Vojo community call - Office hours
A West Coast girl at heart, Denise Cheng comes to MIT from all over. Her background is a mix of journalism, media empowerment and community building, including as a Peace Corps volunteer and the citizen journalism coordinator for The Rapidian, a hyperlocal based in Grand Rapids, Mich. She has long examined the rise of participatory media and its implications for journalism and also explored civic media off the Web, from low power FM to digital storytelling and the Indy Media movement.
Denise is drawn to neighborhoods, design and coding, languages, civic empowerment, DIY and handmade media. You can find out more about her and keep up with her at her blog.
Vojo community call - Office hours
Last Tuesday, Vojo hosted an "office hours" session where anyone who hadn't taken off for Thanksgiving was welcome to dial in with their questions. The Vojo team met Luís Cotto, a Cantabrigian originally from Hartford, CT.
Luis is an arts administrator by trade. He founded Center Without Walls in 2008, which attempts to create community using art as a vehicle, from cultural productions and visual performance to the spoken word. He wants to use Vojo to expand the literal explanation of CWW—literally without walls, and expand this sense of place to the Internet. He first found out about Vojo via CCTV's Park(ing) Day outreach. CWW participated in Park(ing) Day and explored some of the other area Park(ing) Day initiatives. He came across it again via 21 Days in Cambridge. A few days after seeing how 21 Days used it, he created <a data-cke-saved-href="a group for CWW. His goal is to encourage Hartford residents to create stories about their community. In the days following, he started to publicize the group's stories via Facebook and Twitter. When he's home for the holidays, he'll be meeting with representatives from three different groups and leading them through the Vojo submission process. "[I'm doing Hartford stories] as an organic and fun project to do, to see what comes of it."
In the process of testing out the platform so he could train others to use Vojo, Luís proved to be the ideal user: a Vojo user who is proactive about giving feedback. Luís made us aware of where the user interface could use more polishing and which features he found most valuable.
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