Creating Technology for Social Change

Amauta Free Space Project outline (kind of)

So, as I mentioned before, I am trying to build a prototype based on an idea for a collaborate site. The final paper will try to use most of the different themes we have discussed in class, but it will approach these subjects in a way that it challenges this tool, asking, “how would this web platform address these issues we discussed?”. It would then try to find the appropriate way to incorporate the reflections within the prototype itself. This idea for a platform was already trying to deal with most of these issues, so it would try to delve further into them. Yet the platform idea is more of an excuse (or exercise) to try and synthetize all these topics and connect the dots.

The different themes are below (which is basically the outline of our whole course), and next to each theme, I have a name of a possible contact that I could be interviewing. Whenever I can, I will engage with interviews, some of the readings from our class, and our great collaborative class notes and exercises, to provide an analytic framework and draw conclusions for a possible prototype. I will also include some complimentary readings to add to the research. Some topics I have written about already in blog posts, and might just work on those further.

civic media (Ethan Zuckerman?)
crisis in journalism
digital inequalities
public sphere/networked counterpublics
power/radical media/resistance (Michael Albert?)
media justice (Dana Cunningham?)
media political economy
free cultural labor (Richard Stallman?)
activism through other media
digital civic media (and its potential) (Evan Henshaw-Plath?)
social movements (Esther Vivas?)
social change and participation
indymedia and open publishing news models (Sasha?)
Hyperlocal (geography)
Collaborative creations (Wikipedia) (Clay Shirky?) (or someone from the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence)
Hacktivism/digital civil disobedience

At the moment, I am contacting some of these people to interview (any other suggestions for interviews are more than welcome!), so depending when they respond, I will write a blog entry that will constitute a chapter. Not all themes will have someone for an interview, so I can begin writing those first. Basically, my work plan will consist on writing a weekly blog, talking about several subjects, with reflections on how it would look like in a platform (and maybe with other people’s comments with suggestions, concerns, etc that I can incorporate into the final paper: free cultural labor!). From there, I will apply the conclusions into the prototype.