MediaShift Idea Lab: Civic Defense 2.0
Chris Csikszentmihályi co-founded the Center and became its Director in 2009. Csikszentmihályi also founded the MIT Media Lab's Computing Culture group, known for developing political technologies that rebalance power between citizens, corporations, and governments. Trained as an artist, he has worked in the intersection of new technologies, media, information activism and the arts for 16 years, lecturing, showing new media work, and presenting installations on five continents and one subcontinent. He was a 2005 Rockefeller New Media Fellow and a 2007-2008 fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and he recently served on a US State Department tech delegation to explore technological tools to strengthen civil society in the face of narco-trafficking violence in the Mexcio-US border region.
MediaShift Idea Lab: Civic Defense 2.0
This week our development team announced the release of the LandmanReportCard (LRC), the first of our experiments in designing tools for community understanding and self-defense. We've chosen one of the most difficult community contexts imaginable: neighborhoods, mostly rural, that stand in the path of some of the richest and most powerful corporations in the world. In the mix are weak and compromised governments, a lack of local media, mutant baby goats, a toxic soup of industrial byproducts, unmatched potential for profits, flammable tap water, and a clean burning source of energy that may be central to national security.
Read the full article at PBS' MediaShift Idea Lab:
http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2008/12/extract-civic-defense.html
