What are the elements of an appealing invitation to participate in a collaborative storytelling piece? What would motivate you to share a personal story with an unknown audience? How do we prompt people in a way that elicits contributions of a kind we are imagining?

from http://olganunes.com/

My dear friend Olga Nunes recently ran a beautiful and enormously successful campaign, a simple call for memories relating to smell to which people responded with touching and deep memories. She says, “We are all made of stories” and underlying all of her artwork is some expression of this sentiment. She’s an artist who draws you into semi-fictitious lives that she spins through songs, poems, visual art, experiences. In this project, she helps draw stories from you through your memories, making apparent the fabric of stories that weave us together.

Ed and I met with the Accessibility and Usability team yesterday, part of MIT’s Information Services and Technology (IS&T), one of the departments on campus that makes the institute go. We met with Katherine Wahl and Chris LaRoche, usability consultants, and Stephani Roberts, accessibility consultant. They work as consultants with projects across the institute -- both department sites and smaller projects and we went to speak with them about Vojo.co. (http://ist.mit.edu/usability and http://ist.mit.edu/accessibility)

We had emailed before meeting, and when we arrived at the office, Katherine, Chris and Stephanie asked us what Vojo is. Question 1: Do people understand what Vojo is from the site? Answered.

In late Jan, the Vozmob and Vojo teams gathered in Oakland and LA for a work sprint.
Link to notes from the sprint: http://brownbag.me:9001/p/vozmob-sprint-january2013

Who:
The Vozmob team of IDEPSCA (http://vozmob.net/) are based in LA were part of the original codesign team for Vozmob and continue to be codesigners as well as media makers and trainers. Pedro Joel, Luis Valentin, and _, from IDEPSCA joined via hangout periodically through the week.

Mirabot is a tech co-op based in Oakland and we are working closely with Squiggy Rubio and Matt Olenick on development.

From Civic, Civic Technologist Ed Platt and I joined in person, and Sasha Costanza Chock joined from LA with the IDEPSCA team.

[poster designed by Denise Cheng]

The Spring 2013 Codesign Studio is underway. Inspired by the profusion of hackathons, the frame of this semester’s course is to collaboratively design an inclusive pop-up event with our community partners. We meet weekly and both enrolled students and our partners participate in each class meeting. See our syllabus and growing resource list here: http://bit.ly/codesignstudio2013.

Our goals are:

I've participated in a few New Tactics in Human Rights dialogues. New Tactics is a program of the Center for Victims of Torture that is committed to training, community building, and skill and experience sharing. Dialogues are online conversations held for about a week at a time on a specific topic. Kristin Antin has been at the helm of the dialogues I've been involved with. She curates a group of people who can speak to a certain topic and works with that group to discuss key issues and to propose prompt questions for dialogues.

While the dialogue is active, these members of the group participate in ongoing conversation, posting written thoughts about the prompts and responses to one another's posts. I've found participating in these to be very engaging and that people involved seem to really take time to read each other's posts and to respond, so a conversation does develop.

Where commuters run over Black children in Detroit. By the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute: http://makingmaps.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/bunge_runovermap.jpg

This post written together with Chris Schweidler.

This Fall, together with DataCenter, we began developing the Civic Maps Toolkit to orient Community-Based Organizations and Grassroots Groups to the opportunities, tools and even limitations of civic mapmaking. The Center for Civic Media and DataCenter are jointly managing the toolkit development and our team of content writers includes students from the Center and enrolled in Center courses and interns with DataCenter.

sandystoryline.com

This post written together with Rachel Falcone.

It’s been nearly 3 weeks since Hurricane Sandy hit the Eastern seaboard and there are still a vast number of people without power, without water, without hot food, and without a home.

Housing is a Human Right (HHR) is a storytelling project led by Michael Premo and Rachel Falcone that has worked for the last five years to connect people around housing, land and the dignity of a place to call home. HHR storytelling follows a tradition of oral history and stories are richly captured and shared in multimedia including audio and photographs. They truly create space for people to share stories of their community and ongoing experiences trying to obtain or maintain a home through exhibitions. They have transformed laundromats and empty stores into storytelling spaces, and create storytelling space on multiple platforms including radio and internet.

I had the chance to join a Bay Area Doula Project (BADP) salon event the other week. They were gathering at Rock Health (http://rockhealth.com/) in SF, an incubator for health-IT projects and the new host space for the salon series that previously met at Million Fishes. I've been paying attention to the series because a friend is helping to organize it and I've been wishing, from my East Coastness, that I was in the Bay to join these, especially the first 2 events from March 2012, intriguingly named Orgasm Outside of the Box and This Hormonal Life. Through the magic of video chat, I joined as a head on a tv for the Sept 27th salon on how the full spectrum doula movement is using new media to build skills and connection between the community of practitioners, connect with clients, and some of the potential benefits and concerns of communicating online.

The Question Campaign, http://21dayscambridge.org/, launched in the City of Cambridge on Weds Oct 17 as part of the Cambridge Campaign Against Domestic Violence. For the next 21 Days, the Question Campaign will ask for people in Cambridge to donate their questions about Domestic Violence. Following that, through a series of public processes, the campaign partners and Cambridge residents will identify common questions and work towards local policy and service provision that responds to these questions.

We had our second Vojo Community Call on Tues Oct 16. The agenda included introductions from 3 of our community groups and a hands-on demonstration of how to locate feed addresses for Vojo groups and Vojo tags. We followed that with a screenshared demo of how these feeds can be integrated into Drupal’s native RSS feed aggregator and a Wordpress plugin that we have found works well with Vojo feeds. The following is a recap of the introductions and some of the call activities.

For more info about this call: