The MIT Center for Civic Media designs tailored civic media tools and jointly develops them with communities like yours. We want to showcase the possibilities for community-wide empowerment, so we are looking to partner with activists and non-profit organizations in the U.S. and around the world.

What you get
As a community partner, you will receive free open-source resources and technical support to address your most pressing civic media issues, whether it’s how to highlight local business, ways to engage kids in local issues, or even something seemingly too daunting for mere technology. You can be an early adopter of tools to support and foster local civic media and community action.

The Center for Civic Media showcased its playful side last Friday when it hosted Google’s Computing and Programming Experience (CAPE) program.

Through the CAPE program, 10 local rising 8th graders (five boys and five girls) experience daily life at the Google offices in Kendall Square. Immersed and exposed to the amazing variety of computer science applications at work there, the program reveals how computer science impacts society and culture everyday.

Part of the CAPE program involves visiting local businesses and research facilities to expose the students to the diverse opportunities they have to apply a computer science education. Their visit to the Media Lab included a general tour and time interacting with various Center projects.

Students hailing from the Dorchester neighborhood were interested in the My Dot Tour project introduced by Rahul Bhargava. As one student noted, “it is a great way for people from Dorchester who don’t live there anymore to be able to share their stories and experiences, too.”

As many of you heard at the Knight conference last month, Yesica Guerra has had tremendous success running CRÓNICAS DE HÉROES in Juarez, MX. The site, which is approaching nearly 1,000 reports, is influencing the news that is coming out of Juarez and increasing civic pride in the city. Next month the project will launch in San Diego and Tijuana.

More importantly, Yesica is planning to establish the project as an independent organization that will bring Cronicas to many more border towns. (Look out Laredo, TX/ Laredo, MX!)

Working with a community foundation in Mexico, Cronicas is establishing a bi-national fund to raise funds for these efforts. A bi-national fund allows the project to receive financial support from both sides of the border. As a fiscal agent, the community foundation manages any funds raised by Cronicas. In return, Cronicas gets the benefit of the foundation’s 501c3 status while its own corporation documents and tax exemptions are being developed and processed.

Rick Borovoy, Susan (our new UROP), and I had a productive two days in Wisconsin Rapids last week rolling out the first phase of Sameboat. In partnership with the Community Foundation of Greater South Wood County (CFGSWC), a Knight Foundation two time Community Information Challenge grantee, we’re piloting solutions to correct the difficulty clients have in accessing timely and accurate information about relevant social services available in their communities.

The Phase 1 deployment grew out of feedback Rick and I received during our visit to the area earlier in the year when we met with service recipients at several area non-profits:

• North Central Community Action Program - Family Resource Center
• Mid-State Technical College
• St. John’s Episcopal Church - Neighborhood Table
• St. John’s Episcopal Church - Personal Essentials Pantry
• Wood County Health Department’s Women Infant and Children’s Program
• Wood County Human Services
• Wisconsin Rapids Job Center

The take-aways from the focus group visits were clear. Information needed to:

Crónicas de Héroes, the Juárez Mexico deployment of Hero Reports, rolled out late last year with incredible success at the local level. Since November more than 700 accounts of generosity, kindness, and empathy have been reported by the Juarenes. Today cronicas are being read over the airwaves by local radio stations and printed in local newspapers. Media from Juárez’s sister city of El Paso and Mexico City have covered the campaign. And the site has attracted visitors from Japan, Brazil, Argentina, France, Venezuela, Thailand, Portugal, Jamaica, and Ecuador. Recently, Alyssa Wright, founder of Hero Reports, and Yesica Guerra, Manager of Crónicas de Héroes Juárez, were invited to speak about the project at TED.

Lost in Boston Real Time turns bookstores and burrito joints into bus stops by delivering the MBTA’s live bus and T data to these value add locations via LED signs. The first few deployments of the project validated the hypothesis: indeed knowing that the CT2 is still ten minutes away is much more valuable while sitting at Anna’s Taqueria with friends than standing alone at the bus stop.

LIB Real Time may be of limited value to all of us with smartphones and bus apps. But imagine you’re not sitting at Anna’s with the bean juice running down your arm as you check your smart phone app; instead you’re a client living at a residential treatment program for drug and alcohol addiction.

Say today is the first day of a new job and you need to find your way there on the bus. You don’t have a bus schedule, never mind a smart phone. You leave for the bus stop hoping that today the cards aren’t stacked against you and the bus is running on time.