Who should decide what products, services, and structures shape our lives? In political debates, our answers play out between markets on one hand and the state on the other. On issues including power generation, healthcare, or transportation, we tend to argue about accountable corporations versus the accountable state. But accountability is only a retrospective tool of democracy. It says nothing about a question of fundamental importance to any group: who should design the things which shape our lives? Is it even possible for values of democratic participation to apply to the way we design our streets, devices, and media? Or is it best to provide feedback through our votes, purchases, and tech support phone calls?

This great guest post has been written by my Media Lab colleague, the entrepreneur and engineer Travis Rich (twitter) (linkedIn). Mass Challenge visited the Center for Civic Media for lunch today; both Travis and I took notes. My companion post, which includes further detail is here: "Mass Challenge: A Startup Renaissance?".

Today, Mass Challenge joined the Center for Civic Media for lunch. My notes here form an extended record of our conversation. A great summary: "Mass Challenge at the Center for Civic Media," has been written by my Media Lab colleague, the entrepreneur and engineer Travis Rich.

Can the big challenges facing our world be solved by entrepreneurs? If so, then what kind of community might be needed to coordinate the resources, ideas, and connections required for large-scale, big impact initiatives?

Today, we had a visit from Karl Buttner, Jeremy Bersin, and Warren Anderson of MassChallenge, a $1M global startup competition and accelerator program that aims to catalyse the launch and success of high-growth, high-impact new businesses.

On the Civic Media blog, Matt Stempeck and I have been arguing about the relative importance of learning from failure or success. Matt urges us to be honest about failure and learn from it. I think success is a better teacher. Underlying this debate is a somewhat flawed assumption: that we can know when something is successful.

I am starting a new project with Gaia Marcus of The RSA's Connected Communities project to create a new, cost-effective way to measure the social impact of public services and civic interventions. We're designing a mobile and tablet app for recording offline social networks as part of an interview process. I also expect the open source software we build to be useful to journalists and ethnographers.

Today, we had lunch with Bob Filibin and Stephanie Han-yu Shih of DoSomething.org. They started off by telling us that smartphones with touchscreens and Siri aren't going to drive social change, but that texting is a much more viable approach. To help frame the possibilities, they shared a slide with a 160 character text:

This is exactly what one hundred and sixty characters looks like. No, I'm not joking. This is it. This is all you have to work with OMG WTF AMIRITE LOLOLOL

Friday at MIT CSAIL, Lada Adamic gave a talk on "To friend and to trust: eliciting truthful and useful ratings online". Lada is an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Information & Center for the Study of Complex Systems. I met her in 2009 at the SIGWEB Hypertext conference, and we did a small collaboration (together with her student Jiang Yang) when I was a software engineer at KGB. It was great to hear Lada again; she always brings fascinating examples, unexpected insights and humour into what are serious in-depth quantitative research projects.

Last Thursday at the Center for Civic Media, we heard a talk by Christina Xu, Chancellor of the Institute on Higher Awesome Studies, the non-profit wing of my favourite funding organisation, the Awesome Foundation. Christina formerly worked for the Center for Civic Media, and the Institute for Higher Awesome has been funded by the Knight Foundation to start the Awesome News Taskforce increasing awesomeness in communities and the world. Christina joined us to talk about the values of the Awesome Foundation, and to share an update on her work to bring Awesome to Detroit.

Together with Sasha Costanza-Chock and Molly Sauter, I'm planning to make a visual map of co-design. Thus far, this has involved learning about co-design, meeting co-designers in the UK, and familiarising myself with theories of co-design.

Now that the field is coming into focus for me, I'm starting to make decisions about what things to include, and what visual approaches to take. Here are some of my initial thoughts.

Timeline
I think that a timeline will be very helpful in the upcoming class Sasha is teaching on co-design. Timelines are very good at setting something in context, showing how a trend develops over time, and presenting a pile of names and examples in a narrative (see the Design History Timeline as an example).

Over the last three days of the Mozilla Festival, the team from the MIT Media Lab & Center for Civic Media has been asking people to visualise their media diets. This is part of a larger project we're doing with our director Ethan Zuckerman to develop a nutritional label for the news. You can read more about it in this great post on the Nieman Journalism Lab, "Ethan Zuckerman wants you to eat your (news) vegetables". Clay Johnson of InfoVegan is also writing a book on the topic, set to be published by O'Reilly in the near future.