall, ten miles outside Boston -- you've likely gone weak at the knees at the mention of Chick-fil-A. The waffle fries. The sweet tea. And tops, the spicy chicken sandwich.

And you too may be conflicted about 1) Chick-fil-A's homophobia vs. 2) how good that spicy chicken sandwich is. (If this sounds like the Kenny Rogers Roaster episode of Seinfeld, it's not far off.)

So it came as a perversely pleasant surprise that the language associated with one of history's great homophobes, well, this happens:

My mother's father was a machinist.

He had a stocked workshop, and I can't picture him without a blue jumpsuit on, speckled with the light-brown — a sugary scent — of machine oil.

Even as cigars browned his fingers and arthritis froze them, he worked with his hands. His father, an Iowa corn farmer, did too.

A quick note pecked on my phone from the ONA conference in San Francisco...

At the end of this morning's "Business of Collaboration" session, I had the chance to ask a panel of editors, "Why have you only talked about how you collaborate with other news outlets? Are there particular ethical concerns about generating stories and data with non-profits, local governments, advocacy groups?"

I thought it would be a tricky question to answer, but it wasn't: "Yes, there are ethical concerns and they're not ones we can compromise on" (I'm paraphrasing ProPublica's editor).

I followed up: "So if a mayor in upstate New York asked Abrahm Lustgarten to analyze the fracking data the town couldn't, ProPublica wouldn't collaborate with the mayor?" His answer was accommodating but clear, that a journalistic outfit still has to remain removed to ensure impartiality, but they could cite the data and would still need to compare it to what the company doing the fracking would provide.

What if residents could allocate their town's spending like some people do their 401(k)'s?

I've been a homeowner for a little over a year, so for the first time I'm tracking town expenditures and, as important, listening to other residents' town-solvable needs and frustrations.

Arlington's issues can feel piddly. (The divisive issue this year was a leaf blower ban.) But dissatisfaction can grow faster than my crabgrass, and my own dissatisfaction doesn't have to do with present issues as much as the process we'll have to use when things really do get serious.

What geeked-out little changes to our voting system would you make to result in huge benefits to representative government?

On Becky's recommendation, I've been reading Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons. The extraordinarily fun part of the book is how quickly it gets you out of the "government is either the solution or the problem" debate. Now, Ostrom tightly circumscribes her research, limiting it to common-pool resources (fisheries, grazing land, and the like), excluding common goods (which is what I focus on below, in terms of voting), and suggesting the self-governing, self-regulating structures she studies can't be broadened to the largest organizational structures...like national governments.

But that doesn't mean I'm not tempted to do it anyway.